I pick up a new novel by Lucy Ellmann with high hopes, expecting to be entertained and savaged in equal measure. On the strength of two previous novels – Sweet Desserts and Varying Degrees of Hopelessness – she has established herself as a novelist with lots to say and a uniquely personal way of saying […]
You are too young to understand a word I write, dear daughter, but this review is for you. I’ve never written to you like this, and I’m doing so now only because Carey’s novel has set me thinking about the relationship between father and child. His book, you see, takes the form of an address […]
Burning Patience is an energetic, charmingly ribald folk-like tale, the third novel by expatriate Chileno, Antonio Skármeta. Set in a small Chilean fishing village, it is the story of the village postboy’s passion for the local bartender’s nubile daughter. To woo his Beatriz, Mario enlists the aid of the village’s most illustrious inhabitant (the only […]
Richard Ford’s hugely successful 1985 novel, The Sportswriter, was a sprawling work which left few doubting the author’s skill and intelligence. It also must have caused many to wonder about his ability to rein that talent into a manageable, cogent narrative form. With his new novel Ford should lay such doubts to rest. It is […]
Bret Easton Ellis and his mates Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney – the so-called literary ‘bratpack’ – established themselves in the Eighties by writing about smug yuppie trash at a time when everyone wanted to hear about smug yuppie trash. But yuppies, as everybody knows, have disappeared (or at least articles about them have, which is […]
It is 17 years since Pynchon’s last novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, a work of dizzying opulence and grandeur, so there is cause for a little contained excitement. The setting is Northern California in 1984, a landscape of shopping malls and Burger Kings, designer cocktails and crank astrologists, a lawn-care service called The Marquis de Sod (‘’E’ll […]
From its opening sentences Susanna Moore’s new novel alerts the reader to its possibilities: I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony. For a cop book, which at its basest level this is, that is pretty good. This […]
After the publication of Underworld, Don DeLillo confessed in an interview to being a bit of an Italian show–off. He was talking about his style, but The Body Artist shows off something else: his extraordinary range of mood. It is a long way from the hilarious White Noise via the luxuriant Underworld to this gaunt, […]
Tereza is a nice Polish Catholic poet who has come to New York University to study literature. Jose is a ‘roughly handsome’ Brazilian anthropologist, also Catholic, who has come to the same university to research a book on the theological debate provoked by the 1972 Andes air crash survivors who ate their dead fellow passengers […]
It is not easy to sum up the particular quality of Margaret Atwood’s short stories, because they do everything. They have irresistible ‘read-on’ opening lines: ‘Julie broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp…’; ‘When she was nearly five, Susanna did a tap dance on a cheese box…’ They develop with the most […]
Lovers of lost causes will delight in the latest Marquez, a historical novel in which Mr Magical Realism has jettisoned the fantastic trappings of his early books in favour of facts. These are not just any facts, of course: his subject, South America’s liberating hero General Simon Bolivar, belongs to the shady territory between […]
We have to be careful about foreign reality. Debutant British critics, keen to show the visas on their passports, like to overpraise the luxuriant imaginings of exotic writers while diminishing the scrubby, arid little fancyings of their UK counterparts. But the disparity is often not one of imagination at all. Here is Gabriel García Marquez, […]
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The latest volume of T S Eliot’s letters, covering 1942–44, reveals a constant stream of correspondence. By contrast, his poetic output was negligible.
Robert Crawford ponders if Eliot the poet was beginning to be left behind.
Robert Crawford - Advice to Poets
Robert Crawford: Advice to Poets - The Letters of T S Eliot, Volume 10: 1942–1944 by Valerie Eliot & John Haffenden (edd)
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What a treat to see CLODIA @Lit_Review this holiday!
"[Boin] has succeeded in embedding Clodia in a much less hostile environment than the one in which she found herself in Ciceronian Rome. She emerges as intelligent, lively, decisive and strong-willed.”
Daisy Dunn - O, Lesbia!
Daisy Dunn: O, Lesbia! - Clodia of Rome: Champion of the Republic by Douglas Boin
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‘A fascinating mixture of travelogue, micro-history and personal reflection.’
Read the review of @Civil_War_Spain’s Travels Through the Spanish Civil War in @Lit_Review👇
John Foot - Grave Matters
John Foot: Grave Matters - Travels Through the Spanish Civil War by Nick Lloyd; El Generalísimo: Franco – Power...
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