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...
Eilis Lacey is a young Enniscorthy woman who has never dreamed of leaving Ireland. Friary Street and Castle Street, the square and the cathedral: the grey co-ordinates of her small County Wexford...
In spite of the snow, he powered his bike down the freezing road, avoiding the dogs that gambolled there, shitting and pissing, barking and growling. He cursed them all, their scarfed and gloved...
Master claps of thunder, Wrath of God thunder – Sitting on the porch at night and waiting For the rain to fall in Texas; Or at the Cantina Grill Express In Denver airport, between flights,...
i. Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983 Walking to Woodstock Road from Wytham where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood’s wands, we talked salmon, midges, flood meadows, the energy system cindering...
John Wray’s first book, The Right Hand of Sleep (2001), was a historical novel, narrating the slow collapse of an Austrian hilltown into the embrace of the Nazis. His second, Canaan’s...
‘I had envied them sometimes,’ Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 book about D.H. Lawrence. ‘Those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when,...
It must feel odd – and more than a bit unsettling – to realise that sooner or later, perhaps in your lifetime, somebody will write your biography. Biographers can get lives badly...
One of the dissatisfying things about a lot of classic crime fiction is that when it comes to the anagnorisis, we really only have the detective’s – and the author’s –...
In Vanity of Duluoz, a cross between a novel and a memoir published in 1968, a year before his death, Jack Kerouac wrote about the circle of friends he had met in the spring of 1944, on his...
What would you want with that? They said, and fairly, when the auctioneer’s van dumped it in the drive. It was far worse than they knew. One absent bidder had ruined me for the thing, the...
In this brilliant new book Kazuo Ishiguro maintains his preference for first-person narrative. The voice of both the first and last of this suite of five stories is that of a guitarist who plays...
Robert Lowell wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he...