Charles Reznikoff may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban...
Nae knickers, all fur coat Slurped Valvona and Crolla, Tweed-lapelled, elbow-patched, tartan-skirted, Kilted, Higgs-bosoned, tramless, trammelled and trammed, Awash with drowned witches...
On 22 May 1724 James Logan, a wealthy Philadelphian fur trader, scientist and bibliophile, took a day trip with friends from London to Windsor. Big crowds accompanied them, and no wonder: they...
A woman’s husband leaves her, she’s determined not to lose it, she loses it, she gets herself back together: that’s the plot of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of...
When Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before...
‘How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a...
Looked for all the intersections. Time and fiction. Asked can it be / true? Time and history. Asked can it really be true? This is happening. But is / not what the real feels like. The past? Is senseless.
For the gospel message to come as good news, one must first be convinced of some really bad news. This bad news is not obvious, and the devout must work hard to keep it vivid in the minds of...
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution.
It’s an interesting paradox that the 19th-century realists took the counter-realist impulse much further than the 20th-century anti-realists.
Among the leading Austrian writers of the postwar period, Marlen Haushofer is an unobtrusive presence. Where Bachmann and Bernhard, Handke and Jelinek all in their time achieved international...
A single drop fills the rainbow glass. The fountain overflows. How come the purr and passing of this every night arrives at stealth? Just – be prepared. If it happens every day around this...
The life of Franz Kafka reads like a truly great comedy in the tradition of Blackadder.
December 1938 in a large provincial city. It’s the last chance for the council to agree the municipal budget; in the chamber a reporter from the local paper tries to wring a bit of fun...
David Mitchell is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key...
Chapter 6 of Rachel Cusk’s new novel takes place round a large square table at a creative writing course in Athens. The narrator asks each student in turn to tell a story. The fourth is...
In August a man in the Bronx tied a chain to a pole, wrapped it around his neck, got behind the wheel of his Honda and stepped on the accelerator. The chain severed his head from his body,...
There is no sign that Freud read Jane Austen. Yet in her use of the words ‘unconscious’ and ‘unconsciously’, Austen might have had some claim to his attention. The...