Jonathan McAloon 
Interview with James Wood
James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for… Continue reading
2 Comments
Death Comes For The Poets by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams – review
Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about… Continue reading
0 Comments
Interview with a writer: Lars Iyer
People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing… Continue reading
2 Comments
Junot Diaz, the new Saul Bellow
Every so often a writer renovates a whole literary landscape from underneath. Armed to the teeth with slang and learning, Saul Bellow reinvented American prose with The Adventures of Augie… Continue reading
2 Comments
John Keats by Nicholas Roe – review
The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than… Continue reading
4 Comments
Back to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one… Continue reading
1 Comment
Review – John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk
Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or… Continue reading
1 Comment
Review – Sebastian Faulks’s A Possible Life
In a promotional video clip, Sebastian Faulks describes his new novel, A Possible Life, as like ‘a symphony in five movements… or an album in which the tracks are separate… Continue reading
1 Comment