“To come here you must risk not only the bear’s meathook claws but the jaws of the orca, the nose of the wolf, perhaps even the magic of some stranger ...
Sarah Dodds on the large and complex cast of characters in John Lanchester’s “Capital”, his story of London life told through the inhabitants of one street. Continue Reading ...
Would Mr Darcy have got on with Facebook? Gwen Smith considers the social media savviness of her favourite literary characters. Continue Reading Literary Characters Who’d Be Good at ...
In 2003, award-winning poet and novelist James Lasdun taught a fiction writing workshop in New York. One of the students, a young woman, stood out from the other students as ...
The next Hunger Games? Dystopian-fiction fan Emily Ding reviews Hugh Howey’s Wool and chats with the Florida-based author about his journey from self-publishing sensation to Big-Six author, and how it ...
Fifty Shades of Grey was 2012’s literary phenomenon, and its impact continues to be felt in the press, social media, the publishing industry and academic studies. How do these books ...
From his author picture, Simon Rich looks pretty happy (even if his mum probably made him wear a tie). Who wouldn’t be: three books, five screenplays, he used to work ...
The days when a sex scene in a book could generate wide-spread controversy are long gone. Now that you can pick up a copy of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades ...
Authors may expect us to buy the happy-ever-after ending, but seriously? Wives in the attic, cross-species love and a 2,000 year age gap? How long is it really going to ...
“One of my pupils had Alice horribly injured in a car accident and then caught up in a zombie outbreak. Another decided that she would become a gangster’s moll and ...
“I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything ...
Anyone who thinks that the crime novel is a boring, repetitive genre would do well to read Belinda Bauer’s Rubbernecker. Set in the coma ward of a Cardiff hospital, Rubbernecker ...
The literary history of Ireland is as varied as it is unique, but the short story has a specific resonance in the country’s history and culture. In this feature, Deirdre ...
Cross-dressing, sodomy, blood-sucking and a touch of necrophilia. In this feature, novelist Rosie Garland picks her top ten weirdest relationships in literature. “The edge of things has always interested me ...
‘Do you ever wonder where your life is going? You are not alone,’ reads the logline on the front page of Afsaneh Knight’s second novel. Fresh from my own existential ...
The details of Fanny and Stella’s story will completely destroy all your presumptions about Victorian attitudes to sexuality. They and their circle of friends regularly dressed in elaborate drag and ...
What are the borders between the urban and the rural? Between consumerism and conservationism? Between innocence and experience? These are some of the questions concerning Melissa Harrison’s debut novel Clay. ...
It’s London, 1850, and private detective Charles Maddox has just been given a new case. Sir Percy Shelley and his wife are being harassed by someone threatening to make public ...
The stories in this debut collection are familiar: a beautiful outcast taken in by seven dwarves, a girl with a long plait of hair, a woman going three times to ...
These formally inventive tales add up to an unflinching and visceral collection of stories which fragment and coalesce in surprising ways: Borges as written by Poppy Z Brite and Virginia ...
