This Space

Much of online activity related to literature involves posting quotations from novels, invariably without commentary and attributed to the b...

Byung-Chul Han says in The Crisis of Narration that modernity "is animated by a belief in progress" and its narratives "radi...

My disappointment with the contemporary novel has been an occasional feature on this blog. Fourteen years ago I asked myself whether I had ...

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu  after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust le...

In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelv...

Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its anal...

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a N...

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature   To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they ...