In discussions of translation, we hear a lot about difficulty, impossibility, loss, riches, invention, triumph – all justified and interesting avenues. But texts may suggest something else: agreement,...

Consent could mean, as now, agreement to a proposal, but Shakespeare’s plays reflect social conditions in which consent between lovers depends on the consent given by friends and family. As Petruchio...

The Hutu authorities​ in Rwanda, Scholastique Mukasonga writes in The Barefoot Woman, portrayed the Tutsi as ‘inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate’. Mukasonga’s...

American poets have never tired of the wonders of refrigeration. Ever since William Carlos Williams pilfered plums from the icebox there have been songs in praise of fridges and their contents – and...

The structural jumps and awkward sutures of time in The Fraud are part of its argument. They give additional force to its wider project of showing how the novels of the period 1840-80 were structurally...

This Other Eden is loosely based on what happened on Malaga Island, Maine in 1912, the same year that the first international congress on eugenics was held in London, at which Leonard Darwin, son of Charles,...

Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is interested in our relationship to the history we are living through, conscious that no one is fully aware of living in an historical epoch, perhaps as fictional figures can’t...

H.P.Lovecraft’s name rarely appears today without the requisite condemnation. Yet nobody is really suggesting that we stop reading him, cancel Cthulhu and de-platform the Great Old Ones.

Spiritual guidance is rare in Vernon Lee’s stories. Her ghosts are usually the undoing of those who encounter them; they represent compulsive desires rather than fears, and the glamour of history more...

Byron took from Milton the idea that the mind, being ‘its own place and time’, could be its own hell. Torment in the tales and other ‘dark’ poems may be both a physical space – a dungeon, a set...

Barbara Kingsolver’s reason for following the plot of Dickens’s David Copperfield so closely is simple. In the acknowledgments, she thanks Dickens for ‘his impassioned critique of institutional...

In the crisis-ridden 1930s, Hughes was happy to combine the roles of activist, foreign correspondent and purveyor of agitprop verse. His most inventive and original poetry, however, had other sources,...

Alexander Baron was an atheist from a young age, telling his parents that if they insisted on having him bar mitzvahed he would hide a ham sandwich in his pocket and place it on the Torah scrolls during...

At a time when there was no female equivalent of the gentleman’s club, the Yellow Book offered a congenial literary space in which men and women could joke, flirt and briefly imagine themselves free...

I wanted to be in Lorrie Moore world, too, even if her characters were stuck in middle America, usually with disappointed middle-class lives, underwhelming husbands and dysfunctional relationships with...

For Teju Cole’s protagonist in Tremor, as for many of us, the public reassessment of history has been accompanied by a private reckoning. It isn’t only the external world that has been revealed to...

You can read Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss as a set of Russian dolls, each containing a different debate about trauma. Small doll: Om’s conversations with Flavia, in which the sex therapist parrots pop-psychology...

Charles Lamb could not ‘digest’ death, but he gorged on life. Food, for Lamb, was a medium of thought, a master metaphor. The solitude of childhood was the ‘feeder of love, and silence, and admiration’.