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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst finds that more than three decades after The Original of Laura was laid to rest, Vladimir Nabokov's final work still tricks and teases Tennyson’s greatest fear towards the end of his life was not death,...
This past year or two I've been revisiting what you might call my cultural roots. Because I was distracted almost daily by treatment for a wounded foot and unable to work much, I began re-reading the PG Wodehouse, Edgar Rice...
'I felt that the only thing I was on earth to do was to write' A couple of months ago Mavis Gallant had a dream. A messenger came to the door carrying a cardboard box with a lid on it. On top was written "Mavis Gallant" in big...
Clare Clark on a tangled family web Maya de Jong, an 18-year-old girl from small-town western Australia, moves to Melbourne. There she tentatively embraces her adult self, renting a room in the house of an experimental...
Suffering from 'novel nausea', Zadie Smith wonders if the essay lives up to its promise Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don't know where to put them. It's a rare reader who...
On the 10th anniversary of Paul Bowles's death, Paul Theroux remembers the writer and traveller who set him on his way T he Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles's first novel and, although he honed his art almost to his dying day –...
Readers' responses to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai Kiran Desai was not the first novelist who has come to speak to the Guardian book club and confessed to having second thoughts about the ending of her novel. Several...
In the fourth of a series of Q&As with the shortlisted authors, Reif Larsen discusses his novel What moved you to write an illustrated account of a child prodigy's adventuresome life? This book, like most creations, grew in...
I can visualise Alan Ross's expression – ineffably polite, but just failing to disguise his displeasure at being called anyone's hero. Perhaps "exemplar" would be a better word, given that he was the first writer I properly...
David Malouf’s first novel Johnno (1975) was a semi-autobiographical tale of a school friendship. Much of his subsequent work, however, has explored the identity of his native Australia, from the 19th-century colonialism of...
