The best adjectives for Bruno Schulz’s stories are not so much intellectual as sensual. They’re sticky, fuzzy and so richly textured that they seem almost rotten. The stories move in such a private...
If le Carré saw that the secret services on both sides of the Cold War had a shared interest in keeping hostilities simmering, Mick Herron gets similar mileage from the idea of the enemy within: not in...
In North America, Camus looked for Europe and failed to find it; in South America, he looked for Algeria, and although he didn’t exactly find it, he discovered something both familiar and strange: a...
There’s a scene in Paul Murray’s novel Skippy Dies (2010) in which a science teacher called Mr Farley talks about the word ‘amphibian’. He says that it refers to an...
Taubes, like many postwar artists and intellectuals, turned to surrealism to articulate the trauma of displacement, the secondary trauma of returning to a diminished homeland, and the lifelong challenge...
I first encountered George Orwell in 1977, when a brave English teacher got a group of bolshy 14-year-olds to read Nineteen Eighty-Four and told us to write our own dystopia. It isn’t hard to see why...
‘I am a better translator than he is,’ Willa Muir complained in a 1953 journal. For several generations the couple’s Kafka translations were the most widely read English-language versions. Early...
In Hazzard’s fiction there are very few children, and the ones who do appear are not particularly rewarding. But they are not the enemy. The enemy is the person who sees others as playthings. The enemy...
The trick that Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings plays is to make us think we’re reading a certain kind of novel, before wrongfooting us. Crime narratives are appealing not just because they’re lurid...
Voltaire regarded the short tale as a duel with the reader, and a form of complicity. He went out of his way to disparage the ‘littleness’ of the form, and to ridicule all fiction, as fables without...
The sheer force of the memories exacted an impressive precision and solidity in Coleman’s expression. And she must have felt the electricity of her novel, as she was writing it, in both directions: channelling...
Early Works shows Alice Notley feeling her way past the dominant aesthetics of her period – she was a key figure in the downtown New York poetry scene before moving to Paris in 1992 – and discovering...
In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s first book, the choice presented to bisexual women – surrender to the world’s expectations and get with a man, or follow your desires and risk forfeiting power and...
In Old God’s Time Tom Kettle, Barry’s hero, sees the moon rise behind Dalkey Island, and it feels like an eclipse; each time he looks at it, it’s in a different pane of the window. Wave or particle?...
Ulysses is haunted by the story of its own composition. As Joyce famously put it, ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,...
Fiction can do without all sorts of things that seemed essential to 19th-century novelists: it doesn’t need to comment on society, or provide descriptions of settings and scenery, or a linear chronology,...
Han Kang’s story is propelled by antinomies. Here is a dead language, Greek, and there is the ‘unbearably alive’ Korean. Here is a philosopher, there a poet; one unrequited love, another love one...
With her insistence on renegotiating power dynamics between the sexes, claiming her right to sexual pleasure, and earning her own money, Alysoun can sound not unlike a second-wave feminist. Yet she doesn’t...