Kafka
Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed
Kafka, spitting blood, escapes Prague to join his sister in Bohemia, and a fictional lover flees the wrath of an outraged husband in Josipovici’s delightful two-in-one trick
Will the photo of your lost loved one be replaced by a chatty robot?
It seems entirely possible that AI simulacra could be fashioned from the digital remains we now inadvertently leave behind, says Carl Öhman
Magic tricks
Five short stories with male narrators – including a seahorse and a vampire – revolve around masculinity’s contradictory demands and the wish to belong
The waking nightmare
After years of insomnia, Marie Darrieussecq derives some comfort from finding herself in the company of Kafka, Kant, Proust, Dostoevsky, Borges and Plath
A Wiltshire mystery: A Saint in Swindon, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled,…
Ian McEwan’s anti-Brexit satire is a damp squib
Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has…
Bohemians rhapsodising: the favourite haunts of writers and artists
Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
If there’d been a Gilbert and Sullivan opera about Roland Barthes, it might have sounded like John Banville’s The Blue Guitar
The Blue Guitar is John Banville’s 16th novel. Our narrator-protagonist is a painter called Oliver Orme. We are in Ireland,…
Kafka goes to Dubai
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…
Must Paris reinvent itself?
Muriel Zagha 27 April 2024 9:00 am
The beautifully preserved, elitist metropolis now looks increasingly out of step with neighbouring capitals and may be forced to become more multicultural