after Seidel The road trip ends in someone’s parents’ redone basement, All Berber and navy, and evergreen, Corona in the mini-fridge, rural New Jersey. On the big little-screen, The...
Holy Mary grant me a firkin of butter a peck of green pease a quart of...
Richard Hoggart made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor...
In her approach to story-writing Lydia Davis might almost have taken a vow of chastity, of the aesthetic sort publicised by the Dogme 95 group of filmmakers. Dogme principles included shooting...
Mr X, a bureaucrat at the UN Secretariat, who, with his wife and child, Lived in a collapsing Gatsby mansion in Oyster Bay My wife and I rented half of for that summer, depended for everything On...
Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call...
Many people are eager to know when Dai Congrong, the Chinese translator of Finnegans Wake, is going to produce the rest of the book. To date she has only published one third of her version and...
‘I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.’
Halfway through a bad trip I found myself in this stinking car park, Underground, miles from Amarillo. Students in thongs stood there, Eating junk food from skips,...
During his time as a Jesuit, Hopkins’s letters were his chief means of contact with the intellectual and literary world.
A Boy Call The long cry of ‘BOY …’, falsetto, travels down two flights and bursts like a blow to the head through the last door on the left where I am struggling with my...
I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that...
My name is Róbert Valzer and I like walking, not that I have anything to do with the famous Robert Walser, nor do I think it strange that walking should be my favourite hobby. I call it a hobby but...
Charles Willeford is in a category all of his own in the annals of American crime writing. He is neither glamorous nor pulpy; he didn’t write airport fiction and he didn’t write...
At the end of Mircea Cărtărescu’s collection Nostalgia (1993, translated into English in 2005) is a fantastical tale called ‘The Architect’, about a man who buys a car...
A Breakfast Radish Whatever we’re dealing with catches us in mid-reconsideration. It’s beautiful, my lord, just not made to be repeated, that’s all. Counterterrorists have...
Before stethoscopes were invented, physicians would listen to their patients’ hearts by laying one ear directly onto the skin of the chest. We’re accustomed to laying our heads...
Lisa Dwan has been performing Samuel Beckett’s immensely demanding Not I since 2005. What audiences saw at two short London runs this year, at the Royal Court in January and the Duchess...