A twist on the American classic: The Sidekick, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
On the cover of The Sidekick, just below a broken basketball hoop, a quote from Jonathan Lethem suggests Benjamin Markovits…
Unkindly light: The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, reviewed
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
A delicious novel from one of our most inventive contemporary voices
‘Food experiences,’ writes Michael Flanagan in his paper ‘Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: Food in Popular Children’s Literature’, ‘form part…
The urge to purge: it’s closure at last for the tortured Karl Ove Knausgaard
And so it comes, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence: a pale brick of a book,…
Shadows of the past are ominously present in a trio of memorable first novels
The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section…
Worming out the truth
In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement…
Worming out the truth
In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement…
Smoke and mirrors
Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds…
