Literature & Criticism

John Carey has always been alive to what he once called ‘the strengths of the unliterary’, the salutary effect that a principled suspicion of the aesthetic may have on the actual practice of...

Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation. His often anodyne protagonists have to compete for our attention...

A ‘true ghost story’, except to a believer, moves between the worlds of fact and fiction, but Alma Fielding’s poltergeist is more disturbing. It inhabits a place of constant dissolution...

Reviewers like to say that Despentes’s trilogy ‘holds a mirror up’ to French society and call it things like ‘the Comédie humaine 2.0’. But Balzac wrote about modern...

His great instinct, all along, has been to give shape to dread­ful events before they happen, before the people who might carry them out are even born, and to seem to know their source in our public...

Amid the tearing of hair and the rending of garments, the busted teeth and the vomit, a picture of a gutted Glasgow emerges. It’s the dark side of Thatcher’s Britain, another reason for the...

With its double entendre connoting the kind of thing adults say about toddlers as well as an era-defining sarcasm, Such a Fun Age is interested in a different sort of hysterical realism: how is it possible...

The riddle of who is made in the image of whom – humans in that of God or the Devil, God or the Devil in that of humans – becomes an extravagant joke about figuration, about any attempt to...

Denise Riley argues with her identities and ‘identity’ in general: she is unhappy with them, casts them off only to find them stuck on again in the morning. She is also our pre-eminent dialectician...

How do you write against your audience, an audience that celebrates your work but interprets it narrowly? The title on the cover, Homie, is for this audience; for Danez Smith’s publishers; and for...

Real Life bristles with everyday micro-aggressions, all the myriad, annihilating ways blackness is weaponised. It’s a campus novel, but anyone familiar with 19th-century slave narratives will hear...

Most climate dystopias are set in this temporal and spatial landscape: well into the obliterated future. The terrible thing has happened, and the details of how we got there are unimport­ant, as are...

Nabokov and I are hardly a match made in heaven – I’m stumped by the most elementary brain­teasers, every chess game I’ve ever played has lasted at least two hours and no one has...

‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House....

Rainbow Milk is a candid, sometimes un­even novel. But at moments it’s electrifying – an algorithmic pop ballad that suddenly transcends itself and sounds different, more affecting, like...

The earliest texts that look extensively at the slave trade are structured by the motifs and conventions of revenge tragedy: resentment, conspiracy, delay, the grand soliloquy and, above all, tortured...

Ideal for snoopers, snip­ers, novelists, cartoonists and daydreamers, squares offer the chance of peering out in several directions without someone across from you peering back. They mix urbanity and...

Jack is a love story; it contains miracles. It is also the most theological of Robinson’s novels, bound by religious paradox and poetic impossibility. Robinson is interested in love, not as desire...