The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written. Darío became the representative poet of modernismo, a movement that ...

The American author Elaine Kraf (1946–2013), who was also a painter and special-needs educator, was interested in those who deviate from social norms. Her debut, I Am Clarence (1969), features a ...

Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam is a series of impossible elegies. The poems respond to the recovery from the River Thames in 2001 of the torso of a Black boy, named Adam by police officers. The unknown child ...

Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, a Comedy follows a woman over the course of a day during her stay in an artist’s retreat. The woman doesn’t use the term “artist’s retreat”, but she does call the ...

Precious little is merciful about the country in which Anna McCormick, the first-person narrator of A. L. Kennedy’s latest novel, finds herself. Anna, a primary school teacher formerly known as the ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Recommending that readers start a book by skipping from its beginning to its end is an unusual thing to do, but then Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography of Piet Mondrian is not a usual book. Its ...

“I beg you to send me immediately the remaining Vols:”, Henry Fielding wrote to Samuel Richardson in October 1748. Fielding was requesting the final volumes of Clarissa; or, The History of a Young ...

Daisy Johnson was the youngest-ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for Everything Under (2018), a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth that appeared when she was twenty-seven.