Fiction and literature

Guest Notebook: Roland Allen on the Birth of the Notebook

How the humble notebook greased the wheels of learning and literature

Nov 10

Review: Dorothy Parker on Benito Mussolini, author

Signor Benito Mussolini, back in the days when he was wearing white shirts, if any, wrote a book

Nov 3

Review: Marina Warner on Margaret Atwood

It is the deep function of a fairy tale, even the most merciless stories of cruelty and revenge, to hold out a belief in change

Oct 30

Diary: (2) Donna Seaman, “River of Books”

My parents, Bronx high-school sweethearts, were ardent readers. My father, who dropped out at age fifteen to work, schooled himself in libraries and on…

Oct 21

Review: Anthony Domestico, Poetry on TV

How to convince people who think they don’t like poetry that there might be something in it for them?

Oct 16

Review: Joy Williams on Andrey Platonov

He is never playful or ironic. He is sincere to the point of pathology, a holy pathology

Oct 9

Diary: Deborah Levy on J. G. Ballard

Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.

Oct 6

Review: Barry Yourgrau on Jean-Patrick Manchette

Manchette used the crime thriller to skewer capitalist culture’s sedating distractions

Oct 2

Review: Michael Robbins on translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Having just finished rereading Metamorphoses in different translations, the author arrives at various grouchy conclusions about the art of translation

Sep 25

Diary: Octavio Solis, Sam Beckett and I

Isolated by the pandemic, a playwright finds renewal in an unexpected place

Sep 22

Review: Christopher Benfey on the Stevensons

An irreverent, pistol-packing, independent woman runs away from her “reliably unfaithful” first husband and throws in her lot with the always ill and…

Sep 18

Diary: Michael Wood on Jean Giono

A sea journey ostensibly about “Zoology, Botany, Paleontology, Oceanography” turns out to be a pursuit of the unknown

Sep 12

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