Literature & Criticism

Children’s books revisited in later life may disappoint, but they are immune to the embarrassment associated with outgrown toys. Even if their colours have faded, they expanded the world in a way toys...

I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was absolutely ordinary up to the point that she wasn’t. If anything it deepened that mystery. There...

All the revulsion in Jane DeLynn’s novel can seem antagonistic, but it’s driven by more complicated feelings. Unlike the teenage Lynn, we and the narrator know that disgust is not the only lens through...

Achille Mbembe is the pessimist’s optimist: he delivers a devastating analysis of the contemporary moment while never losing sight of the possibility for a better future. This explains his disdain for...

There is a world which is at times – and today even more – regressive and frightening; cultural analysis must never make the mistake of thinking either that it alone will redeem or can substitute for...

The house style of the early Partisan Review was hard-headed, truculent, dismissive of religiosity (‘mystification’), academicism and ‘folk culture’, sceptical of the American weakness for self-serving...

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....

Mushrooms,​ trees, turf, twigs, bushes, moss-covered stones: nature is a force in Olga Tokarczuk’s Empusium, incoherent and disorganised, yet also personified, sort of, in the collective voice that...

I groaned​ my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life. This is because, while...

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...

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...

Twenty years of writing, reading, thinking and travelling went into Memoirs of Hadrian. Several drafts were burned. But the most striking thing about it is the permission Marguerite Yourcenar gave herself...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...