Gibbon’s new and self-created version of the modernist sentence mixes Scots and English to resemble ‘a meandering, live thought-process’, as Ali Smith puts it: ‘poetic and realist...
The wilted season: peacocks drop their tails,The vines drop leavesAnd wear a bunch of raisins on their sleeves.The scoured sky pales.Cicadas grate and grate the airLike pencil sharpeners....
Strout’s characters live in sociable communities, mostly small coastal towns, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They gossip, reminisce, pontificate, form unlikely friendships,...
Few writers could match Verne in sales or in spin-offs, including the hugely successful theatre productions. Popular success did not, however, translate to literary prestige. Verne was largely ignored...
Gorky was the designated mourner for a vanished moment in Russian culture. He wanted socialism or democracy but he no longer wanted Bolshevism, which seemed to him psychopathically preoccupied with power....
Bainbridge chose to be seen as a woman who lived on her own terms, but that wasn’t always the way she felt, and she came to resent the persona she had created for herself. She was an actor before...
John Berryman often arrived at lectures and seminars by taxi from whichever rehab clinic was treating him, and afterwards returned there exhausted, his shirt drenched in sweat after delivering his interpretation...
The protagonist of Hall’s latest book is the wind itself. Helm, the only named wind in the British Isles, blows through Cumbria’s Eden Valley, where Hall was raised and where much of her writing,...
OlmProteus anguinusI live in a cave. Of course I’m immature.That’s how I can breathe underwater. I play the long game.You may never meet me. I can never be sure.I shine in the dark...
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...