Snow Approaching on the Hudson Passenger ferries emerge from the mist river and sky, seamless, as one –...
If the first page of a novel is its front door, then the epigraphs that some writers like to install on the approach to it correspond to value-adding features such as carriage-lamps or stone...
The double centenary in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California....
‘No two pictures of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at...
Pluviose There is a kind of sleep that falls for days on end, the foothills lost in cloud, rain in the stairwells, rainspots crossing the floor of the Catholic church and the sense of a...
The Girls A summer evening,...
On 16 October 1940 the house in Tavistock Square in which Virginia Woolf had lived for 15 years was destroyed by a bomb. The first image in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition
A man sits counting the floor tiles of the bathroom floor, Counts silently left to right, then right to left, while pressure mounts, And while, in urgently increasing amounts, His sphincter...
Mai Jia’s success in the West comes as no surprise to his readers in China: we like our airport novels as much as anyone else. It’s odd, though, to hear Decoded – a thriller...
For some years, I have nursed a modest hope concerning Ian McEwan: that one day he should write a novel without a catastrophic turning point, or a shattering final twist. That for once no one...
Baghdad of the West, gallimaufry of Zahahadidery, Heavy with locos, liners, yards and docks Docked now of shipyards, sculpted, purled into shining Titanium hulls where Wild West meets West End,...
Fairy tales deal in ones, twos and threes, in lone heroines, haunting doubles, sets of wishes and curses: they are patternings, engines for producing extreme and ambiguous effects from simple...
The narrator of Joshua Ferris’s new novel is a rich, white, garrulous, sexist, misanthropic New Yorker with a troubled childhood, now in early middle age, wondering what the point of it...
‘I was so angry,’ Peter Matthiessen said late in his life of his early days as a writer. ‘I was constantly in a contest … with my father.’ He’d grown...
Roughly thirty miles southwest of Exeter the A38 rips along the edge of the churchyard of Dean Prior, where Robert Herrick, with one period of interruption, was rector between 1630 and his...
The most interesting novels are always a bit strange. The stories bend and shift with the author’s own predilections; they reject the predictable progress of conventional plotlines in...
By the time he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: he had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it.
Forster started writing his novel about India soon after getting home from his first trip there in 1913. During the 11 years he took to finish it, he wrote – but didn’t publish...