Shame Stack Shame requires the eyes of others unlike guilt. Eyes of Elijah the Tishbite saw in Jezebel a person with much to be ashamed of. There is a link between shame and mercy people who lack...
The mountains are still there, monotonously changeable, And the men in the sky with their slices of melon Are managing their ennui – at least until teatime, Till the dim philosopher comes...
‘I have travelled a great deal,’ Raymond Roussel wrote towards the end of his life, ‘but from all these travels I never took anything for my books.’ It’s an odd...
For a Hungarian to call a novel The Melancholy of Resistance (Az ellenállás melankóliája) could be an exercise in truthtelling, a peeling away of illusions, or else a play...
There’s a manner of presenting ideas in fiction that corresponds roughly to Yeats’s claim that man can embody truth but cannot know it. A story can embody thoughts it never spells...
There’s a fascinating anthropological study to be written about Oxford undergraduates of the 1960s – or perhaps this book is it. Roger Garfitt in his daffodil-yellow pinstripe suit...
for Kelvin Corcoran Just off the main square at the entrance to a crowded narrow street – this is in Bologna, 1992 – a man stood erect, hands behind his back, watching something, or...
after Nonnus Hardened by the hills of Phrygia, quickened by its streams, the boy-god Dionysus came of age. And as his own body changed his eyes grew wider, and turned towards the bodies of...
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first two novels, Out of the World (Ute av verden, 1998) and A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven (En tid for alt, 2004), attracted admiring reviews and won prizes....
There can be no new reader, and therefore perhaps no wholly new reading of the collection of stories known as The Arabian Nights. Not because they have been exhausted by retelling and...
It is entirely in my hands now as it returns like blood to remind me – the chains so soft from wear, in my right, in my left – the first time I, trying for perfection, of balance, of...
That was heavy freight moved through last night, and has been moving through since I’m back, settled in again by the Hudson at the Hotel Oneira: maps on the walls, shelves of blue and white...
Anxiety about identity stands in for actual drama in Nathan Englander’s ‘corny’ stories.
Fifty years ago, Walter Ong startled classicists with the proposal that learning Latin offered medieval and Renaissance boys a rite of passage not unlike Bushman puberty rites. Torn from the...
Why Proust killed his mother but wished he’d killed his father.
A cloud blew up and like that: OK fun’s fun but we’ve got issues, to wait until tomorrow. At least that’s what I heard, a kind of rushing as of water over steep slabs. More ants...
A newly discovered short story, written in French in 1842 for Constantin Heger.
Lysander Rief, the hero of Waiting for Sunrise, arrives in Vienna in 1913 to undergo psychoanalysis, and stays there for a few months; after his final session he goes to a café, where he...