After the Vietnam War – or so the story goes – a little girl whose parents had fought the Communists in Laos was resettled with her family in St Paul, Minnesota. They didn’t...
The secret Mark McGurl discloses is the degree to which the richness of postwar American culture (we will here stick to the novel, for reasons to be explained) is the product of the university...
Its geography similar to Istanbul’s – read for Lake Huron, the Black Sea, for the St Clair River, the Bosporus, for Lake St Clair, the Sea of Marmara, for the Detroit River, the...
Most writers of fiction want to give their readers the sense of an alternative passage of time to the actual one. This, the narrative drive, comes through a combination of events following one...
I had Coltrane playing from the hallway / and was humming along. The black cat / was poking and hissing at the white cat, / when a crow landed a couple of feet away.
Heidegger fretted energetically about the impersonal touch of the typewriter. Still, that’s no reason to set off for the Black Forest with a rucksack full of virgin postcards. Compositions at the keyboard...
I sometimes think that my plays are just an excuse for the introductions with which they are generally accompanied.
[Ibykos fr. 286, Poetae Melici Graeci] In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is] and vine blossoms...
Zadie Smith’s career has been a 15-year psychodrama. An advance of hundreds of thousands of pounds on a few dozen manuscript pages when she was still at Cambridge made her a celebrity...
Laurent Binet has written an excellent novel about the absurdity of writing any kind of novel at all. HHhH retells the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of...
Diego Marani works in the Directorate-General for Interpretation at the European Commission, and he writes fiction full of ideas prompted by his day job. New Finnish Grammar, translated last...
Claudia Johnson begins with a ghost story. One summer morning, as she sat by the leaded gothic windows of her Princeton study editing the Norton Critical Edition of Mansfield Park, she was...
John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the...
Sesquipedalian Thomas, aureate Urquhart, Sir Thomas of Cromarty, author of THE TRISSOTETRAS: OR A MOST EXQUISITE TABLE FOR RESOLVING ALL MANNER OF TRIANGLES, and the most commendable...
The Casual Vacancy is as much an event as a novel – J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults! – but only the novel aspect can be reviewed. Incidental atmospherics don’t come...
after Nonnus I Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks, sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in the air. She’d never seen a...
August Strindberg’s complete works in Swedish run to 55 volumes, not counting the ten thousand or so letters. He lived for 63 years, yet wrote sixty-odd plays, equalling Shaw, who lived...
David Foster Wallace’s parents were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands.