Javier Marías is Spain’s most celebrated novelist and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Marta Pérez-Carbonell, whose book on Marías is soon to be published by Brill, ...
In Western thought, literature has often been separated from politics. Plato founded this tradition when he famously banished the poet from the city with the resounding words: “Not pleasure and ...
It is a story that is devastating because its married protagonists, Pauline and Michael, make misery their quotidian experience.
Continue Reading The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
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Reading an AM Homes story for the first time is a like being drunk – you’re not really sure what’s going on, you kind of like it and everything’s going ...
Kurt Vonnegut once (in)famously laid down this commandment to his students: “First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve ...
Dylan Brethour tells the tragic tale of the Mandelstams – poet Osip and writer Nadezhda – whose harrowing experience of persecution, exile and betrayal exposed the USSR’s excesses. ...
Xenobe Purvis reviews Julian Barnes’s impressionistic biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, his first novel since 2011’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. Continue Reading Power and Irony: The Noise ...
Gina Mussio revisits Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel. Continue Reading Revisiting The Goldfinch
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Welcome to Litro #147 – the Space Issue. In this issue we explore the world’s ever-evolving urban social landscape. We’ve got art, stories, essays, cartoons, interviews – all examining ...
The symmetrical title of Salman Rushdie’s latest fantasia-like novel is a Julian calendar apportioning of the legendary 1001 nights of Eastern lore. Continue Reading 9/11 Fiction and the ...
My dream was traditional, but to get there I had to take non-traditional routes. What was it Einstein said? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and ...
In this beautiful essay, Stephen Hargadon describes his love of the second-hand bookshop: the thrill of the chase; the smell and feel of the books; the memories contained within. ...
There is a good book to be written about spinsterhood, writes Joanna Pocock, but Kate Bolick’s Spinster isn’t it. Continue Reading Spinster, Schminster: The Destruction of a Perfectly ...
Poles can’t get enough of steamy Norwegian romance novels known as ‘sagas’. What explains their popularity? Continue Reading The Phenomenon of Norwegian Romance Fiction in Poland
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Struggling against a city in financial decline and still reeling from the wounds of civil unrest, the Turner siblings are faced with a dilemma. The family home their parents worked ...
One hot, black midnight in El Salvador a woman answered her phone. “We are going to kill your son,” the voice on the other end informed her. The marked man ...
Growing up in a stifling upper class family in rural Lancashire, Leonora was born a rebel. A source of endless frustration to industrial magnate Harold Carrington, the father she both ...
Myths and legends belong to society – but individual storytellers can retell them in a personal, unique way and claim creative ownership of that version. Does this apply to the ...
Unthank Books’ latest collection of short stories has a little something for everyone. Continue Reading Review: Unthology 6
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After reading the excellent collection of stories in our North London issue, I’ve been trying to think of other short stories I’ve read set in North London. It was tougher than ...
