The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

Edward Wilson-Lee's most recent book is A History of Water: Being an account of a murder, an epic and two visions of global history, 2022 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

To Charles Lamb, a friend and colleague of Thomas Hood at the London Magazine in the 1820s, the humorist was “our half Hogarth”. Lamb had in mind etchings such as “The Progress of Cant”. Made in 1825, ...