Literature & Criticism

Despite the autobiographical elements in his fiction, John McGahern wasn’t especially interested in exploring his own psyche. He rowed in familiar waters because the cadences in the prose and the...

Despite their diversity, it is possible to discern a figure in the carpet of Malcolm Bull’s books. They are all about what one might call lessness: the emancipatory power of weakness, failure, diminishment,...

This​ is a fabulous book, beautiful, generous, sombre and wise, a wistful romance about a man writing a book like Always Crashing in the Same Car. Don’t fall for that subtitle...

Good​ health connects us with the world, illness forces us back onto ourselves. When Gloria Goltz, the title character of Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War for Gloria, in her early...

Warmer and warmercreep the late Januarys,disturbed beauty ofprecocious flowers,the ease of a year’s first swim.Pulsing in their silktent in the tree’s crotchthe pine...

Hooked is most interested in the kinds of aesthetic experience occasioned by works that ‘strike’ us forcibly. Rita Felski describes a writer being ‘hammered by’ Matisse, of Thelma...

The literary stomach of the world is a goat’s, not a hummingbird’s, and Karl Ove Knausgaard knows it. He tosses us crumpled newspapers, cardboard cups, grocery lists – all the detritus...

Katie Kitamura is interested in the moment when a performance collapses, when the void underneath the expressionless mask is revealed. But sometimes it’s hard to resist being beguiled.

No one to talk to is a factor in interrogation. How would you do pitted against men who need no solace, saying things like, We are not lonely, you are lonely. Your new shoes are pathetic. Do not lounge...

‘Abeginning​ is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time...

Anyone who has ever had to chaperone a demanding Man of Genius will recognise something of Jay Parini’s plight. Parini had to be Borges’s guide, driver, listener, eyes, protector, interlocutor,...

There is no world-transforming event that severs past from present; no survivors charged with finding a safe haven or with the daunting responsibility of rebuilding civilisation from the rubble; no prelapsarian...

‘The moonlight​ drips on the parlour floor;/I shall go mad if no one wipes it up.’ So began E.V. Knox’s parody in the August 1921 issue of Punch.And the moon dripped upon the...

Because in 1960s Harlem the odds were stacked so heavily against Black people, even if you weren’t a criminal yourself you risked being found guilty by association, or dragged down by those around...

In ‘Ignorance’ Rose Macaulay meditates on that ‘real delight in cruelty, such as Nero’s, or Caligula’s, or the Nazis’, which she ‘simply cannot begin to understand’....

Tom Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness ‘like a coat’ when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could...

Dense clouds of starlings ripple on our skylines.Wildebeest thunder collectively over the plain.Fireflies blink. Bamboo-forests blossom at once.Round the innocent cell, bacteria follow the...

Reading books like this, I feel like a Philip K. Dick character in the grip of wild-eyed madness. I want to run around telling the authors to snap out of it, to stop wasting their time and their Sontag...