This Space

Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail.

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.1 It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu.

I wonder how many of those of us who write exclusively on literature and read only novels, poetry, literary criticism and occasionally into related subjects, have an otherwise unaccountable curiosity with another beyond the literary horizon.

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point.

This isn't the usual novel-author interview.

My old and very best of friends Mark Thwaite has taken over at the Left on the Shelf bookshop, so if you're at all interested in any of the subjects listed in the poster below, please consider subscribing to his newsletter, checking out the listings on Ab…

When this post from Max Cairnduff appeared I had been reading Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry and books and essays studying Heidegger's lectures on Hölderlin's poetry in a bid, however incongruous, to articulate an experience unique to reading…

A year of limited reading.

Today in 2015 my blog-collection This Space of Writing was published as a book.

Much of online activity related to literature involves posting quotations from novels, invariably without commentary and attributed to the book's author with the implication that it is a statement of personal belief, sometimes as an authoritative comment…

Byung-Chul Han says in The Crisis of Narration that modernity "is animated by a belief in progress" and its narratives "radiate an aura because the future is a phenomenon of distance".

My disappointment with the contemporary novel has been an occasional feature on this blog.

When John Updike read À la recherche du temps perdu after having read Scott-Moncrieff's translation, he was surprised to find Proust less Proustian, the epithet we associate with flowery prose blossoming over prodigious sentences proliferating clause with…

In an in-between time in which nothing begins or ends, in which blank patience takes the place of activity, I picked two books from my shelves stubbornly remote from utility, lacking the intimacy of possession, and a third in which I had never read a key…

Two intellectual memoirs dominated my reading over Spring, three if WG Sebald's Silent Catastrophes can be included given that its analysis of the careers of various Austrian writers illuminates Sebald's own literary trajectory.1 Peter Brown's Journeys of…

The premise of this multi-volume novel is simple: a modern-day French woman called Tara finds herself stuck inside the eighteenth day of a November.

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.

On this day last year I began posting every day for 39 days to commemorate 39 years since I began reading books.

For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.

In order of being read.

"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by explanation: "The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value".

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical.

On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog.

"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial"…

The centenary of Kafka's death was marked twelve years late.