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“... Six years ago, at the First Committee Meeting of the International Necronautical Society, an organisation set up to explore ‘the cultural parameters of death’ – why not? – the INS’s Chief Obituary Reviewer (my sister Melissa) announced that she would be conducting a study of surfers, whom she ‘suspected were onto something’. Six months later, I and other INS committee members cross-examined her about her findings in an art gallery that had been adapted to look and function like a sinister Hearings Camera: microphones, stenographers, press area – that sort of thing ...”

“... In the introduction​ to the 1995 reissue of his 1973 masterpiece Crash, J.G. Ballard discusses ‘the balance between fiction and reality’. ‘We live,’ he writes, in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen ...”

“... Being​ much plagued by insomnia, some years ago I took to reading, as I tried to drift off to sleep, a collection of dialogues recovered from the flight recorders of crashed aeroplanes. These transcripts, rendered on the page in conventional dramatic format, followed a uniform narrative arc: a mishmash of cockpit directions, communication with air traffic control, and with passengers and stewardesses, banal chit-chat about family or food (Krispy Kreme donuts seem to be a favourite of US pilots) suddenly giving way to concern about an unexpected bang or shudder or an unresponsive flap or lever; rapidly escalating to blind panic as the situation turns critical; then, inevitably, the same denouement ...”

“... For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling ...”

“... How​ do you write after Ulysses? It isn’t just that Joyce writes better than anyone else (although he does), it’s the sense that Ulysses’s publication represents a kind of rapture for literature, an event that’s both ecstatic and catastrophic, perhaps even apocalyptic. A certain naive realism is no longer possible after it, and every alternative, every avant-garde manoeuvre imaginable has been anticipated and exhausted by it too ...”

“... existing literary world, in which editors were all too likely to pounce – as an editor does in Tom McCarthy’s novel Men in Space when a character slips talk of ‘the Western epistème’ into an art review – on instances of ‘pretentious bollocks’. After discovering Pierre Bourdieu, I even began to wonder if a taste for difficult, academically ...”

“... so often are in life. ‘One of the real structural understandings of great literature,’ Tom McCarthy told the Believer in 2008, ‘is that it’s an event … this seismic set of ripples that goes on through time, backward and forward.’ And so, in place of interpretation, the novel chooses instead to echo, repeat, re-enact its founding ...”

“... with cellars and garrets and stairways and salons and endless particular clutter. The narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder has been given £8,500,000 to keep quiet about an accident that has befallen him. Something – ‘Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know’ – fell from the sky, broke most of his bones ...”

“... in current fiction in Ireland, it’s less a return, in the manner called for by writers such as Tom McCarthy, and more an acknowledgment of the variety of experimental traditions on which young writers now draw. For sure, there are aspects of Joyce and Beckett to be heard in Bennett’s fretful lyricism. ‘The Gloves Are Off’ resembles other stories ...”

“... gentler James Wood? In ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, she looked at books by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy. Realism, it seemed, was on the run, and it turned out that novels in English could still be vehicles for avant-garde ideas. Why not try to be James Joyce? A bit wobbly and lopsided by design, NW is a hotchpotch in five parts. The first two ...”

“... is not an ‘anti-style’ or the resistant Teflon-coated style of such Modernistes-nouveaux as Tom McCarthy and Michel Houellebecq; nor is it an attempt to demonstrate the semantic clumping we might expect once consciousness becomes fully technically mediated; rather it’s simply that transposition of style and methodology which is to be expected ...”

“... of realism which still dominate the English novel. Heralded by commendatory quotes from Tom McCarthy and Lee Rourke on the cover of this new gathering of previously uncollected or unpublished writings, Ann Quin now seems to be emerging as their best ancestor. She has all the biographical qualifications for the job of precursor, as well as being ...”

“... news reporter who had been appalled by the young Roy Cohn who wreaked such havoc as Senator Joe McCarthy’s aide, has fallen into Cohn’s web, become entranced by him, and tries to get away with presenting him as a lovable rogue. Von Hoffman makes no attempt at sustained analysis: he is content to present one interview after another, from Cohn’s friends ...”

“... doesn’t have much of a personality beyond his narrative function as a goodie. And readers – as Tom McCarthy points out in Tintin and the Secret of Literature – have felt possessive towards the supporting cast from early on.* Captain Haddock, Tintin’s insult-hurling best friend, showed up in 1944 in a vengeful newspaper strip done ‘in the manner ...”

“... these characters are well-heeled, one of the book’s main themes is redundancy. Many people in Tom’s circle have become redundant, either because they have lost their jobs or because they simply are, as persons, superfluous; and now he himself is a redundant movie director. Film, however spurious, is life: acting, however talented, is a form of ...”