Literature & Criticism

Reading the work​ that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry. If much of her writing sounds like the apotheosis of Eliotic impersonality,...

The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s...

Driving from Durrus to Ballydehobto see for myself the family farmhousethey burned my grandmother out ofa hundred years ago the hedgerowon my right gives way to intermittentflashes of the lovely...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling...

Cé​sar Vallejo is Yeats’s poet with the sword upstairs. Everything about him seems to burn with intensity. He burned through zarzuela Spanish, making it into a language of monosyllables, blurts, inventions,...

Robert Frost’s poetry has a way of lifting its gaze – with a heightening of register, a grand image, a weighty allusion – and seeming to dare you to shake your head in disbelief. ‘You think this...

I took off my glasses& pocketed them.I took out my eyes& tossed them upfor the crows to catch& turn tonotes. I feltthe wind. The one crowlanding on the rankingbranch. Staringat me....

In Ruth, Kate Riley layers two views of the church: on the one hand, a hidden but unquestionable authority, ‘like some pulsing larval queen’; on the other, a fretful collective of brothers and sisters...

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was...

I’m glad he’s gone my father said.But that was the beginningOf my obsession with garnets.He did cure my husband in the end,Just as I had jokingly wishedHoped requested. Begged,Prayed...

When Michael Clune’s character in Pan alights on Proust in the course of his daily writing practice, he learns a mode of ‘redescription’ for the narrative of his life. Clune is also describing his...

He was holding up his shoe, inspecting the sole of it, and barely balancing on one leg, when I first saw him. I had asked him about the shoes – and he said any sort would do – that it...

For Jorie Graham, the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic...

A version in Scots of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of love and war, attributed to the priestess Enheduanna of Ur (fl. 2255 BCE), the world’s earliest identifiable author. As well as...

Virginia Woolf admired Jane Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of life is collected’ – as it arises out of and then subsides back into...

Comedy can mean either the active incitement of laughter or a set of literary conventions. If a fair proportion of Kiran Desai’s Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is comedy in the first sense, all of it...

Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by Michel Lévy. The relationship, as established by Flaubert, was quite straightforward:...

morning mist and cloudfaint on the mountaina god is moving his faceover the waters a godin the cleft in the pass up theghyll the scramblers maketheir way also up –yesterday  ...