Mid-afternoon a light breeze sways the worn blue curtain. Could this be Alexandria? – I think not – but some provincial city? seaport? And the year? In a...
Our serrated landscape so full of digits: dial, keloid, data, roseate. If trees are still ‘in’ we can thumb through not click-through. Books are so over though. All those chyrons...
The Danish novelist Christian Jungersen writes topical novels with untopical frames, which appear to be of the moment though they look at the news askance. His second novel, The Exception,...
John Donne is a modern rediscovery. His reputation, high among his contemporaries, fell after their time, along with those of other 17th-century metaphysical poets who would wait equally long...
How do you write after Ulysses? It isn’t just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does), it’s the sense that Ulysses’s publication represents a kind of rapture for literature,...
8. The problems of Albertine are (from the narrator’s point of view) a) lying b) lesbianism, and (from Albertine’s point of view) a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.
In the early 1960s, around the time that Raymond Queneau was working on his choose-your-own-sonnet sequence, Cent mille milliards de poèmes, and Marc Saporta on Composition No. 1, a...
‘How was I supposed to live in America when I had never really left Ethiopia?’ the immigrant Sepha Stephanos asks in Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel, Children of the Revolution...
Peter Handke began his career insulting his audience, and it long seemed that he would end it with his audience insulting him. In Insulting the Audience (1966), the play that brought him fame...
Is that geezer in a suit really a weatherman? He’s dry as a dead tooth and shiny. The prince rides a boat down the lane. Grab his pearls of vapour. Ask him what he does when his bushes rage...
I admit that the advert announcing this authoritative critical edition of D.H. Lawrence’s poems made me snort. The painstaking collation of every textual variant seems an odd aim in...
Does Karl Ove Knausgaard have a style?
Waiting The window waits for light. The path to the river waits for twigs and stones and feet. The day hopes to be successful, a prose day really, nothing untoward, and so it, too, waits. Also,...
Still looking for lost people – look unrelentingly. ‘They died’ is not an utterance in the syntax of life Where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them Not minding if...
For several years now, a number of Walcott’s friends, family and old students have travelled across the world to wish him well on his birthday, listen to him talk, and flit from one sort of jump-up or...
Tourmalines I used to collect them; they gather a charge under pressure, piezoelectric (I was proud to know the word), semi-precious when clear, pink or green; mine were half an inch thick,...
If Beryl Bainbridge had published, as her last novel, a satirical farce about the machinations behind a famous literary prize, she might have managed to weather the accusations of pique....
for Roy ‘Dooms’ Sullivan (1912-83) In ’42 the first bolt announced itself, cut a strip from his right leg and left him grappling the mud, smoke rising from the bloody cauter....