Literature & Criticism

 As in dreams, Williams’s surrealism and sundry rabbit holes don’t need to violate the laws of physics to create distinctive, inviting worlds populated by exuberant eccentrics. A yawn, a laugh, an...

Layout on the​ page is a larger affair than mere punctuation, but punctuation, the set of interruptions that promotes flow, has its own set of powers. It is assumed to be a relatively trivial matter,...

Binyavanga Wainaina belonged to a second-wave, post-independence cohort that could put the past – and the Cold War – behind them without feeling they’d lost track of history: it was Africa’s moment...

Cristina Campo hated modern mass society and detested contemporary Italian literature and art. She considered the world in which she was condemned to live irredeemably ugly. I don’t think I have ever...

‘He draws his rents from rage and pain,’ Emerson once wrote of ‘the writer’, but more narrowly of himself.

It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...

Thanks to New Directions, Plunket’s two novels are now back in print. On its reissue last year, My Search for Warren Harding was hailed as a comic masterpiece all over again. It’s not as funny as the...

After You Were, I Am was at least a decade in the making, and the strength of the poetry is a measure of the crisis it confronts. Given complete freedom, a tabula rasa, how does a poet begin? And even...

One of the papyri excavated by the archaeologist Heba Adly contains 97 lines of two plays by Euripides – Ino and Polyidus – that were known to us only through scattered quotations and summaries...

The desire, and ability, to recreate the world around them in accordance with their will is a trait that narcissists, tyrants and artists have in common, and the narrator’s father in Via Gemito is...

Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that...

Putting stand-up at the heart of a campus novel allows Camille Bordas to highlight the awkward fit between the modern university, with its risk-averse corporate structures, and creative work.

James wanted every sentence to be artful. What he could often forget, later in life, is that some sentences just need to say what they need to say. But the prefaces are by no means all mannerism and circumlocution....

There aren’t many novels to which the title Choice could not be attached, and it isn’t clear what makes it particularly appropriate here, shorn of an article, as stark as an abstract noun can be. The...

Gaslighting is a helpful way of explaining what is happening when Donald Trump gives fake-news briefings and refuses to be held accountable for his actions while claiming – or allowing others to claim...

The guiding consciousness of From From feels quadruply alienated: Monica Youn is not fully or comfortably American, not Korean, not an immigrant, permitted neither to see herself as a victim nor to take...

‘First/Bunny died, then John Latouche,/then Jackson Pollock,’ Frank O’Hara reflects in ‘A Step away from Them’, written in August 1956. Everyone knew Jackson Pollock and the lyricist John Latouche,...

Groff is not telling a new story – in fact, it’s a very old one – but it’s inflected by the anxieties and politics of the present moment. Would it have been better if humans just … vanished?...