Proust looms large over this short but wide-reaching novel about love, sex, loss and grief in interwar Paris The author of In Search of Lost Time crops up a lot in Paul Bailey's very sweet, very sad and very short new novel, but it's not only its brevity a mere 151 pages that sets it apart from Proust's modernist mammoth. Shortly after his beloved mother's death in 1927, Dinu, a 19-year-old Romanian,...
by WS Merwin Old friend now there is no one alive who remembers when you were young it was high summer when I first saw you in the blaze of day most of my life ago with the dry grass whispering in your shade and already you had lived through wars and echoes of wars around your silence through days of parting and seasons of absence with the house emptying as the years went their way until it was home...
This novel about the messy, complicated lives of two New York brothers takes inspiration from the Hans Christian Andersen tale, and has the strange, slippery feel of a fable It's no wonder so many stories that involve an element of enchantment begin, as this one does, with a freeze or flurry. Snowfall brings with it a sense of magical transformation, a glamour in the old sense of the word; muffling...
On the eve of the 45th anniversary of the first man on the moon, Geoff Dyer explains why Mailer's historic account, written with typical gusto and urgency, is an exemplar of the New Journalism Mailer starts with the news of Hemingway's death; I'll start with Ezra Pound's claim, in The ABC of Reading , that literature "is news that STAYS news". The appeal of having one of America's...
We love raw seafood but can't stand uncooked fowl or pork. Why? A big part of it is the effective lack of gravity in water, a scientist says. Weightlessness gives fish muscles a smooth, soft texture....
The author of Because of Winn-Dixie and The Tale of Despereaux shares her summer book recommendations for young readers ages 8-13....
The U.K.-based newspaper says the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century , a treatise on income inequality, may have gotten some of his data wrong....
Narendra Modi is a Hindu nationalist and political outsider who won India's election in a landslide. To understand India's political history, author Akash Kapur recommends a book by V.S. Naipaul. ...
A quiet, slow-build haunted house story that reads like a classic of the genre Inheriting the mysterious Mire House from a distant relative, Emma Dean has no intention of keeping it, but on her first visit her imagination is captured. She knows how she would decorate, she imagines herself coming down to breakfast there and the house filled with the laughter and voices of children she does not yet have....
Affected by her own family's experience with drink, Laing's book is full of insight, compassion and unexpected beauty Travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, science, psychoanalysis: Olivia Laing's second book lines up genres like shot glasses along a bar. It could cause a terrible grape-and-grain headache, but her study of six alcoholic American writers John Berryman, John Cheever , Raymond Carver...
A poet whose dark imagination mixes solemnity with lyricism, treating the poem as a kind of secular prayer Never mind movements, schools and styles: fundamentally, there are two types of poet those who see spirits, and those who just drink them. As Sean O'Brien noted when reviewing her Faber New Poets pamphlet in these pages in 2009, Fiona Benson is a sober, contemplative sort. But as her...
You can buy texts at midnight while on the train to Taunton and read with ease in the full glare of the sun. What's not to like about electronic reading devices, asks Margaret Drabble My deep attachment to my e-reader is greeted by slightly offensive surprise from those who expect readers of my generation to be sentimentally fond of old bindings, and resistant to new and bewildering technologies....
What the critics thought of Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes, The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee and Stress Test by Timothy Geithner "This trilingual prodigy was to become a revolutionary writer in her own right, a trailblazing feminist, a lover of literature and a tireless activist on behalf of the poor and oppressed all over the world." Bel Mooney was lost in admira tion for Eleanor...
On the UK release of Roman Polanski's Venus in Fur Nicholas Blincoe returns to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella, a sweetshop of seduction and suspense Roman Polanski's new film, Venus in Fur , sent me back to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella with every intention of writing a stern, authoritative appraisal. Inevitably, I was soon playing around with Google Maps as I plotted a journey...
In a life of second-hand bookselling, I met many people who were forced to disband their libraries. The cricket buff who had to go upstairs while I loaded the car with desirable biographies; the 99-year-old whom I tried to comfort by saying "people will be so grateful to you for giving them a chance to buy your books", as tears poured down his cheeks; ministers who came along snatching back...
At Sydney writers' festival, a strangely curated panel provides plenty of laughs but little in the way of illumination Launching into the weekend of the Sydney writers' festival, Annabel Crabb hosts a panel entitled Humour and Debauchery with a Few Manners in Between, with three of the leading international guests of the festival. It's a strangely curated panel: is Gary Shteyngart the humour, Irvine...
Two leading female authors tell Sydney writers' festival that they have had remarkably similar experiences of literary sexism "I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," Eleanor Catton once noted in a Guardian interview following her Man Booker win. People got very annoyed at that comment, Catton said in a panel at Sydney writers' festival....
Irish author reveals pleasure and pain of creating pathologist in Benjamin Black books set to star in BBC TV adaptation There are two John Banvilles. The first, a Booker prize-winning novelist, is famed for his poetic and sensory fiction. The second, a crime fiction alter-ego by the name of Benjamin Black, is the one the author admires most. "My Benjamin Black books are a triumph of nerve and...
As literary festivals spring up around the UK, Claire Armitstead heads for Charleston House to examine the alchemy between author and audience Continue reading... ...
A complex, subtle and moving story about a childless couple and their adopted chimpanzee In rural Vermont, a few decades ago, Walt Ribke tries to mend his wife Judy's unhappiness at being childless by getting her a baby chimpanzee, Looee. Their deep commitment to bringing him up like a son is wholly believable, testament to Colin McAdam's wonderful writing. In Florida, other chimpanzees inhabit the...