The older I get, John Burnside remarks, the happier my childhood gets. In a third volume of memoirs he goes further towards an understanding of his father, a threatening alcoholic for whom, he had said in an earlier book, cruelty…

On its publication in book form in Germany in 1929, this great anti-war novel met with both critical and popular success. But in 1933 it was to receive the ultimate accolade when it was tossed onto the bonfires by Nazi…

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.

If the mystery could be taught, poetry would die, argues one contributor to a new study of creative writing teaching in Ireland. But what workshops and courses can do is save time – condensing years of toil and experimentation and…

A new biography of seventeenth century English poet George Herbert reads his life through his work and his work through his life, and suggests that Herbert is more than just a religious poet, and that his influence on modern poetry…

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 least a way of framing and confronting tragedy.

At a time when the Bible’s importance is no longer at the centre of secular cultures, it is timely to consider the contribution of the Norton Critical Edition of the King James Bible. Detailed, yet accessible annotations demonstrate its continuing…

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral can be seen as the start of his most prolific period, when he turned to focus more on questions of assimilation and social mobility in a country John F Kennedy called “a nation of immigrants”.