It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit... Read more »
Sublimation by Isabel J Kim (Picador, £18.99)This debut novel from an award-winning Korean-American short fiction writer is a fantastical reimagining of the immigrant experience. Here, anyone who crosses a border not intending... Read more »
When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her... Read more »
With its gods, monsters and dizzying scale, Homer’s the Odyssey is deemed by many to be unfilmable, though it hasn’t stopped directors from having a go, including Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster adaptation... Read more »
The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under... Read more »
There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and... Read more »
I’ll confess my heart sank slightly at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of them previously published in the New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier... Read more »
At the heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of how to secure a place... Read more »
How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised... Read more »