Beyond language
Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of aphorisms on poetry-writing taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets. These 470 meditations, collected by his students, are evocative micro-poems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put...
An experiment in history
Set in 1830s British North America, my debut novel, The Voyageur, is about an orphan named Alex who falls in love with a rum-guzzling fur trader and follows the older man into the hallucinogenic wilderness of the Great Lakes, only to be shot in the stomach when a trading-post robbery goes off the rails. Present...
Judith Shakespeare
In her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explored the reasons why over the centuries women had written so little compared to men. “A woman must have money and a room of her own,” she famously pronounced, “if she is to write fiction.” In lectures originally given in 1928 at Newnham...
Tell me a story
Our oldest memories are in stories. Our oldest memories are stories. To tell a story well is a skill: the sort that can be learned but cannot easily be taught. To be told a story is a pleasure and often a privilege. When I first picked at the thread of an idea for my debut...
Getting on: Later-life female friendship
‘The first time I saw you, do you know what I thought?’ Janet steels herself. ‘I thought, that woman looks like she ploughs her own furrow. You stood out from everyone else – no one else in our street strides around with their pockets clanking with tools. I couldn’t take my eyes off you! I...
History train
‘Mater’ comes from the Japanese abbreviation for ‘mountain’. During Japanese colonialism, fifty Mater 1 locomotives, modelled after their Mountain-type counterparts in the United States, were built in Gyeongseong (Seoul) and at the Kisha Seizo factory in Japan. The thirty-three-carriage Mater 2, an improved version manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, was introduced and operated mainly in...
After the deluge: Knowledge in the magical age of (mis-/dis-) information
A new book by Simon Winchester has just come out. The mere fact in itself is thrilling and exciting. For over 50 years, Winchester has been critically informing his readers as a journalist for the Guardian, the Daily Mail or The Times, and as an author of political histories of troubled places and troubling times,...
The Book of Derek Parfit
Walk around Oxford on any reasonably warm and relatively sunny day and, as you inevitably reach the Radcliffe Camera, you will invariably witness a perennial phenomenon: along a high, practically unclimbable and unassailable, Headington-stone-yellow and castle-worthy wall, there will be an impressive line-up of young people sitting down restfully, or leaning languidly against that Corallian...
Trees need cuddles too
5pm, Monday: “The permission has come through. Can we come and do it tomorrow, first thing?” During the pandemic, I’d sit out in the shade of the 150-year-old copper beech that dominates – defines – my back garden, and feel luckier than most, for the first time in years. I’ve never been a gardener, or...
My grandmother
With some frequency, we hear readers ask authors how much of their novels they’ve pulled from their own lives, assuming that some if not most of the content must be autobiographical. One of the fascinating things about this memoir by Xesús Fraga is that readers ask the same thing, because it seems simply impossible that...
Far more darkness than the eye can fathom
Take your seat – preferably, if you can, in the centre stalls, for a commanding, birds-eye panoramic view of the spectacular stage that Es Devlin has created for Sam Mendes’ National Theatre production of The Lehman Trilogy, currently at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London. As the lights switch on, you will find yourself in an existential space-time warp:...
“An unspeakable hell” – subversive spaces in literature
This is a collection of uncanny places, of nasty, squirming, blackened spaces. In the traditional haunted house, we place the blame for fear or hysteria or death squarely on the draped and ethereal shoulders of a ghost. They pass through walls and shriek in the bathrooms and lurk beneath the beds, causing all sorts of...
