Literature & Criticism

The strange pleasure ​of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover...

We​ had been watching The X-Files at a rate of about two episodes a year; I expected to be finished when I was approximately 114 and living in a small fishing village in Japan. But ever since my husband...

Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. The sentences flow smoothly, the jokes bob gently along (Chris ‘really took the expression “plain clothes” seriously’)...

You might think that a novelist who works in more than one language would want language itself to become conceptual, to allow for its smoother transposition across borders. But Tawada is fascinated by...

Alberti the writer, first and last, was Alberti the reader, whose attitude towards ancient (and later) texts was anything but passive. He grew up in an age of textual discoveries – the hunting and gathering...

After the publication of Schwartz’s first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum...

Love’s Work is the ‘existential drama’ of a postwar Jewish British woman philosopher, born in London in 1947, who reads books, sits in meetings, falls in love, falls ill, faces death. But it also...

 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...