Literature & Criticism

McMurtry bemoans the fact that readers take his characters at face value and misidentify cowboy selfishness as heroism. ‘I don’t think these myths do justice to the richness and fullness of...

Klaus Kinski is in some respects the archetypal Myers character: a charismatic, morally compromised figure fully committed to the dangerous, life-altering power of art. Yet even if Jesus Christ Kinski...

Earlier Mrs Wren had appeared entirely joyful holding her husband’s hand in the outer corridor – yet how she wept inside of the courtroom, so much so that her face looked enamelled....

Lynette Roberts loved obscure words and was not shy about using them. Over the course of two pages, I had to look up ‘corymb’, ‘cymes’, ‘chyles’, ‘cuprite’,...

The people of Unnimore thought that ‘flitting’ would not come upon them while they lived. As long as they paid the rent, and that was not difficult to do, anxiety did not come near...

Walls of various kinds are present in almost all of Marlen Haushofer’s writing. They are a means of both entrapment and escape. Why else would the narrator of The Wall, who confronts the tallest...

In some ways, Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, is a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments. Barrodale...

close your eyes and feel the smog clearas you descend shrinking into your boyhood shortsand slow as cruising wings to your townwhere a kola kube in a scoop for a paper bagat the sweet shop is on...

Far out along a county roadfrom pole to pole of yellow pinecatenaries bear the load,the twisted pairs of tip and ringconnecting ear to anything.I hear you humming through the line.In blazing...

For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought...

Despite Henrik Pontoppidan winning the Nobel Prize in 1917, there was no English-language version of this extraordinary novel until Naomi Lebowitz’s appeared in 2010 with the title Lucky Per. Paul...

Barnes could have called this work ‘Disappearance’ or ‘Disappearances’, but he didn’t. The implication of the bracket in Departure(s) is that we should not concentrate on...

One doesn’t read Gwendoline Riley for plot; each of her books is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short,...

The almost dreamlike movement of the story of The Ipcress File is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s...

The Knight’s Maze, Eastnor CastleFor JohnOur teenagers turn kids again, amazedBetween tall hedges, planted to confound.They race ahead to the unknown, unfazedTo meet with cul-de-sacs, and...

The Kristóf who emerges from the sources was, like the twins in the Notebook trilogy, a person divided in two. In Hungary she had lived; in Switzerland she wrote. For Kristóf, the two were...

Schuyler once told an interviewer that he didn’t write the kind of poetry that attracted critics. ‘It’s too easy,’ he added, with a laugh. It wasn’t easy, though, to arrive...

The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Ben Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most...