Towards the end of the correspondence a self-consciousness creeps in. Responding to ‘Parker’s Back’, one of O’Connor’s last stories, Gordon’s self-deprecation borders...
To fuck God once or twice at moderate length would be enough for most writers but Gerard Reve had a reputation to uphold. He decided to defend himself at the trial, which ran from 1966 to 1968. It...
At moments Mantel might have heeded the words addressed by her Wyatt to Cromwell: ‘Be careful . . . You are on the brink of explaining yourself.’
What happens when a travesty of authority becomes a template for power, when Dada sets up in the White House or at 10 Downing Street?
If it answers to now, if it’s sufficiently fearless and adaptable and capacious, why not write the same poem again and again – in couplets, in slabs, in measured stanzas, in irregular...
The title of Fernanda Melchor’s unrelenting novel brings together disruption and regularity, a break in the pattern but also the pattern that underlies the break. Early in the novel...
In Mario Levrero’s novel Empty Words a writer, unable to change the vast mess of his life, decides to improve one small part of it: his handwriting.My graphological self-therapy begins...
‘Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.’ Whether or not you like Gibson’s novels will depend less on your enthusiasm...
Between the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly...
If you believe the Ngram viewer, the phrase ‘damned lies’ has passed its peak, and ‘lying politician’ was far more commonly used in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods than...
Her prose was sophisticated, her references depended on all kinds of knowledge I didn’t have: this writing was not addressed to me, but over my head. Who were these people and what did they want,...
One of the more ludicrous aspects of the affair involved some photographs, circulated by Jeanine Cummins on social media, of a prelaunch promotional dinner during last summer’s BookExpo Conference...
My mother used to tell a story she heard in the Peace Corps in the 1970s. An American couple somewhere in the South Pacific decided to swim across a narrow but deep channel where tiger sharks...
Deborah Eisenberg spent the summer of 1963 at a school for labour organisers and civil rights activists in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was 17. ‘It was a proudly Klan...
Few authors of such historical importance have so high a proportion of their writings forgotten or neglected as Walter Pater. I used to think his essays on ancient sculpture the least studied...
Paul Muldoon enjoys leading his reader astray. On that the critics agree. I have been looking back at reviews of his work over the years. It is remarkable how often people quote from an early...
In 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder...