Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate’s series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret...
On the Fairytale Ending Begin with the fend-for-yourself of all the loves you learned about in story books; fish-scale and fox-print graven on the hand forever and a tiny hook-and-eye...
In which country has Hamlet mattered most, politically, over the last couple of centuries? Despite a succession of celebrity stage productions, the answer probably isn’t Shakespeare’s...
Do novelists come nicer than Elizabeth Taylor? Her mother died of politeness – she developed appendicitis over Christmas, and didn’t want to interrupt the doctor’s holiday...
Out in the vacant lot to gather weeds I found these teazles – their ovoid heads delicately armoured with crowns of thorns. Arthur, from whom I haven’t heard a word in thirty years,...
Stories rely on mystery. Who killed the old lady? We don’t know, so we read on to find out. Perhaps we do know, so we read on to see if the killer will be caught. It may be that we know the...
A popular clip on YouTube shows a local news reporter trying to interview a costume-shop owner who’d been charged with cyberstalking. The woman is dressed as a giant rabbit and refuses to...
Stray dogs with a red plastic tag in one ear Have been licensed By the city to be safe and allowed to live in the street, So they wander around, or more likely just lie there, Healthy, checked by...
This intimately funny and desperately sad novel opens with a parade of visitors to Ilya Ilich Oblomov’s Petersburg flat. Most of them are introduced, in this new translation, by the phrase...
translated from ‘The Alliterative Morte Arthure’ King Arthur was on his mighty boat with many men, enclosed in a cabin among copious equipment. And while resting on a richly arrayed...
The protagonist of ‘The Enduring Chill’, a short story Flannery O’Connor began in the autumn of 1957, is a 25-year-old would-be writer called Asbury Fox, who has been forced to...
A number of the stories in this collection cluster around the figure of K.K. Harouni, an elderly landowner in 1970s Pakistan, with a big house in Lahore and farms in the Punjabi countryside, just...
Belated Treatment We went to the vivarium – to see the tropical butterflies in a walk-through biodome. They were cocooning, their insides filled with meconium. The cocoons looked like jade...
My grandmother’s grandfather died in 1913, survived by his wife, Ann, and five children: four sons and a daughter, Margaret. The sons all married and left home; but Margaret, who was 35 when...
after Ovid Pentheus – man of sorrows, king of Thebes – despised the gods, and had no time for blind old men or their prophecies. ‘You’re a fool, Tiresias, and you belong...
‘Freaks and poor people, engaged always in some violent, destructive action,’ was how Flannery O’Connor once described the subjects of her fiction. She claimed that her vision...
Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was...
The oral tradition tore us apart. It sang in the heart, it chanted of the sun. It knew the attributes of gods, naming their triumphs one by one. We looked far out: that ship was like a bird! Its...