Literature & Criticism

‘A Rewilding’

Paul Farley

26 June 2025

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....

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Ocean Vuong’s Failure

Tom Crewe

26 June 2025

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 . . .

Olga Tokarczuk’s Mycophilia

Jenny Turner

26 June 2025

‘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 . . .

On Marguerite Yourcenar

Joanna Biggs

24 May 2025

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’s Impossible Books

Chris Power

24 May 2025

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 . . .

Malfunctioning Sex Robot: Updike Redux

Patricia Lockwood, 10 October 2019

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.

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Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

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.

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Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.

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Le pauvre Sokal: the Social Text Hoax

John Sturrock, 16 July 1998

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,...

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The Fatness of Falstaff

Barbara Everett, 16 August 1990

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...

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Diary: On the Booker

Julian Barnes, 12 November 1987

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.

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Sounding Auden

Seamus Heaney, 4 June 1987

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.

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Fairy Flight in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

William Empson, 25 October 1979

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.

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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...

Read more about Cosy as a Scalpel: Murder Most Delicious

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,...

Read more about Brag and Humblebrag: Walt Whitman’s Encounters

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...

Read more about Transdimensional Cuckoo: On Katie Kitamura and Richard Price

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...

Read more about Hero of Our People: On Mário de Andrade

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,...

Read more about Wouldn’t you like to be normal? Janet Frame’s Place

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...

Read more about It’s in the eyes: Hanne Ørstavik’s ‘Stay with Me’

Hairy Teutons: What William Morris Wanted

Michael Ledger-Lomas, 8 May 2025

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...

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Poem: ‘The Historians’

Maureen N. McLane, 8 May 2025

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....

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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...

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Clean Machine: On Dino Buzzati

Michael Wood, 17 April 2025

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...

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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...

Read more about Story: ‘The Place for Love in Human Life’

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...

Read more about Rolex and Ladurée: Constance Debré’s Bravado

Hair-splitting: Versions of Marx

Peter E. Gordon, 3 April 2025

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...

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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,...

Read more about Packing Like a Fury: Marvellous Mavis Gallant

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...

Read more about Swagger for Survival: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Theft’

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.

Read more about Germans don’t get toothache: Krasznahorkai’s Antimatter

Going with the Gush: Unfunny Valéry

Michael Hofmann, 20 March 2025

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...

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Itch to Shine: Austen’s Suitors

Freya Johnston, 20 March 2025

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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