Using the classic short story form with surprise endings to great effect, Urmila Pawar brings to life strong and clever women from all classes of society: heroines who are brave in the face of caste oppression, strong in opposing their in-laws, defia...

Marjorie Perloff writes in her preface to "Poetics in a New Key" that when she learned David Jonathan Y. Bayot wanted to publish a collection of her interviews and essays, she was "at once honored and mystified".  But to Perloff's surprise and her re...

Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story's own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have m...

"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...

To the extent that she is popularly known, Katherine Parr (1512-1548) is the woman who survived King Henry VIII as his sixth and last wife. She merits far greater recognition, however, on several other fronts. Fluent in French, Italian, and Latin, Pa...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will div...

For Tom Pickard poetry is a free, and freeing, space. His pen "demands / complete autonomy", and finds it as it explores both harsh and lyrical realities with a northern working-class sensibility. A lifelong counter-cultural figure, Pickard transcend...

Wilfred Owen is the poet of pity, the voice of the soldier maimed, blinded, traumatised and killed, not just in the Great War, but in all wars since, so resonant has his message become. Although he saw only five of his poems published in his lifetime...

Unsavory artists, titled boobs, and charlatans with an affinity for Freud – such are the oddballs whose antics animate the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell. A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds...

Unsavory artists, titled boobs, and charlatans with an affinity for Freud – such are the oddballs whose antics animate the early novels of the late British master Anthony Powell. A genius of social satire delivered with a very dry wit, Powell builds...