Literature & Criticism

‘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...

Reading the work​ that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry. If much of her writing sounds like the apotheosis of Eliotic impersonality,...

1breakfast is ready Dadhappy birthday to you it’s not my birthdayyou better get a move on sit down Dadwho’s been using my razor you don’t have a razorwhy don’t you just...

The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s...

Driving from Durrus to Ballydehobto see for myself the family farmhousethey burned my grandmother out ofa hundred years ago the hedgerowon my right gives way to intermittentflashes of the lovely...

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye activates and resists our expectations about testimony, confessionalism, narrative access; our presumption that we know just how the accent is falling...

Cé​sar Vallejo is Yeats’s poet with the sword upstairs. Everything about him seems to burn with intensity. He burned through zarzuela Spanish, making it into a language of monosyllables, blurts, inventions,...

Robert Frost’s poetry has a way of lifting its gaze – with a heightening of register, a grand image, a weighty allusion – and seeming to dare you to shake your head in disbelief. ‘You think this...

I took off my glasses& pocketed them.I took out my eyes& tossed them upfor the crows to catch& turn tonotes. I feltthe wind. The one crowlanding on the rankingbranch. Staringat me....