It took me a few weeks to read Blake Bailey’s exhaustive and exhausting (770 pages tip to tail) biography of John Cheever.  Living with Cheever even for a month was no picnic: as his wife or children would tell you.  He was a depressive, conflicted...

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which had to be hidden as if it...

The cover design of the NYRB Classics edition of John Williams’ novel Stoner might have been expressly chosen to emphasise that, even though the book was published in 1965, this is not a sort of literary Cheech and Chong.  It is a sober study of one...

Tao Lin is a writer I’ve been meaning to read since seeing praise for his novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. Lin is a self-made phenomenon, seemingly as interested in presentation of himself as in his work, perhaps as keen on ‘being a writer’ as in being a writer:...

“If I was born with a name like Simon Crump,” said Chris de Burgh, “I would spend the rest of my life trying to get all that anger and resentment out of me by being very rude about other people.”  I recently reviewed Neverland: the Unreal Michael...