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Sometimes, reading a chance remark that asserts a surprising claim persuades us to reread a text to see if we’d... Published 23 Aug, 2020 07:15am

In an unpublished essay composed some 10 years ago, titled ‘The Sycorax Syndrome’, English poet Christopher Middleton Published 28 Jun, 2020 06:56am

The eminence claimed for Lampedusa is based on referring to his novel as that by a Sicilian writing about Sicily. Updated 03 May, 2020 12:40pm

Two unpublished poems from the writer… Published 08 Mar, 2020 08:19am

Long before the much-celebrated Latin American boom that is associated with the 1967 publication of One Hundred ... Updated 30 Dec, 2019 02:30pm

Reading T.S. Eliot’s letters, one learns how an obscure work by an unknown writer is pushed to the attention of a... Updated 28 Oct, 2019 11:39am

The letters in the seventh volume of T.S. Eliot’s massive correspondence — written during 1934-35 when he was a... Updated 26 Aug, 2019 09:55am

As we read in history, since ancient times the Indian subcontinent has attracted explorers and invaders to raid its... Updated 24 Jun, 2019 09:40am

Much of today’s English-language poetry seems to be written by people who believe themselves to be poets, but have... Published 28 Apr, 2019 07:16am

Reality being a fiction that we apprehend in a combination of intertwined languages — which include scientific... Updated 04 Feb, 2019 11:08am

Some years ago I visited the English department of a university in Pakistan and, on entering the chairman’s ... Updated 26 Nov, 2018 03:32pm

Many readers may have heard of a French novel called La Disparition by Georges Perec, written without using the... Updated 16 Sep, 2018 10:37am

Summertime and the tourists are abroad, I among them, seeing the world through a veil of ignorance cast over it like... Published 22 Jul, 2018 07:59am

The shock that then jolts the reader is the substitution in the reader’s mind of the rats by people... Published 20 May, 2018 08:02am

It is cold midwinter and the line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ — “If Winter comes,... Published 18 Mar, 2018 07:09am

When John Ashbery died last summer, I was reminded of the novel he co-wrote with James Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies,... Updated 14 Jan, 2018 06:42pm

At another time in another place, a writer complained in the preface to his novel. Updated 13 Nov, 2017 11:47am

Half a century ago, a competition for a first book of poems, to be judged by W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for... Published 17 Sep, 2017 07:01am

A literary agent once said to me that a paragraph in People magazine with some trivial gossip about a writer sold... Updated 04 Jun, 2017 11:03am

There’s many a neglected genius in literary history. Sometimes, chance leads one to discover a work of... Updated 10 Apr, 2017 05:24pm