Daniel Soar

It’s​ a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. All the modernists were fans. Woolf: ‘Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of...

Iwish​ I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions...

It’s​ not always easy to talk, but sometimes you have to try. Picture this: your brother is dying in a hospice, and you’ve come all the way to the city to see him – something you’ve perhaps resisted for a while – and all you want to do is cheer him up, be a little silly and light-hearted. In Lorrie Moore’s new novel, her fourth, Finn is a high-school...

One of​ the things you can pretty much guarantee about fiction is that it will have people in it. After all, there’s got to be someone telling the story: a narrative implies a narrator. But I challenge you to find a story – even the shortest – that doesn’t imply the presence of at least one other character too. Take this sixty-word wonder by Lydia Davis (it’s...

It must​ be tough to be an English novelist. Or at least a certain type of English novelist, of a certain English vintage, from a certain English background. There are duties to uphold, expectations to fulfil. It’s easy to be embarrassed to be English, embarrassed by privilege, entitlement and insular prejudice. It’s easy to feel guilt by association. Oddly, this means that the...