Literature & Criticism

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...

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...

In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...

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...

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my...

All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It...

Dionne Brand writes about pain, but her poems use obscurity and abstraction to keep lyric intimacy at bay. This extends to their multiple first-person subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the...

It’s​ a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. Joyce talked...

All of David Szalay’s stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity to torment a person with inappropriate desire, or to carry on regardless of success...

In general, New Left Review is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical about the winners of the day, especially if they happen to be Labour or the Democrats. One envies...

The Stepdaughter (1976), Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine...

Women who write ​about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping...

Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition....

When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating...

‘American unreason’ is the atmosphere that pervades Small Rain, which is in part about how a near-death experience puts one in confrontation with the American myths of independence and agency. Garth...

Rochester could ruin anything. ‘Even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass,’ Barbara Everett wrote. Germaine Greer called him ‘a poet against his better judgment’,...