Literature & Criticism

The short time they have been together, they have shared sex, the house and garden! – food and drink! – what some would consider freedom! – although this is probably the last...

A lot of contradictions are laid out in Michelle de Kretser’s Theory and Practice, and one’s tolerance for graduate students – clearly infantilised by their milieu, despite being in their mid-twenties...

For many years, if asked about Hamlet’s poetic quality, I would have quoted not ‘To be, or not to be’ (which strikes me as grossly overrated in its importance), but Polonius’s casual words to the...

Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace come to mind as antecedents, though Tulathimutte has their wit without their warmth. He writes like a child holding a microscope over the ground, peering down at an...

To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of constantly multiplying targets would not be entirely wrong. The truly misanthropic,...

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...

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 crux of Daniel Kehlmann’s Director is whether it’s weakness or necessity that makes G.W. Pabst compromise. On the one hand, he’s disgusted by swastikas and Hitler salutes; on the other, his need...

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...

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...

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...