From the Archives: “But for me that liminal quality, neither one thing nor the other, is exactly the point”: Peter Ho Davies with Eric McDowell on writerly patience, all manner of hybridity, and his novel The Fortunes.
In this essay on Robert Stone’s final collection, Fun with Problems, Frank Freeman explores the writer’s mellower, sweeter—and funnier—side.
“For me, the setting of a novel is the novel in many ways, and it seems right to devote time and space to establishing the geography and history of the place. This forms a frame inside which the rest of the story takes place.” Andrew Michael Hurley talks with Steven Wingate about rural England, the “ghost story” spirit, and developing writerly patience.
“Writing a novel—for me, at least—is like answering a craigslist ad placed by a group of people seeking a roommate. You meet them; you like them; you move in; but within a short period of time, all of them have moved out, and new people have moved in, and these new people, it turns out, are the ones you’re going to live with for the next few years.”
The optimism and nostalgia we sometimes associate with a certain narrative of American immigration—the golden door—are banished by these writers’ sharp, sober observations.
“The real estate in North London Drabble-land has appreciated and her cast of bohemian academics has aged over the fifty years since her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963),” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reports, reviewing Dame Margaret Drabble’s newest novel, The Pure Gold Baby, “but she’s back, in fine form.”
This week’s feature is Peter Murphy’s new novel, The River and Enoch O’Reilly, which was published this week by Mariner Books. Murphy is a writer from Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, Ireland. His first novel John the Revelator was published in the UK and Ireland by Faber & Faber and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and was nominated for the 2011 IMPAC literary award, shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Book Awards and the Kerry Group Fiction prize. His second novel, Shall We Gather at the River (2013), is published by Faber in Ireland and the UK and as The […]
Peter Murphy offers us a fictional review of an imaginary anthology of songs about the Rua river, which was removed from his new novel, The River and Enoch O’Reilly, at the draft stage. It publishes tomorrow!
Does the lowly individual stand a chance against the blunt force of the mass? Anita Desai’s novella collection, The Artist of Disappearance, celebrates the wish to be left alone, and the raw agony of the desire to be seen.
A.B. Yehoshua never writes the shortcut phrase “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in Friendly Fire, his most recent novel, newly translated into English from Hebrew. It’s as though the veteran Israeli author is mining a seam so deep that its boundaries do not need to be explored or examined, or picking up a thread of conversation that Israelis have already been engaged in for 60 years. That isn’t to say, however, that Yehoshua has no comment on the matter.
