‘Profonde Albertine’, the narrator writes close to the end of Proust’s novel. By ‘deep’ – profonde – he means ‘unreachable’. She was mostly...
I tell myself I’m a minimalist. Not that it matters to the big guns who train their sights on us, who also know about tomorrow and their brothers, and had a pretty good run. It would be...
Keith Ridgway used to be compared to John McGahern for his dourly lyrical stories of a changing Ireland. (‘Fr Devoy nodded his head and sipped his tea and waited. He watched the sky move...
Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets...
Chris Ware’s new book, Building Stories, isn’t a book at all. It’s a cardboard box, about the size of a board game, covered in bright, blocky illustrations and stuffed with...
A few weeks after leaving university many years ago, I was lunched by a publisher. ‘What book would you most like to write?’ he asked. The war in Indochina was beginning to escalate,...
When the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of James Bond’s great work, Birds of the West Indies.
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...