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...
M ai 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...
F or 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,...
F airy 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...
T he 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...
R oughly 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...
T he 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.
F orster 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...
As avidity circulated about the soccer game A bear lingered, nosing among the spruces, Under damp boughs, sampling scents, perching Briefly on a stump, while remaining curious, Until, on impulse,...
Odd, unsettling somehow, visiting here again after so many years, travelling through town at this hour, the Baixa nearly deserted, then along the river, the lights of the bridge blurred by rain,...
W hat a pleasure to return to Thomas Hardy. For about a hundred pages. Then the torment begins, and we’re not even halfway through. From now on each turn of the page will expose the...
T he Red Badge of Courage is generally the only thing about Stephen Crane that readers remember now. The novel, first published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the...
A t what point does Ned Beauman’s Glow become fantastical? There’s a kid from South London called Raf who likes drugs and raving. From a girl he meets at a party, Cherish, he...
What does courtship look like in a world where people worry about breaking up in light of how much they’ve ‘invested’ in a relationship? In which the ‘market rate’ of everyone...
I n his Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Brecht wrote: ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark...