Literature & Criticism

William Morris wrote with appalling fluency. Composing verse on trains or while sat at the loom, he could turn out a thousand lines a day. One friend used to stab herself with pins to stay awake during...

It is time to consult my friendsthe historians who still believein research and a tapestry of factwoven on the loom of deliberationand hypotheticals testedagainst what are perceivedto be outcomes....

This is Alia Trabuco Zerán’s true subject: the psychological effect of being treated as an implement rather than a person. When Estela first enters her room off the kitchen, she sits on the narrow bed...

In a late interview Dino Buzzati offered his theory of a secular form of original sin. ‘The human being is a malformation of nature … It is a mistaken creature … unhappy by definition.’ This is...

His spaniel was up on its hind legs, paws on his master’s belly, where my paws happily had lately been.He was my host, and I ate his food, while others there were still at it, too, and the...

Playboy was published in France in 2018 and was seized on by critics, and the public, as a powerful challenge to conservative views on gender and the proper place for women. But it isn’t clear that the...

Marx meant Capital to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion, penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system that depends on the exploitation of labour...

The sheer quantity and variety of Gallant’s output is fascinating. She’s dislocated, a traveller, eager for clues, hungry to read the worlds she’s passing through. Through her cast of diverse characters,...

Beyond Gurnah’s postcolonial perspective is an understanding of the trauma all people suffer when they’re sundered from what they know. His own uprooting came at the age of eighteen, when he flew with...

Donne’s triumphant ‘Death, thou shalt die’ has nothing on the apophatic reversals of László Krasznahorkai’s metaphysics, where art exposes the scrim between us and non-being.

Would it have made a difference to read Monsieur Teste earlier? I have always had a taste for not-quite-novels, but I suspect this would always have been too much of a not-quite-a-not-quite-novel for...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...