Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski.
Masonic creature. Maker. Water encircledsurvivor of hat crazes. Crib fabricator.Chiseller. Tooth enamel’s hardest expressionon any branch of the mammal clade. Stash housebuilder. Stickler....
Something very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs . . .
‘The mycological turn’ is a phrase coined ‘half-jokingly’ by Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon in an essay published last year in Critical Inquiry. It refers to ‘an enthusiasm for fungi in the . . .
Awriter ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the . . .
Georgi Gospodinov was 22 when Bulgarian communism collapsed in early 1990. ‘The end of our training,’ he has written, ‘coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.’ In his first . . .
When he is in flight you are glad to be alive. When he comes down wrong – which is often – you feel the sickening turn of an ankle, a real nausea. All the flaws that will become fatal later are present at the beginning. He has a three-panel cartoonist’s sense of plot. The dialogue is a weakness: in terms of pitch, it’s half a step sharp, too nervily and jumpily tuned to the tics and italics and slang of the era. And yes, there are his women.
I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.
Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.
Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF,...
One day early in the 1590s a clown came onto a London stage, holding a piece of string. At the end of the piece of string was a dog. The dog, possibly the first on the Elizabethan stage, I want to...
The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It is El Gordo, the Fat One, the sudden jackpot that enriches some plodding Andalusian muleteer.
Hard-bitten, aggressively up-to-date in the way it took cognisance of the fallen contemporary landscape, yet susceptible also to the pristine scenery of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon England, Auden’s original voice could not have been predicted and was utterly timely.
So the working fairy does at least half a mile a second, probably two-thirds, and the cruising royalties can in effect go as fast as her, if they need to. Puck claims to go at five miles a second, perhaps seven times what the working fairy does. This seems a working social arrangement.
Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski.
Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...
Mark and Seamus look at the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, the east-coast American poet who enjoyed a limited audience, and published relatively little, in her lifetime, but whose reputation has grown...
In their first episode together, recorded in 2017, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry looked at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet much written about in the archive of the London Review of Books.
Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Thomas Hardy, with its blend of bitterness of tenderness, its intense dramatisations of loss and grief, and its inversion of traditional tropes of love poetry...
Mark and Seamus discuss life and work of W. H. Auden, from the influence of his parents and his political development, to how his poetry emerged from a meeting of English tradition with high modernism,...
Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ and a famous performer of her poetry, considering the despair that underlines her best work,...
Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A.E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shropshire Lad, with its expression of the agony of thwarted...
Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney
In the final episode of their series, Mark and Seamus confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionalism’ came to exemplify...
Mark Ford, Seamus Perry and Joanna Biggs consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War.
Detective novels offer a means of rehearsing the fearful reality of death, and in this sense the conventions of the genre, with its distracting intellectual puzzles, is a kind of play. A capacity to balance...
A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, Whitman announces in the first pages of Specimen Days: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous,...
Detail validates a fiction, giving the impression of a world that can be priced and measured, touched and tasted. But for some writers it’s more than ballast – it represents priceless cargo, and the...
Macunaíma has become a myth. It says something complicated about Brazil, but also about what modernism meant. And eventually it made me admire Mário de Andrade’s decision to look back on his modernist...
There were her nicknames: Nini with the nits at home as a child, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty,...
The difficulty of being in contact with ‘the truth about yourself’ is a theme that runs through Ørstavik’s work. In her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted...
William Morris wrote with appalling fluency. Composing verse on trains or while sat at the loom, he could turn out a thousand lines a day. One friend used to stab herself with pins to stay awake during...
It is time to consult my friendsthe historians who still believein research and a tapestry of factwoven on the loom of deliberationand hypotheticals testedagainst what are perceivedto be outcomes....
This is Alia Trabuco Zerán’s true subject: the psychological effect of being treated as an implement rather than a person. When Estela first enters her room off the kitchen, she sits on the narrow bed...
In a late interview Dino Buzzati offered his theory of a secular form of original sin. ‘The human being is a malformation of nature … It is a mistaken creature … unhappy by definition.’ This is...
His spaniel was up on its hind legs, paws on his master’s belly, where my paws happily had lately been.He was my host, and I ate his food, while others there were still at it, too, and the...
Playboy was published in France in 2018 and was seized on by critics, and the public, as a powerful challenge to conservative views on gender and the proper place for women. But it isn’t clear that the...
Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...
The sheer quantity and variety of Gallant’s output is fascinating. She’s dislocated, a traveller, eager for clues, hungry to read the worlds she’s passing through. Through her cast of diverse characters,...
Beyond Gurnah’s postcolonial perspective is an understanding of the trauma all people suffer when they’re sundered from what they know. His own uprooting came at the age of eighteen, when he flew with...
Donne’s triumphant ‘Death, thou shalt die’ has nothing on the apophatic reversals of László Krasznahorkai’s metaphysics, where art exposes the scrim between us and non-being.
Would it have made a difference to read Monsieur Teste earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for...
The main business of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more...
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