Bear essentials
In Yoko Tawada’s surreal and beguiling novel we meet three bears: mother, daughter and grandson. But there will be no…
Big skies and frozen wastes
We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window…
Big skies and frozen wastes
We know our way around Raymond Carver’s blue-collar cityscapes and Updike’s urban angst and despair. Rick Bass opens a window…
Joking apart
A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which…
And the answer is…
Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction…
The horrors of French colonialism
We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’…
Music, love and all things human
When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling…
Bookends: Short and sweet
Before texts and Twitter there were postcards. Less hi-tech, but they kept people in touch. Angela Carter (pictured above) and…
