John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion. Part Beat, part hippy, part punk, he was a gay, sexually active poet who tells us that he loved to do it ‘endlessly’. He was therefore very popular among New York’s avant garde, many of
In supposedly unprecedented times such as ours, there are compelling reasons to turn to the history of medicine. For hope, that epidemics do indeed come to an end; for consolation, that the people of the past suffered even more than us; and for insight into how we could be doing better. The story of smallpox
The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains, with glimpses of society from high to low as they drift pass: it doesn’t take long before the flavour of this picaresque novel starts to seem hauntingly familiar. In his mid-teens towards the end of
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A Lover’s Discourse is a series of poetic miniatures, sometimes just a page long, following the unnamed female Chinese narrator, living in London to pursue a PhD, and her relationship with a similarly unnamed German-English architect.
The history of rubbish can be scholarship, but the history of scholarship is often rubbish. Hindsight diminishes earlier habits of thought and behaviour, especially when, as with freemasonry, they involve rolled-up trouser legs, coded handshakes and a curious blend of mysticism and matiness. Yet freemasonry was once a radical, even revolutionary, rite — to its
It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would have seemed unthinkable to have the leader of the free world bragging of being a ‘very stable genius’ on social media, then taunting the despotic ruler of a nuclear-armed nation as ‘Little Rocket Man’ and
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels and five volumes of finely controlled short stories that have ranged from austere realism to operatic fantasy. He is not easily pigeon-holed — an intentional state of affairs, but one that has denied him a
In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex Halberstadt’s father — the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards — attests:
Covid-19 has been bad news for writers with books coming out — unless the book is about breathing. We’re all now gripped by our airways, by the significance of a runny nose, a sore throat or chest tightness. We know to dread that once obscure symptom, anosmia. We debate the risks of breathing through two-ply
Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social history and condition report of the New Orleans neighbourhood in which she grew up. The youngest of 12 children in a blended household, Broom was born
Keith Douglas is perhaps the best-known overlooked poet. He died following the D-Day landings in 1944, and his Collected Poems were published in 1951, followed by a Selected Poems in 1964. ‘Now, 20 years after his death,’ wrote Ted Hughes in his slightly puffy introduction to that volume, ‘it is becoming clear that he offers
All it takes to turn a cast-off into a prized possession can be a bit of imagination. To a passerby, a bookcase left on the pavement might be perfect for that impossible-to-furnish alcove. An empty bottle, once the waves have worn it smooth, could become a precious jewel for a beachcomber. In an instant a
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The Great Soul of Siberia. In it the Korean cameraman Sooyong Park describes his quest to document the life of the region’s Amur tigers, evoking both his totem beast and its remarkable landscape in loving detail.
Tim Parks is a seasoned, incisive observer of football, the railways, work, domestication and plenty more in his adoptive country of half a lifetime. What is, what ought to be and the machinations in the delta between provide much of his material. In this tale of two countries in one, bright, hard-working Valeria leaves Basilicata
Some faint hearts may sink at the idea of a torrid Swedish family drama peopled with nameless figures identified only as ‘a grandfather who is a father’, ‘a sister who is a mother’, and so on. Stick around: this gets better. That grandfather, an immigrant trader who ‘could sell sand to a beach’ or ‘wind
A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir of the world going mad around her sparked a memory of my own. It is a couple of days after the Brexit vote, and several hundred of us have gathered in London for the memorial
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane dates back to his childhood. In his acknowledgments he admits he lacked the expertise to write a proper book about his hero, and so enlisted the help of a young scholar, Richard McLauchlan, credited on
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love Child in 2009, standards have been slipping. More Than Love is by a minor actress whose only claim to fame is that she is the daughter of Natalie Wood and won’t ever let you forget
Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work was just rookie preparation for something more substantial. (That said, many do go on to write that novel.) The Dear Departed is, amazingly, the first selection of Brian Moore’s short stories to be published. Written
Melancholy pervades this novel: a sense of glasses considerably more than half empty, with the levels sinking fast. This is largely due to its central character, John Dyer, a former journalist in his late fifties, who has returned from years in South America to live in Oxford and write a book about Portugal’s accidental discovery