The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Recipes can take many forms, from detailed sets of instructions to simple lists. Stuck to my refrigerator is a carefully ...

The American author Elaine Kraf (1946–2013), who was also a painter and special-needs educator, was interested in those who deviate from social norms. Her debut, I Am Clarence (1969), features a ...

Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, a Comedy follows a woman over the course of a day during her stay in an artist’s retreat. The woman doesn’t use the term “artist’s retreat”, but she does call the ...

Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam is a series of impossible elegies. The poems respond to the recovery from the River Thames in 2001 of the torso of a Black boy, named Adam by police officers. The unknown child ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Precious little is merciful about the country in which Anna McCormick, the first-person narrator of A. L. Kennedy’s latest novel, finds herself. Anna, a primary school teacher formerly known as the ...

Recommending that readers start a book by skipping from its beginning to its end is an unusual thing to do, but then Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography of Piet Mondrian is not a usual book. Its ...

“I beg you to send me immediately the remaining Vols:”, Henry Fielding wrote to Samuel Richardson in October 1748. Fielding was requesting the final volumes of Clarissa; or, The History of a Young ...

Daisy Johnson was the youngest-ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for Everything Under (2018), a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth that appeared when she was twenty-seven.