In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months the novel acquired a Midwestern background, a poor boy-rich girl theme, a narrative structure and a...
In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line...
In 1962, the daughter of a friend of Dorothy Baker’s went up to her house in Terra Bella, California, to interview the 55-year-old novelist. ‘What is your real purpose in this...
Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh.
My Life in Letters There you are, looking like the Khan’s most favoured concubine, but in a London doorway, cigarette and beige Aquascutum, smiling, at me, it would seem, all ardour,...
Salter’s images are an aspect of the virtuosity that makes him singular: his mastery of time, the raw material of narrative fiction.
Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have the one belonging to Paris Hilton.
‘You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew, and even unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold.’ The following...
Printed with old roses or tartans and thistles, there’s a biscuit tin like this in every house. Prise off the lid and catch the flinty scent of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping. Like...
It’s perhaps Munro’s consistency that her admirers cherish: ‘like butterscotch pudding on the boil’.
Kate Atkinson is in no danger of prosecution for misrepresenting goods. Life after Life does exactly what it says on the spine of the book, offering a number of versions of the life of Ursula...
In the National Theatre’s inaugural season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave,...
After publishing a handful of stories around the time of the First World War, Fritz Grönloh, an Amsterdam businessman, wrote almost nothing until his death in 1961. His small body of work is...
‘My story is boring,’ the narrator says in Aleksandar Hemon’s story ‘The Conductor’, in Love and Obstacles (2009): ‘I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I...
Perform Small Tasks ‘One second!’ I said – for everything can go cold in a day or hot. For a man like me, there’s an on and off bulb that does the deciding. I had to...
Spinsters, in the old novels, are sexless, meddlesome and prissy. These days, what they used to call a spinster is a fearsome spectre.
If it’s hard to tell what’s going on in William Gass’s fiction that’s because Gass himself doesn’t always know exactly what he’s set in motion. ‘As a...
John le Carré has now published 23 books, the Great Bear of that night sky being the series of novels lit by the round English gentleman, spymaster George Smiley, he who wipes his glasses...