When I first migrated to New York, a wide-eyed student with a frugal scholarship, I felt no fear, for Manhattan was connected to other land-masses by half a dozen bridges. That calmed an inner part of my soul. Given my family history, I do not know how it could be otherwise. Until that point, rivers...
Gong Ji-young is at the forefront of the new wave of women writers who rose to the top of the literary tree in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. We meet a few months after the UK publication of Our Happy Time, her invigorating tale of victimhood, love and redemption, on the eve of her...
A long, sinuous highway cuts the town in half, stretching as far as the eye can see. The road connects and disconnects the southern and northern halves of the country, accentuating their differences, reawakening their desires. Adrift in the middle of nowhere, the town battles against boredom and oblivion. Old people in the streets and...
This year I became an accidental author. Not that I didn’t want to write a novel, I always thought I would one day, but it wasn’t on my to-do list anytime soon. My previous writing career had encompassed scriptwriting for everything connected to cinema and TV, from soap opera to drama, short film to feature...
The Oxford Book of War Poetry has been on active service for thirty years, one hundredth part of the history of warfare to which poets have borne witness. At no point in that history did man’s inhumanity to man generate more eloquent testimony from more poets than in the two world wars of the last...
There are many ways to wake up in the morning. At the castle of Roccapendente, for example, the servants were awakened by the crowing of a cock, the one creature enthused by the fact that once again the sun had managed to roll up over the mountains. Among them were some who did not hear,...
For a long time, whenever someone asked me where my home was, I never knew how to answer. I know where my house is, in the heart of the American Midwest where I’ve lived for the past seven years. I know where I was born, which is Delaware. And I know all the places I...
I’d like to think there’s something more essential about the short story than just its being, well, short. Are short stories inherently tidier, messier, more dramatic, voicier, paradoxically slower, better with beer and pretzels than neighboring forms? We could adjectival-phrase away for days on this, following up with maybe yesses and maybe nos, but I...
The perennial ‘Can writing be taught?’ question rarely seems far from the book pages, but a couple of creative-writing-related stories have received particular media attention this year. One was Hanif Kureishi’s slightly mischievous comment that creative writing courses are a “waste of time” (he teaches the subject at Kingston University). The other was the publication...
Mona Simpson is lauded as a sharp and infectious chronicler of American family life. Her latest novel, Casebook, is a coming-of-age story about two boys who unearth powerful secrets that threaten a family’s health and sanity. She invites us into her home and gives an insight into her literary habits. Where are you now? At...
Andy Miller’s engagingly therapeutic and very funny The Year of Reading Dangerously sets out to reaffirm the pleasure of the written word by casting a critical eye over all those must-read classics you never quite got around to tackling. Now his dynamic roadshow reaches out to an appropriately pumped-up public… Thursday 29 May To Bookseller...
I arrived at boarding school in England a few weeks short of my twelfth birthday. I’d spent my childhood switching friends, schools, houses, countries, continents (my father was a diplomat) and at some point all this had begun to pall. I wanted things to stay the same: the same faces every term, the same rooms...
