Jakob Wassermann, who published nearly a book a year for the last thirty years of his life but died broke and exhausted, soon to be forgotten, on 1 January 1934 at the age of sixty, was well...
I became an addict when I was 14. But it wasn’t drugs, or booze. I didn’t drop out of school or run away from home; in fact I stayed in. When you are addicted to fan fiction, you don’t need to leave...
Weland the goldsmith knew grief’s weight. That strong-minded man was no stranger to misery, his loyal...
Figuring oneself as Hamlet in the middle of the 19th century was a perilous business. Think of Mr Wopsle, who performs the role in a hilariously bad production in Great Expectations. When he...
On 31 August 1939 Alan Cameron was at his desk at the BBC, where he was secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting, when he heard that the British fleet was mobilising. This meant...
Jim Crace is as much ‘out-of-pattern’ as the narrator of his new novel, a settled outsider. He can hardly even be said to resist the pull of publishing convention, any more than...
In 1951, Alasdair Gray went on holiday with his family to the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde. He was 16, a pupil at Whitehill Senior Secondary School in Glasgow, brilliant at art and English...
Now in his mid-seventies, Les Murray has written some of the most astounding poems of our era. The opening words of several – ‘All me are standing on feed’ or ‘Eye-and-eye...
A father is in despair about his daughter’s unhappiness. All Lilly’s friends at school are richer than she is, and one lives in a mansion, with a pet horse, a llama, a luxurious...
In October 2001, media reports claimed that tens of thousands of Pakistanis had volunteered to help the victims of the American bombing of Afghanistan. Many of these men (and women), whose fate...
The God Who Disappears after Nonnus Born to a life of dying, the boy-god’s first death came when he could barely crawl, the budding horns just there, nudged among curls, as he played on the...
One thing Sheila Heti does know is that she’s had enough: of her contemporaries, of men, of herself.
Traveller’s Tales: Chapter 12 The cruise ship heads out of the harbour before dark in the direction of Point Blanco and the sea beyond, the din from the convent playground below having...
It’s not hard to describe the editorial career of Dave Eggers: he came to prominence in the late 1990s as founder of the literary magazine McSweeney’s, which is still publishing after...
Protocol In Rome, they forget their time, though such forgetting is an error of sense. Forget an age of shoe bomber, of underwear detonator, of airplane null. Forget American Gosselin serialism:...
If I’m Early Every other day I follow the route of the Midland Railway to where it cuts through St Pancras Old Church Cemetery. I might go into the church and heave a sigh or two before...
All that glitters is not glass, but lots and lots of it is, mused the helmeted cyclist … o you fast- spinning tyres, so delicately ridged, so like the scales of a young crocodile –...
The book world has a tendency to go weak at the knees where men of action, and particularly soldiers, are concerned. If Dr Johnson was right that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having...