Edmund Gordon

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing...

By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when

Upton Sinclair​ was born in 1878 to a Baltimore family of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to...

The stories​ in Colin Barrett’s first book, Young Skins (2013), assembled a shabby cast of bouncers and pool sharks, small-time gangsters and big-time losers from a dismal Irish town. The narrator of ‘Diamonds’ is typical:

I was not well. I was drinking, too much and too often, and had resolved to stop. In the city I had drank away my job, money, a raft of friendships, one...

Insects don’t get a great deal of airtime in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The book that exposed the harmful effects of DDT on fish, birds, livestock and people had surprisingly little to say about the creatures the pesticide was intended to harm, except that they were starting to develop resistance – in other words, the case for spraying poison indiscriminately wasn’t...