Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89, was a major American writer with a distinctive voice. In McCarthy’s world, war and violence are primordial realities.
Deborah Levy’s new novel, set in our pandemic-era present, contains the heat and desire of a European summer and the upward struggle of a soul. Jane Gleeson-White says she ‘read it like a thriller’.
André Dao has kept the legacy of his grandparents alive in Anam, a brilliant novel of immense scope that became a full quest for the truth of his family history, which spans the two Vietnam Wars.
A strain of sorrow and pessimism underlies all of Vonnegut’s fiction, as well as his graduation speeches. But he also insisted that young people cherish those fleeting moments of joy.
Novels aren’t responsible for the climate crisis and probably won’t solve it, but there is plenty they can do. They can make us feel for lives unlike our own; modelling careful thinking and analysis.
Short-circuiting the language of literary value, permanently wrongfooting the custodians of taste, Gravity’s Rainbow proposes a new way of thinking about what we treasure most.
Polyglot texts — texts that use many languages — have become increasingly common as writers document struggles between regimes of European hegemony and decolonizing movements.