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…
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.
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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The depravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s reading list
The Epstein emails are crawling with Humbert Humberts
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How Wuthering Heights seduced its readers
Nothing beats the thrills and seductions of Emily Brontë’s novel
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Hamnet fails Shakespeare
Paul Mescal’s portrayal leans more on grief than genius
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From the archive: Mr Eliot’s poems
1926: How TS Eliot’s “music of ideas” saved a generation
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TS Eliot’s Hollow Men are all around us
The poem, which was published 100 years ago, has beguiled a remarkable array of minds
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DH Lawrence and the superiority of fiction
The Goldsmiths Prize Lecture on 100 years of the writer’s seminal essay “Why the Novel Matters”
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Reluctant Cheats: a story by Anton Chekhov
In this short story, appearing in English for the first time, New Year’s party guests battle against time
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Never recommend Philip Roth to your mother
Her face was a mask of horror
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Iris Murdoch’s poems were better left in the attic
A cache of newly unearthed works is not the “thrilling literary discovery” their publisher claims
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The real crisis of literacy – we’re reading too much
In the age of AI, with its blizzard of words, we should relish our pre-linguistic sensibilities
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David Szalay: “I think of myself as a European novelist”
The Booker Prize winner on masculinity, sex and what Keir Starmer should read
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Why László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature
The Hungarian author’s work has a huge and haunting vision
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Thomas Pynchon’s lasting triumph
His latest novel borrows too freely from his previous work. But what work it has been
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Has Kemi Badenoch actually read Terry Pratchett?
She claims he’s her favourite author, but his books have a few lessons for her
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The terrible contradictions of Tolstoy
Maxim Gorky’s reminiscences about his literary hero are just as avant-garde today as they were in the 1920s
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