Moments of Being: Virginia Woolf's Short Fiction
/Woolf’s short fiction is under-appreciated, but in its outpourings of place and feeling we find the style and rhythm that also created her great experimental novels.
Read MoreThe bowl that one fills and fills
/What has not already been written about Virginia Woolf? A new critical biography offers ideas about how to read both her work and her life.
Read MoreTrauma Room
/To make something we must first unmake or take apart something else. Why, then, in a novel preoccupied with acts of destruction and reconstruction, does Pat Barker not offer a corresponding deformation of form? Has her critique of Modernism led her to disavow art altogether?
Read MoreEntitled to Extravagance: Some Historical Fictions of Anthony Burgess
/Some of Anthony Burgess' most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe's England and Jesus' Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Read MoreAbandonment, Richness, Surprise
/Impressionistic, idiosyncratic, unsubstantiated: Virginia Woolf's literary essays challenge us to rethink, not just our experience of reading, but our expectations of criticism itself.
Read MoreQueen Elizabeth the First
/Elizabeth Hardwick joined the literary world of mid-20th century Manhattan with every intention of making her mark upon it - which she did, in review after inimitable review, taking American book-discourse to levels and places it had never reached before
Read MoreLooking for Laura
/She's a shadow, an absence, that haunts the letters, diaries, and novels of her famous half-sister Virginia Woolf. What can we really know about Laura Stephen?
Read MoreTime Wounds All Heels
/In Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child the renown of a minor English poet balloons and distorts in each succeeding decade after his death
Read MoreWalk, Swim, Grumble
/Olivia Laing's digressive natural history of the 42-mile-long River Ouse is filled with philosophical meditations, childhood memories, and of course the ghost of Virginia Woolf.
Read MoreSatanic Maggots
/Colonialism, feminism, witchcraft, the Lord of Darkness — themes such as these once made Sylvia Townsend Warner's novels bestsellers. Now her charmingly subversive fiction is back in print.
Read MoreSophistication and Recklessness: Patrick Leigh Fermor
/With Patrick Leigh Fermor's death, the world lost a gracious host, a tireless traveller, and one of the best prose stylists of the 20th century. We pause to appreciate him.
Read MoreSummer Reading 2011
/In this year's special feature, our team of avid readers offered some suggestions for books a little off the beaten path of summer blockbusters.
Read MoreSummer Reading 2011 Goes On
/More of this year's special feature, where we offered some less predictable ideas for books to tuck into your beach tote or suitcase.
Read MoreA Question, an Answer, and a Death
/Cinema lore has it that Jean-Luc Godard read only the first and last three pages of King Lear before making his film adaptation. Lianne Habinek suggests this may have helped him get at the play's essence.
Read MoreMemo to a Colleague
/Is Marjorie Garber's defense of literary studies balm to the beleaguered English professor's soul? Not yet, anyway.
Read MorePrince Eddy and the Blackguards
/When the heir presumptive, Prince Eddy, died suddenly, the nation and empire was convulsed with mourning - and a century of speculation began! Had the lost prince been a simpleton, a saint, a catamite - even Jack the Ripper?
Read MoreThe Muse of Trouville
/‘She’s a drug; I’m her main focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that.' Victoria Best explores the fraught relationship between Marguerite Duras and the young man whose love inspired and tormented her.
Read MoreA Visit from the Prince
/You think you want to look beauty in the eye? Get ready to tremble... Alice Brittan reviews Michael Cunningham's paradoxical novel "By Nightfall".
Read MoreOne Common Reader
/Virginia Woolf imagined the Almighty seeing us coming towards Paradise, books in hand: "We have nothing to give them, they have loved reading." But does reading always bring salvation?
Read More
