Review – Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life
In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements… or an album in which the tracks are separate but the whole thing adds up...
View ArticleReview – John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk
Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this...
View ArticleBack to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one lover… one acre of...
View ArticleJohn Keats by Nicholas Roe – review
The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than...
View ArticleJunot Diaz, the new Saul Bellow
Every so often a writer renovates a whole literary landscape from underneath. Armed to the teeth with slang and learning, Saul Bellow reinvented American prose with The Adventures of Augie March in...
View ArticleInterview with a writer: Lars Iyer
People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people...
View ArticleDeath Comes For The Poets by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams – review
Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored...
View ArticleInterview with James Wood
James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for The Guardian....
View ArticleSheila Heti: ‘I did worry putting sex in the book would eclipse everything else’
There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in...
View ArticleWhy boys love Jane Austen
When I first read Jane Austen I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to impress a girl who read her. I didn’t get the girl, but I got the novelist: persuading myself that I was the only 16 year-old boy in...
View ArticleThe Foyle prize for poetry will restore your faith in arts awards
Those of us who were never destined to be great young poets can probably remember the attempts. I kept my verses from when I was 14 in a pillowcase, which was mercifully put in the wash. Writing poetry...
View ArticlePerhaps Michael Gove should get the Turner Prize
It is a week where you’d imagine most British politicians would be occupied by the Supreme Court ruling over Brexit.…
View ArticleBuffy the Vampire Slayer made me the man I am
Buffy the Vampire Slayer turned 20 yesterday, which will make millennials feel as old as the actors who supposedly passed for…
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