In Travelling Sprinkler, Nicholson Baker revisits floundering poet Paul Chowder, the protagonist of 2009’s The Anthologist, and finds him abidingly disengaged. Pining for ex-girlfriend Roz, he seeks solace in protest songs, political hand-wringing, garden implements and other passing distractions, including a desire to be taken seriously as a cigar aficionado. Through it all, he has...
The crowd piled in around the São Cristóvão pitch and there were police and firemen, bacchanal experts and moonshine connoisseurs, employers and employees, handymen of every sort, pretty girls with cavityless smiles and a multitude of delicacies from Canal do Mangue and Ilhas dos Melões, said Tio Balela. The crowd was already in a frenzy,...
Kerry Hudson’s award-winning debut novel Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma drew partly on her experiences of growing up on estates and in B&Bs. Her second, Thirst, is about Alena, a woman sex-trafficked from Siberia, and Dave, a security guard who catches her shoplifting. When I meet Hudson for...
Christmas cards, letters, cartoons, posters and the manuscripts of celebrated war poets are among the collection on display for the first time in Enduring War: Grief, Grit and Humour in the Folio Society Gallery at the British Museum. The exhibition explores the many ways those both at home and on the front line tried to...
Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I think about the grandfather in ‘My Flamboyant Grandson.’ George Saunders’ story is set in a semi-absurd dystopia where every citizen is required to wear Everly Strips on their shoes, bar-coded soles that summon customised ads to ubiquitous public screens, phantom voices beckoning to you as you amble...
In Em and the Big Hoom, Jerry Pinto invites the reader to inhabit the complicated lives of a family trying to deal with the manic-depressive episodes of its matriarch. The dialogue is often wild and quick and yet betrays the subtle aches of a family whose collective heart is breaking. FM: Jerry, thank you for...
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,...
