The amorphous and labyrinthine structure of Kokoschka’s Doll is certainly demanding. Portuguese polymath Afonso Cruz presents an array of parallel and tangential stories and them
In her celebrated 1964 memoir La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc recounts the genesis of her first novel, at the instigation of her friend and weary confidant, the writer Maurice Sachs:&n
A year ago, I was given the chance to leaf through Roald Dahl’s mother’s book of Norwegian fairy tales. The slim volume, held in the Roald Dahl archives in Great Missenden, wer
Knut Hamsun detested England. To the Nobel laureate, the island in the west embodied modernity at its worst: industrialism, materialism, the uprooting of mankind from its rural pas
Whenever an author has already made their mark with an impressive, prize-winning novel, you dread their subsequent books, out of fear that the new one simply won’t match up. This
Reading this book is a powerful experience. For me it meant full immersion into a unique world, filled with vivid, or even lurid colours, and strong tastes and smells, both appeali
A slim slice of literary perfection, The Bitch is a lesson in the power of understatement. The simplicity of the story, the setting, and the daily life of its protagonist are refle
This collection of short stories cleverly and comically uses the mundane format of the job interview to expose the failings and oversights of twenty-first-century humans. With wond
Despite being widely regarded as one of the catalysts of the contemporary Catalan novel, the work of Narcís Oller (1846–1930) is little known in the English-speaking world. Perh
