The new TV series, Feud: Capote vs the Swans tells the story behind Answered Prayers, the never-finished gossip novel that made its author a social pariah. But what was in the book – and was it any good?
What does capitalism do to our ability to connect with other people? Lydia Davis’ stories suggest it hollows out our words – but that the exaltation of the ordinary can connect us.
Dante’s Inferno – Joseph Anton Koch, detail from Cassa Massimo fresco (c.1825).
Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons
Let Us Descend is concerned with the neglected lives of the the poor, the despised, the dark, those barely scraping a living, but cannot capture the collective experience of slavery.
Characters in books can teach lessons about addiction.
Nataliia Shcherbyna via iStock/Getty Images Plus
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.
Last Judgement – Michelangelo (c.1541): the image used for the cover of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon.
Wikimedia Commons.
Four years after his death, Harold Bloom continues to loom large over American literature, but his signature work has been less influential in the field of literary studies.
The outrage misdirected at Lolita – and its author – does nothing to negate the realities it reflects. Reading Nabokov’s novel now raises questions about censorship, book banning and human nature.
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.
Thoreau thought commerce destroyed moral freedom. A true “economy”, he argued, would lead to ecological and social flourishing for humans and for all beings.