Search Results

“... corporation I worked for had fallen more than 80 per cent in the previous 18 months. The CEO of Barnes and Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the US, had just announced that ‘never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in, nothing even close.’ My boss ended our meeting with a reflection on the state of ...”

“... of earlier styles is concerned, Thorpe exudes confidence: he’s well up to the standard set by Barnes and Ackroyd, say. (Not that judgment is really possible by non-specialists in the relevant periods: it wasn’t until a particularly unconvincing passage in the modern section – a conversation between three ‘youths’ who are required to mouth ...”

“... which her poems were published in the Little Review and the Dial. Her close friendship with Djuna Barnes dates from this time. But after she received news that Haweis had taken Giles, who was 12, to live with him in the Caribbean, Loy returned to Florence. Deciding that Joella, now a teenager, had grown up disappointingly bourgeois and old-fashioned, Loy ...”

“... the impact on England as a whole of having the Book printed in English. They encountered Robert Barnes, a singularly entrepreneurial supporter of the Reformers’ movement. In the words of a deposition made by one of the Steeple Bumpstead men to the authorities who were hot on the tail of the peddlers of an English Bible, ...”

“... or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader feels, at the deepest level, they’re entering a propositional space where they have to suspend some of their reading protocols and suspend disbelief and make ...”

“... not persist in thinking that translation is all about loss – as so many people do, and as Julian Barnes did in these pages in 2010, with his fine phrase suggesting that the best translation can offer us only ‘a new way of necessarily falling short’.* No fidelity at all wouldn’t fall short: the old text would just have vanished. And plural fidelities ...”

“... And many of Maschler’s authors weren’t household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan Cape. His stable has included Philip Roth, García Márquez, McEwan, Martin Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Chatwin, Fowles, Deighton and, Maschler does not fear to admit, Jeffrey Archer. The title he was most excited ...”

“... a felicitous ending for it on her deathbed. Susan Sontag’s idea of Paris came from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Harriet Sohmers, a fellow student, had picked her up at the University of California by asking her if she’d read it. Sontag had, many times, and the reward for passing this test of a pick-up line was an introduction to San Francisco’s ...”

“... Sue Ellen’s name is not one to be taken lightly. In comparing her with a Mrs Hazel Pinder White, Jonathan Aitken brought on himself a legal action requiring him to kneel on the sand of Viking Bay, Broadstairs, and apologise publicly. JR’s wife, complained the plaintiff, ‘was nothing but a high-class prostitute who drank heavily and was a total ...”

“... writer. So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? Davis’s stories, typically from ...”

“... money will go to the wrong writers, or to too many writers, encouraging a general sloppiness. As Jonathan Coe says, ‘it’s no surprise that the few meagre Arts Council grants are often handed out to writers who never go on to fulfil whatever promise was recognised.’ And Don Paterson: ‘It’s still easier to get money for that ...”

“... writing about her. Since the rediscovery of B.S. Johnson (if that’s what it was) that followed Jonathan Coe’s biography a few years ago there’s been a wave of enthusiasm for ‘experimental fiction’. A new crop of writers such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Kevin Davey, Will Eaves, Eimear McBride and Eley Williams, all published by independent ...”

“... own subsequent work on its uses in the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. On a broader canvas, Jonathan Barnes’s The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (1979) painted a virtuoso picture of the whole development of early Greek philosophy that took Owen’s Parmenides as its fulcrum. Nobody has yet produced a more convincing rival story shifting the focus ...”

“... he seems to be embracing it.The novel takes place in a dull town in the Irish Midlands. Dickie Barnes runs a Volkswagen dealership inherited from his father. But after an economic downturn, sales begin to fall, and soon he is dogged by rumours of corruption. His wife, Imelda, a famous local beauty, starts selling their possessions on eBay. Their ...”

“... a worm, but it doesn’t appear able to do anything else. Was it at this time that he lurked in Barnes and Nobles, lingering near the self-help shelf? ‘Don’t think I can’t speak your language,’ Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer, whom he refers to somewhat pleasingly as a short-haired catamenial braburner; he does, but completely, it has taken ...”