The main thing that Googling will tell you about Ben Fountain is that he’s – depending on your point of view – a slow learner, a model of staying power and resilience, a...
Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel centres on Bloomsday, the annual celebration in Dublin of the day on which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Many nations celebrate mythical events, but Ireland...
The friend in the title of Edmund White’s new novel is a writer called Will Wright, a straight man with bad skin but a sterling pedigree. What little we learn about Will’s first novel...
Erotic writing is said to have a noble pedigree but It’s so much sexier when people don’t have sex on the page.
The bicycle messenger who nearly knocked you over Was me trying to. That was me circling Columbus Circle On a track bike, the kind with one gear and no brakes.Look out! No brakes with a message!...
If we leave aside some notes and references at the back, Zona seems to close, appropriately, with a description of the end of a film: ‘her eyes, her watching eyes, and her face and head,...
The first two sentences of Richard Ford’s seventh novel have the ring of permanence about them: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the...
I. At 8.46 p.m. at Rudower Höhe, the sentry sneezed and a West Berlin customs officer shouted back: ‘Gesundheit!’ At 11.40 a.m. at the Kiesberg sentry post, three West Berlin...
I suggested a brave new form of entertainment, one based entirely on the emotions – hope and fear for example, the idea being to do whatever you want, then describe your feelings...
That, I suppose, must be my mother’s eye, up there on the monitor: that bobbing dark yolk, fringed by wriggling capillaries and the stainless steel of the speculum that holds her lids...
A prophet is wandering Samaria when he encounters a gang of children. They begin taunting him, pointing out his baldness. The prophet becomes enraged and curses them, and suddenly two female...
Peter Redgrove’s sexual ritual, ‘the Game’, ignited some of his most arresting poetry and was vital to his personal mythology.
In literary costume drama even the most exquisitely wrought lace cuff is only as good as its description.
To rate his achievement at its least, Martin Amis has been for 25 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to his generation.
‘There is no accounting for tastes,’ the Westminster Review declared in 1866. ‘Blubber for the Esquimaux, half-hatched eggs for the Chinese and Sensational novels for the...
Bring Up the Bodies is not just a historical novel. It’s a novel with a vision of history that magically suits the period it describes. Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what...
1 ‘So then you’re Russian? It’s the first time I have met a Russian …’ And the lively, delicately bulging eyes examine me. ‘You take your tea with lemon, I...