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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...
Robert Crumb's straight retelling of Genesis lacks his trademark humour It's the old story. Milton tried to retell the Bible and discovered that Satan was a more interesting character than God, and now, three centuries later,...
Would we have had Alien, Planet of the Apes and The Time Machine if it weren't for a certain bearded Victorian? Darwin, Evolution and the Movies is a one-off festival of film and live comedy to celebrate the 150th anniversary...
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 –...
This fast-paced thriller has a compassionate heart, says Josh Lacey There is an obvious pun in the title of Daniel Finn's new novel. (He has written other books as Will Gatti, but this is his first to be published under this...
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...
