Twice Blest

My Name Is James …

The Trump Enigma

Westward Dreams

‘I Gave Them a Sword’

The Watergate affair and the cover-up that brought down Richard Nixon

Virtue Unrewarded

Jonathan Franzen’s America is a place of insecurity and confusion.

The Sly Masquerade

For quality of output, for growth and longevity, for the honesty and intensity of his narrative voices and for the relentless quest for forms that…

An Ordinary Evil

‘Game of Thrones’ is ubiquitous in our culture, yet two-thirds of millennial Americans do not know what Auschwitz is. A new study of Josef Mengele…

The Necessary Details

As Robert Caro tells us in what may be the greatest political biography of modern times, President Lyndon Johnson marshalled incredible resources, including a willingness…

Connoisseur of Foolishness

Today’s bulbous literary novels are remarkably tolerant of longueurs, asides and arbitrary disquisitions, says Thomas McGuane. That can be their virtue. Not so short stories.…

No Hope of an End

Nicole Krauss has made her mark with fiction that is technically daring, emotionally vibrant, and unafraid of the largest subjects. She is fresh and individual…

The Usual Terror

Don De Lillo seems to suggest in his new novel that literature has failed us, failed to correct the inadequacy of language or interrupt the…

Body And Soul

Ta Nehisi Coates contends that white supremacy is a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. Marilynne…

Invitation to the Dance

Over twenty-four years, starting in 1951, Anthony Powell wrote a remarkable series of a dozen novels exploring English upper class and bohemian life from soon…

The Snug Opaque Quotidian

Some critics thought John Updike ‘a minor novelist with a major style’, a misjudgement which may be based on a doctrinaire rejection of the suburban…

The Shining River

A chapter-length extract from Kevin Stevens’s new novel, an urban crime drama about money, race, and class set in Kansas City in the 1930s.

Lovely Visitors

Lorrie Moore, like Beckett, can find comedy in utter darkness and uses the richness of language as a way of finding, if not solace, at…

The Grace of Accuracy

Jason Sommer’s fourth poetry collection exhibits a master’s command of language, rhythm, and image, a formidable narrative gift and an unflinching willingness to take on…

THE BIG ONE

Though he fell out with the temper of the times in the later 1960s, in the light of history Bellow will be a judged a…

All the Known World

Many critics focus on James Salter’s stylistic precision and love of detail as if he is all surface. In fact, his art ushers us towards…

Keepable Sentences

An interview with American novelist Kent Haruf, whose stories of the high plains of Colorado, with their plain but perfectly crafted style and exacting verisimilitude,…

Soundtrack to the Century

For fifty years, Duke Ellington was America’s most important and innovative musical figure, achieving distinction as a composer, arranger, songwriter, bandleader and pianist, and writing…

An Inch From The Everyday

Ford’s narrators get into our ears. A master of first person narrative, he creates observers who are lyrical and philosophical yet confused; situated outside the…

Wise Guy

The heroes of these books are anguished men who nurse large grievances, battle grasping wives and dominating fathers, and are out of sync with the…

The Last Thing She Wanted

Didion’s sensibility has roots in sixties drift and New Journalism iconoclasm, but refracted through a conservative temperament, not unlike the satirical streak of her contemporary…

Two Kinds of Life

Salter’s entry into the literary world happened at a time when Jewish novelists were moving centre stage in the United States. Bellow, Malamud, Roth, Heller,…

One Hand Clapping

Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where the cult of celebrity holds a special place for authors and relentlessly cycles their…

The Need to Disguise

Central to Alice Munroe’s aesthetic is the device, though it is really much more than a device, of jumping back and forward in time, enabling…

Increments of Uncertainty

As Updike’s word count mounted, so did the rancour. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani, considered by many the most powerful literary critic in America,…

Everything He Hated

Like Swift and Twain, Roth is aesthetically propelled by anger; it supplies the energy needed for the massive, self-imposed task of dissecting, novel after novel,…

The Ongoing Promise

“Books can contain all sorts of dire and dour information, opinion, behaviour, and not be pessimistic themselves. I hold with Sartre who wrote that we…