This is not a novel full of euphemism or implication. K Patrick has said they set out to write a ‘horny’ novel and this is what we have here – one composed of short, fragmentary (and at times disorienting)...
Most of the labourers have travelled from elsewhere, leaving behind their families. This is their second or third career. ‘I’m still a fisherman,’ a mechanic foreman from Newfoundland tells Katie,...
María Gainza’s idea is that absorption is only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement. It’s when María’s mind...
Brandon Som’s poems refuse to confine themselves or their forms to any one thing. All of them enfold and link multiple topics, injustice among them. He writes, as well, to honour people who endured,...
‘Michael’ (Bradley) and ‘Field’ (Cooper) were distraught to be revealed as two people and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf...
Themes that recur in James Purdy’s later work include power struggles (liable to sudden inversions), extreme emotional states (also subject to reversal), and polar contrasts of riches and poverty, youth...
The Portuguese were said to be uniquely at home in the tropics, their colonies places of multiracial harmony. Portugal’s empire was fated to endure. In the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial movements...
One could, broadly speaking, describe the history of Western cosmological thinking in terms of three vocabularies: classical, Christian and scientific. Zoom out, and the three appear chronologically...
Other people aren’t hell, Lauren Berlant writes, just bothersome, ‘which is to say that they have to be dealt with’. Why is it so hard to live with other people? And why do we seek to ease the friction...
Comparisons to Proust and Henry James come up a lot when critics discuss Javier Marías, but we could also see his style, his performance, as something akin to a too-late Balzac, aided perhaps by a disciple...
The conceit of the novel is that it is a fictional biography, with fake footnotes, but real endnotes that reveal the sources Catherine Lacey used to create X, her wife and the world she lived in.
I think I should go in and see her. Can I stand it. She is shaking. No doubt. I should go in. She’ll be pouring another glass. It stops the shaking. No doubt. She’ll be sitting in...
In Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s characters keep fabricating their own versions of reality, but their inventions are boxed in: lies, casting after ordinary plausibility, tend to resemble one another...
In The World and All That It Holds, Aleksandar Hemon wants to show how the monolithic lays waste to the macaronic – and how the macaronic, in the form of the resilient Pinto, manages to survive. Yet...
Mary Renault’s novels manifest an unfashionably unabashed admiration for male heroism and an intense pleasure in male beauty and physicality. She didn’t mind that male readers and reviewers constantly...
Jane Bowles’s characters are obsessed with sin and salvation, though they often confuse them. She was drawn towards things she found incomprehensible and, particularly, towards things she feared. What...
Perhaps by making pain formal, or rendering it as a joke, Diane Seuss also makes it tolerable. If frank: sonnets is haunted by corpses, the poet’s own body is also an abiding concern throughout: ‘There...
The terror that Mariana Enríquez works with depends precisely on her refusal of repression. In her fiction, blood isn’t spattered off screen. It’s splurged all over the picture. And so Our Share of...