Literature & Criticism

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...

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....

OublietteIn the years of dark listeningto what lay between the seen and the saidI might catch a true thoughtjust as her mind forced it so far downthat it passed through the floor of herselfand...

More than one variety of omniscience is on show in Saraswati. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually one able to slip in and out of the minds of a modest number of characters, something...

Who​ was English; who was American? If Auden was English, was T.S. Eliot American? Or was it the other way around? Eliot’s own reply in 1953 was: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered...

‘Who’s afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya?’ was the title of an essay that appeared in a Russian émigré literary journal in 1984. Petrushevskaya’s stories – short tales of doomed romance and...