Namwali Serpell’s aesthetic preference is to break a pattern almost before she has established it, to load, aim and cock a symbol but not pull the trigger. In The Furrows, the nexus between disaster,...
If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking...
Russell Banks admitted that he wrote about the sort of people who voted for Trump; those were the people he came from. He wanted them to understand themselves better. But that didn’t mean he was an...
If it is the job of a poet to cast spells, H.D. was very good at it. She was a master of the striking launch, the bravura speech act, sustained intensity. Her work can seem like a high-wire performance,...
The characters in Ned Beauman’s book are defined by the extent to which they care about animals. Halyard doesn’t unless they’re going to make him money or send him to jail. Resaint empathises too...
The realisation that one might be show-offy in a good way is among Donne’s chief bequests to English literature, a salutary corrective to the 16th-century cult of Sidneian sprezzatura. The embrace of...
On BookTok the cycle goes: rating books, simping over them, bringing ‘overrated’ books down a peg, and then rehabilitating them when the backlash goes too far. But there is a worry that we’re all...
Nettel is a mother, and she seems to be saying that ‘normal mothers’ do think ugly thoughts – or rather, that there is no such thing as a ‘normal mother’. There is a strong tradition of works...
Who or what was Rimbaud? What is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems straight – that seeks to ‘strain meaning to the very limits’? Can history live by metaphors...
Toni Morrison is not envious of her characters. They are not punished for the qualities she has given them. Pride does not always come before a fall. Beauty is not bestowed so it might be marred or destroyed....
Jon Fosse doesn’t use sentences, or prefers not to end them. When you open Septology, with its smallish print and narrow margins, it can feel like a death sentence – all the more so since the book,...
More interesting than the sentimental evocation of reading as an activity that sets lonely children apart is the conception of authors as would-be ushers of the apocalypse. That books themselves are pregnant...
‘Like having my skull opened with a tin-opener,’ Angela Carter said about reading Baudelaire as a teenager. Discovering the Claudine books, even at my age and with my Bataille phase far behind me,...
Alessandro Manzoni was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman....
The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially...
The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight and strength in order to tip them off-balance. Helen DeWitt has been talking in laconic for quite a while...
Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’...