The more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below... Read more »
Halfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been... Read more »
“To have chosen such a life, as opposed to having been drugged or crimped or hoaxed aboard, was almost defiant in its sense of alienation,” Geoffrey Wolff writes in his biography of... Read more »
“I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories,” Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestseller Convenience Store Woman, confides a few minutes into our... Read more »
Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a “mixed” couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism.... Read more »
A brilliant, imaginative woman; a mediocre man with too high an idea of himself, in need of a woman to destroy. Itâs a dynamic that goes back to George Eliotâs Middlemarch or Henry... Read more »
The Irish writer Cathy Sweeney’s short fiction has been widely praised, her prose likened to that of Samuel Beckett and Lydia Davis. Her blistering debut novel, Breakdown, displays an impressive economy of... Read more »