"Since it is the case that you are now just beginning that journey that I have for the most part as you see completed, that is, the one through mortal life, and loving you so very much as I do, I have proposed to myself – as one who has been many pla...

In her detailed readings of a wide range of Indian writers – including Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Nair, Jhumpa Lahiri and many others – Geetanjali Singh Chanda focuses on domestic spaces in women's fiction. The house is not merely a backdro...

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in "Robinson Crusoe" is an object – a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the em...

Listen to what I am about to tell you: do not read this book alone. You really shouldn't. In one of the most playful experiments ever put between two covers, every other section of Trance-Migrations prescribes that you read its incantatory tales out...

Throughout her distinguished career, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has sought to locate and confront shifting forms of social and cultural oppression. As her work shows, the best method for doing so is through extended practice in the ethics of reading....

Muriel Spark always regarded the Brontes with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for the new edition, the Brontes inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Throu...

I am Iphigenia, daughter of the daughter of Tyndareus My father killed me Few contemporary poets elicit such powerful responses from readers and critics as Anne Carson.  "The New York Times Book Review" calls her work "personal, necessary, and impor...

Over the course of a fifty-year career, Donald E. Westlake published nearly one hundred books, including not one but two long-running series, starring the hard-hitting Parker and the hapless John Dortmunder. In the six years since his death, Westlake...

"King Lear" is perhaps the most fierce and moving play ever written. And yet there is a curious puzzle at its center. The figure to whom Shakespeare gives more lines than anyone except the king – Edgar – has often seemed little more than a blank, ign...

This "little history" tackles a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from "The Epic of Gilgamesh" to "Harry Potter". John Sutherland is perfectly suited to the task, having researched, taught and writte...