Itch to Shine: Austen’s Suitors

Freya Johnston, 20 March 2025

The main business​ of almost all Jane Austen’s fiction is to portray that brief period in a young woman’s life when she is at the height of her charms and about to surrender them for ever to a more...

Read more about Itch to Shine: Austen’s Suitors

In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...

Read more about Worst Birthday Cake Ever: On Dominique Fernandez

Two Poems

Paula Bohince, 20 March 2025

EcologicWhat are those glassine circles? Lunaria? Wafer,glissade, waft? Is to name a thing to take its Latinate and translatebackwards? Components, sheen and mother-lustre, an ideal array of pills...

Read more about Two Poems

All Fours, July’s second novel, is about a ‘semi-famous’ interdisciplinary artist whose work is filled with ‘unlikely couplings, unauthorised sex, surrealism and a shit ton of lesbianism’. It...

Read more about Dutch Treat: Miranda July’s Make-Believe

What Brutal Days: On Dionne Brand

Andrea Brady, 6 March 2025

Dionne Brand writes about pain, but her poems use obscurity and abstraction to keep lyric intimacy at bay. This extends to their multiple first-person subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the...

Read more about What Brutal Days: On Dionne Brand

It’s​ a big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. Joyce talked...

Read more about Will I, Won’t I? Dostoevsky’s Kiss

All of David Szalay’s stories point up the body’s indifference to the plans the will seeks to impose, its capacity to torment a person with inappropriate desire, or to carry on regardless of success...

Read more about You should get a job: David Szalay’s ‘Flesh’

On ‘NLR’

Jeremy Harding, 20 February 2025

In general, New Left Review is immune to the appeal of actually existing electoral democracy and sceptical about the winners of the day, especially if they happen to be Labour or the Democrats. One envies...

Read more about On ‘NLR’

The Stepdaughter (1976), Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine...

Read more about Dear So-and-So: Caroline Blackwood’s Doubles

I must divorce! On Vigdis Hjorth

Toril Moi, 6 February 2025

Women who write ​about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping...

Read more about I must divorce! On Vigdis Hjorth

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

Children’s books, to a great extent because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is a built on a hegemony of acquisition....

Read more about Why children’s books?

Signs Reduced to Noise: On Elfriede Jelinek

Becca Rothfeld, 23 January 2025

When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating...

Read more about Signs Reduced to Noise: On Elfriede Jelinek

‘American unreason’ is the atmosphere that pervades Small Rain, which is in part about how a near-death experience puts one in confrontation with the American myths of independence and agency. Garth...

Read more about American Unreason: Garth Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain’

Rochester could ruin anything. ‘Even his most elegant verse often resounds with the crash of breaking glass,’ Barbara Everett wrote. Germaine Greer called him ‘a poet against his better judgment’,...

Read more about The Readyest Way to Hell: The Exhausting Earl of Rochester

Isherwood wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically...

Read more about Disguise-Language: Christopher Isherwood’s Artifice

Tropical Trouser-Leg: On Rosemary Tonks

Ruby Hamilton, 26 December 2024

Spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them – as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not...

Read more about Tropical Trouser-Leg: On Rosemary Tonks

The strange pleasure ​of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover...

Read more about The Pope of Course: Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Annihilation’

Style in Lewis’s prose is a sort of triumph of the will over the external world of people and things, ‘that fat mass you browse on’, as Lewis rather horribly put it. ‘The act of creation ... is...

Read more about My God, they stink! Wyndham Lewis goes for it