Literature & Criticism

Was there such a thing as a female style in early modern England? For several authors, valorising originality meant claiming legitimacy in a society that gave them little chance to learn and would likely...

Raffles survives, and it’s not just the verve and breakneck pace of the stories. What captivated me once again, what I had more or less forgotten, was the angst. Raffles and his slow-witted sidekick,...

Sally Carson’s dissection of the question that has disturbed the European mind for decades – how did it happen? – has touched a contemporary nerve, and the new edition of Crooked Cross has met with...

Once at a gate with cherries. Know this quickly buried nowor less to file history brief stuffed full of pen force, the timeit takes to various accounts echoing in my library to ensurepassage broke...

Humankind,​ he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S....

Solvej Balle’s serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make these ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see that...

In all of Flannery O’Connor’s work, there isn’t a single character you could describe as admirable, or even vaguely sympathetic. O’Connor said that her interest in such unedifying types was an...

Once, they caught me in a snareand plucked me to the pinkand left my feather-shafts to curein salt and flowers of zincthey rolled them up in mutton fatand set them by their cotsthen dealt my flesh...

Adèle Yon says that she enjoys it when the archives lose their footing (‘perdent les pédales’), revealing their ‘polyphonie’ and ‘artifice’. Sometimes, though, when the evidence reveals its...

a dead queen a red kingan orange polis crashwhere is the high styleo poet the republic requires& where the Polish heroes& can the heroic be generalcommunal asks the engorgedpopulace we we...

The first few pages of Into the Weeds give the impression of someone starting to regret that she ever agreed to conduct a behind-the-scenes tour of what amounts in the four volumes of the uniform edition...

your mind. Turnaround. Lookthe other way.Is there anotherway. Go ahead. Try to positthe future. It’sjust down there she sd, hesd, the bodies torn topieces sd, the skins like rags,the bloody...

‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a...

Despite her novel’s conventional set-up, Rivera Garza isn’t interested in fulfilling the murder mystery contract. When a detective tells someone ‘you’re the prime suspect in this case,’ it’s...

Betwixt and between is a strange place for any major writer to be more than a decade and a half after their death, and Updike’s standing in the literary hereafter remains profoundly iffy. It’s one...

Good luck itself has a releasing effect on the spine, she was surprised to discover. She counted on some extra good luck and would try to feel kindred with the hunched figures advising her. He was...

Counting came first,then worry.Was someone missing?‘First’ came afterwards.                *Worry came...

The Danish writer​ Olga Ravn has recently published two short novels, one set in the future and one in the past. Both concern insular societies whose members turn on one another with fatal consequences....