The corpse was left half leaning against the peeling wall. He did nothing to defend himself. And his eyes look at you with a hint of gratitude. The blood, glistening like a beetle, is smeared over the dirty pavement. In recent months, like an unpredictable curse, the man who now lies with his body half...
Alice McDermott’s latest novel Someone is a resonant study of an Irish-American family and its remarkable matriarch, and of changing lives and landscapes in 20th-century Brooklyn. Her first novel in seven years, it is her third to have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award. Where are you now? I’m at my desk, which...
Harold Bilodeau’s ex-wife, Sheila, remarried, but Harold did not, and though he told people there was a woman down in Saratoga Springs he was seeing on the occasional weekend, he was not. Their divorce had been, as they say, amicable. She’d had an affair and fallen in love with Bud Lincoln, one of Harold’s friends...
He is standing on the steps with a pile of cardboard boxes. I count ten, all the same size, and most of them carrying the logo of the company he works for, solid boxes with strong bottoms. This man never tackles any task unprepared, always so organised, precise. If it had been left to me,...
Susan Choi is the author of the novels The Foreign Student (1998), recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award; American Woman (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize; A Person of Interest (2008), a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award; and most recently My Education (2013). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the...
Each of the sixty photographs in Kertész’s book On Reading is a particular portrait and an interruption of a particular story which we can never know. Fortunately each image is indescribable in words. Appearances have their own language. Yet, turning the pages of the book and watching image follow image, I learnt something which I...
In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, interviewed Susan Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion made it to print. Now Yale University Press has published a complete transcript of their conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings...
his feet were used to covering many kilometres a day, they were old feet in a young body the ShellSeller enjoyed stepping on the sand of PraiaDaIlha and on the ground that glistened in his nightmares; he had a home in the neighbouring province of Bengo but he had fallen in love with Luanda at...
A silent movie plays and those existential clowns Laurel and Hardy are trading blows in their endless feud. In the real world, things aren’t always black and white. In the technicolour glory of summer’s day in a London park, another cycle of tit-for-tat revenge is about to begin… Award-winning graphic novelist Oscar Zarate’s latest work...
Albert Alla’s debut novel Black Chalk is an unsettling exploration of passion and modern morality in which the sole witness and survivor of a school shooting in the Oxfordshire countryside returns to the scene of the devastation after eight meandering years searching for meaning and reconciliation in big cities and on small islands. He was...
In the 1980s Nina Stibbe wrote letters home to her sister in Leicester describing her trials and triumphs as a nanny in north London to the family of Mary-Kay Wilmers, now editor of the London Review of Books. There’s a cat nobody likes, a visiting dog called Ted Hughes, almost daily suppertime visits from Alan...
I meet Eleanor Catton in the Langham Hotel straight after her Woman’s Hour debut and the day before the Booker shortlist announcement. I have a feeling that her second and most recent novel, The Luminaries, will be on the shortlist and I also have a feeling that she already knows whether it is or not....
