In David Constantine’s short story “Asylum”, a therapist asks a patient to look in a mirror and describe herself. The mirror is “a lovely thing, face-shaped and just the size ...
I know in my heart that it was not Carol Ann Duffy’s fault. It was my own fault, and to a lesser extent the pupils I tried to teach on ...
My new novel, Killing Daniel, has just been released, which I realise should be an occasion for joy, but it also reminds me just how difficult it is for me ...
A recurring theme is the discovery of the city’s beauty in unexpected places. The introductory three-page comic depicting the artist’s social anxiety about being at a publishing party alone gives ...
It’s hard to escape the fact that by opening a book, we are accepting a beginning; and by reading its final words, we are acknowledging an end. Is it ever ...
I’ve always been a huge fan of Nigerian literature. A few years back I even went on a course to learn Igbo. I started seriously reading Nigerian literature during my ...
In many ways, The Genius of Burgess was a fitting title for a symposium focused on the works of such a controversial, challenging and boundary-pushing writer, immediately begging the question: ...
The drifter who wanders through every page of Jesus’s Son is an unnamed narrator whom we are told will answer to “Fuckhead”. He is an addict, a loser, and a ...
Emma Osment ponders the often-repeated advice that you should only write about what you know, and concludes that following it as a rule would narrow your world, that you should ...
It’s not often I get to the end of a novel and realise I need to reread it straight away. Not just because I liked it—I did—but because I realised ...
In her essay “Site of Memory” (Inventing the Truth, 1995), Toni Morrison talks about how a snippet of information—“a dimly recalled figure, the corner of a room, a voice”—is enough ...
Sometimes, it is the echo of something larger that is at the heart of a Jackie Kay short story: a distillation of sorts, whereby a brief, intense image or feeling ...
Robin Stevens, who finished a dissertation on crime fiction recently, went to a debate at Kings Place on Monday to listen to John Banville, Sophie Hannah, Peter James and Lee ...
As a writer, it’s your job to mess with the plot of your story, to test out what does and doesn’t work. Writing is—or at least, it is for me—like ...
This writer unearths the letters she wrote to friends and a particularly well-loved teacher when she was younger, and finds her old desire to write a book revived by her ...
The Rachel Papers is all a bit meta; our narrator structures his life around the literary greats (“I know what it’s supposed to be like, I’ve read my Lawrence”) and ...
Come this way. Your butler helps you slip into your coat before you stride down the hallway. Lady Agnes is beside you, wearing her bonnet, cloak and close-fitting corset. Meanwhile, ...
My first stories were rooted in the escapism that I had enjoyed as a child. I wanted relief from my past, not to revel in it. The feedback I received ...
The Things They Carried is, essentially, a collection of related war stories. But it also redefines what a war story truly is: not a traditional hero narrative of courage, but ...
Bawdy peasant girls performing a bear dance. Masked revelers spinning to the sound of a mariachi band. An accordion-playing polar bear. Collective onion-chopping commiserations to a Jazz accompaniment. The haunting ...
