For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought...
Despite Henrik Pontoppidan winning the Nobel Prize in 1917, there was no English-language version of this extraordinary novel until Naomi Lebowitz’s appeared in 2010 with the title Lucky Per. Paul...
Barnes could have called this work ‘Disappearance’ or ‘Disappearances’, but he didn’t. The implication of the bracket in Departure(s) is that we should not concentrate on...
One doesn’t read Gwendoline Riley for plot; each of her books is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short,...
The almost dreamlike movement of the story of The Ipcress File is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s...
The Knight’s Maze, Eastnor CastleFor JohnOur teenagers turn kids again, amazedBetween tall hedges, planted to confound.They race ahead to the unknown, unfazedTo meet with cul-de-sacs, and...
The Kristóf who emerges from the sources was, like the twins in the Notebook trilogy, a person divided in two. In Hungary she had lived; in Switzerland she wrote. For Kristóf, the two were...
Schuyler once told an interviewer that he didn’t write the kind of poetry that attracted critics. ‘It’s too easy,’ he added, with a laugh. It wasn’t easy, though, to arrive...
The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Ben Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most...
Was there such a thing as a female style in early modern England? For several authors, valorising originality meant claiming legitimacy in a society that gave them little chance to learn and would likely...
Raffles survives, and it’s not just the verve and breakneck pace of the stories. What captivated me once again, what I had more or less forgotten, was the angst. Raffles and his slow-witted...
Nicola Barker’s explorations have taken her to 19th-century India and a post-metaphysical future. Yet British banality has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things...
Sally Carson’s dissection of the question that has disturbed the European mind for decades – how did it happen? – has touched a contemporary nerve, and the new edition of Crooked Cross...
Once at a gate with cherries. Know this quickly buried nowor less to file history brief stuffed full of pen force, the timeit takes to various accounts echoing in my library to ensurepassage broke...
Humankind, he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of...
Solvej Balle’s serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make these ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see...
In all of Flannery O’Connor’s work, there isn’t a single character you could describe as admirable, or even vaguely sympathetic. O’Connor said that her interest in such unedifying...
Once, they caught me in a snareand plucked me to the pinkand left my feather-shafts to curein salt and flowers of zincthey rolled them up in mutton fatand set them by their cotsthen dealt my flesh...