isolation
What rats can teach us about the dangers of overcrowding
The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the…
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
When Ilka Weisz, a young refugee from Vienna, accepts a teaching post in smalltown Connecticut, she struggles to make friends in the close-knit academic community
The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed
Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes
Seize the moment
A group of students in Iowa City meet in bars and seminar rooms, but, separated by class, race and wealth, their connection is only fleeting
More menace – and magic – on the moors
Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney was one of the surprise stand-outs of last year, and a worthy winner of the…
In deep water
Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged…
