Rachel Cusk’s Portmanteau novel
Life of M, a rumoured “biography” of a certain celebrity, is more artful than the gossip surrounding it suggests
ByLiterature
Immerse yourself in the captivating world of literature with our collection of articles, offering literary analysis, book recommendations, author spotlights, and thought-provoking discussions that celebrate the written word.
An even colder Wuthering Heights
Much of what we know about Emily Brontë’s life is jarring – but was she really a disciple of the…
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Summer is the cruellest season
It is the perfect setting for novels that push their protagonists to breaking point
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Mario Vargas Llosa’s demons
He won the Nobel Prize at last. But will his reputation survive his scandalous private life?
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Vasily Grossman, war correspondent
The novelist’s reportage from the Second World War is brilliant and agonised
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Samuel Beckett’s Proustian moment
The great Irish writer’s first book, an idiosyncratic study of Proust, was also a potent work of modernist literature
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In Hong Kong, I saw the coming Chinese century
Is authoritarianism the price we will pay for social order?
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At last, a literary prime minister?
Andy Burnham’s English degree has shaped his worldview
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The dictatorship of the elderly
The Victorians saw how generational conflict would fester – and warp our politics beyond recognition
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Art against the machine
This AI short-story scandal is the beginning of a new era for literature
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Don’t blame AI for bad writing
Long before “The Serpent in the Grove”, the book industry had turned away from style and towards identity
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Sylvia Townsend Warner’s obscure forces
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, published a century ago, is a powerful reverie on women’s interwar status
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The highs and lows of London’s literary scene
Also: a dreamy new novel, and my relapse
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How not to read JG Ballard
This new biography has done a great writer a disservice
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Ben Lerner has taken autofiction somewhere new
The American novelist’s new book is not truly about ego, or technology, but a more elusive and universal theme
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Franz Kafka’s ten apostles
The Mitteleuropean writer owes much of his fame to the gifted translators who took his words out of German and…
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The curse of individualism
Rowan Williams’s new book reimagines solidarity for our times
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My mother’s love for words
As a child, Marie Drabble would read anything that was printed, from adverts to lists. It was a habit that…
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Len Deighton was a revolutionary
Too many of Britain’s espionage writers were melancholy public schoolboys – Deighton was their antidote
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How academics ruined Shakespeare
It is time to retrieve the playwright we thought we knew – the man who asks universal questions – from…
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