The question opening Maurice Blanchot’s essay The Experience of Proust* has always drawn me back, not to secure a yes or a no, but to keep the question of pure narrative open in its initial uncertainty, perhaps, rather, in its i…
Out of curiosity, I read a few novels that over the last year have received the highest praise on social media and literary podcasts, and have appeared multiple times in newspaper Books of the Year choices and on prize shortlists…
For a short time, I stayed up most of the night. In the long summer months between years at school – my guess is 1978 – there was no all-night radio let alone all-night television. Instead I would listen to the BBC World Servic…
We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind. * Since its publication three years ago, David Shields' manifesto Reality Hunger has helped focus my th…
“It is not every day one is sent a masterpiece to review”, wrote Gabriel Josipovici in reviewing WG Sebald's The Emigrants ; “(I suppose one is lucky if it happens more than once or twice in a lifetime)”. I started writ…