The revenge of the young male novelist
Can good writing solve our crisis of masculinity?
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.
Sharing a bed with Edmund White
Epic sexual promiscuity was the key to White’s literary output.
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The epic of James Joyce
How Richard Ellmann’s capacious 1959 biography shaped modern life writing.
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The vagus nerve industry
Can a small and unassuming bundle of fibres really be the key to better health and a longer life?
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There is no contemporary fiction
The novel promises an ending. But world events will not be so neatly contained.
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A cold childhood
My unheated home wasn’t a temporary discomfort. The chill got into my bones.
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Gertrude Stein’s quest for fame
The modernist phenomenon believed bad attention was better than none at all.
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Mark Twain and the limits of biography
The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.
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Who was the real DH Lawrence?
A BBC series considers the novelist’s three great themes: sex, nature and class.
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The lost boys of North London
Leo Robson’s family saga, set during the 2012 Olympics, is both a comedy and a study of grief.
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Edward St Aubyn’s comedy of horrors
The Patrick Melrose novels and his other works are clearly by the same writer – but produce wildly different results.
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Curzio Malaparte, the Proust of violence
The Italian writer was drawn to fascism – but became an unsparing chronicler of the carnage of war.
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Jane Gardam’s dispatches from the past
The late British writer produced novels haunted by uprootings, death, and the twilight of the British Empire.
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The first and last New Journalist
Gay Talese published a candid account of his infidelities in 1980. His marriage survived; his career almost didn’t.
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Samuel Beckett’s art of reduction
In The Unnamable, the writer’s prose was stripped to the bone – and the bone itself boiled white.
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The unbearable weight of the literary canon
Daunted by the breadth of the material, I fear I will never be well read enough.
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s everyday dystopia
Never Let Me Go was once dismissed by critics for its “dear-diary” prose, but 20 years later the novelist’s masterwork…
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The Leopard and the ruins of history
Newly adapted by Netflix, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is a lesson in the anarchic motions of our times.
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Dante’s divine autofiction
How the Italian poet’s search for self-knowledge changed the course of literature.
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Eimear McBride’s literature of desire
The Irish author’s exhilarating fourth novel, The City Changes Its Face, proves there is nobody writing sex like her.
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