There was a drawer in every room of our house and in every drawer there was a white pamphlet. On the cover it said: ‘Who, Me?’ My mother had placed the pamphlets there in the hope...
A Problem with the Landing Gear Cars travelling the other way On the other side of the double yellow dividing line Carry people you don’t know and never will. The woman on the other side of...
Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about...
In Stockholm before receiving the Nobel prize, Mo Yan spoke up in favour of censorship: it was, he said, a bit like airport security.
What kind of politics of representation is in play if you’re writing novels about East Asian countries in English? Is it more complicated or less if you’re Malaysian and a Cambridge...
Keepers 1. On ‘Buried Alive’, possessions can’t be lost or found. They can’t be exchanged. They’re negotiated as one negotiates a landfill. 2. In the militarised...
for my uncle, Alfred Miles 1909-87 ‘they created a desert, and they call it peace’* and that could have been said of Carthage, though it wasn’t. It was much closer to home....
Marxism has thrived as a way of thinking about art and literature, especially at times – the 1920s or the 1990s – when Marxist economic and political thinking has gone into retreat....
To go on a starvation diet in terms of the comma (including the inverted ones that designate speech), as Eimear McBride does in her remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel, may not seem a...
Borges said his essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ represented his first appearance as a Hellenist. ‘I do not think I shall ascend to a second,’ he added. This modest forecast...
Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner’s first novel, was set in the American colony in Oriente Province in the years leading up to the revolution. It described a place in which many had very...
Between 1975 and 1983, Luther Blissett made 246 appearances as a striker for Watford FC and scored 95 goals. When he joined the club they were in the Fourth Division. When he signed for AC Milan...
Piece human, piece hornet, the fury of both, astonishing abs all over it. Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits, his head in the hornet and his head in the hum, and oh he want to sting her. The...
Mother Reilly’s Daughter! Trompe l’oeil Ale! Aphasic Skywalk! Night at the hub pub, microbrews and boutique pinots – In its throes, Does one ever hear the Mädchen cry from...
‘The test of poetry which professes to be modern’, Arthur Symons wrote in 1892, is ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there.’ And what...
after Francis Ponge Orange As for the sponge, so for the orange: the aspiration to regain face after being wrung into expression. However, the sponge succeeds always, the orange never, segments...
From Chambord-pink at the base, it clears to where the upper curve reflects a skull-cap of charcoal, giving the earthʼs atmosphere in miniature: the sea, the air, then space. Erupting from that...
If Taiye Selasi’s debut novel was as fascinating as its acknowledgments pages the book would be a triumph. Acknowledgments in books have gone the way of Oscar acceptance speeches in recent...