It can’t have been hard for Susan Choi to hit on the title of her novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Flashlights show the way; they expose dark corners; in the right hands they’re...
Autumn cyclamen,booby-trapping underfootlike a mistimed spring,clutch of shame’s blushes,flock of flamingos balancedon slender stemwareor mad flight of hats,magenta origami,by...
Ben Pester’s Expansion Project is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one. The corporate attempt to suppress and compartmentalise human feeling is repeatedly shown to be laughable. But pain is non-compliant;...
I don’t think there’s anyone on today’s bestseller lists as accomplished on the page as Elmore Leonard was; he had the extraordinary ability to evoke a place with the sparsest of descriptions and...
Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real. Dream of the...
Dream Count is a product of Adichie’s more ambivalent African feminism. The novel is written entirely from the perspective of women, but their primary interest appears to be their relationships with...
While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing...
A man is fishing under the iron bridge.If I watch him watching the water, I see he is lostin thought. His morning dream came with him.His children are soft-voiced with pain; the dreamis a wheel...
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...
filled the fields. The way forward filled with the wayback. Are those humans out there orjust hollows filled with mercury & ash.When it comes into view the mountain is cleaved open.The silver...
In The Lesser Bohemians, sex is where the narrative sits, not where it goes from time to time. It’s shown as part of people’s lives, as sex is. Sex in The City Changes Its Face is a different thing....
What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and literatures? Is its primary concern with literature...
From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film, Boccaccio has been best remembered – understandably, if unfairly – for his most obscene and ribald tales. In Italian, the adjective boccaccesco means...
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,...