On the urging of a cave diver she knew, Ange Mlinko read Friday (1967), the revisionist Robinson Crusoe tale by Michel Tournier. Though she admired the novel, she was horrified at the premiss of ...

Toby Lichtig assesses the latest recreation of Bob Dylan, the man and the myth, and David Gallagher discusses an academic and spy who inspired the... Boris Dralyuk on a compelling portrait of the ...

You might imagine that the title of this volume is a typo for “Pope”. But the allusion, as the South American Pontiff, or Bishop of Rome (as he prefers to be called), reminds us, some way into the ...

Can a circle, a two-dimensional object, deepen as well as enlarge? Can the façade of a church be “toothsome”? These and similar questions may occur to readers of Adrian Duncan’s third novel, The ...

In Gaza, parents have taken to writing their children’s names on their legs in black marker pen so, if the family is separated during an Israeli bombing, they have some hope of finding each other ...

Despite its shocking subject matter (rape, incest, suicide), Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (TLS, June 14, 2013), was largely critiqued in terms of its use of language.

“Pen pal” is a term with a delightfully retro, innocent ring, evocative of a time when all mail was snail mail and when first-hand experience of foreign cultures was far less common. Alexis Peri’s ...

There is much that is comfortingly familiar about Shizuko Natsuki’s crime novel of 1982, now reissued in its original, fuss-free translation of 1984 by Robert B. Rohmer: a snowbound mansion, a holiday ...

Mineke Schipper draws on a lifetime’s study of stories and proverbs across the world to chart the ways in which ideas about women, creation and power have been deployed over time. From Palaeolithic ...

Benjamin Franklin was not a modest man. Pride was, he pontificated, the hardest human instinct to subdue. “For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it”, he confided to his notebook ...