Deborah Eisenberg / A writer´s life

Deborah Eisenberg
Poster by T.A.

A writer's life: Deborah Eisenberg

The short-story writer tells Daniel Swift that September 11 politicised American life.

Daniel Swift

12:01AM BST 30 Jul 2006

Deborah Eisenberg is an unlikely activist. She lives in a clean, narrow loft in Chelsea, a part of New York in which the haircuts are often the most radical thing on the street. "I would like to never ever think about any political issues," she says. She reads the New York Times only once a year. Last time, she found an article on the links between caffeine and breast cancer, and promptly gave up coffee. She does not have a TV, and in her loft the windows are covered with white curtains. The only view looks out onto a brick wall. "I'm almost impervious to information," she tells me.

Evelio Rosero
Bogotá 2013
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

Good Offices by Evelio Rosero – review

A satire of the Colombian Catholic church incorporates humour, pathos and power


Maya Jaggi
Friday 7 October 2011 22.55 BST

E

velio Rosero's powerful novel The Armies depicted a South American provincial town exploding into violence in the hands of rival armed groups. Drawn from tales of terror and kidnap in the shantytowns of the author's native Colombia, the novel descended from comedy into brutal nightmare, in a rural landscape hemmed in by coca fields and landmines. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2009, in Anne McLean's superb translation.

Pablo García / Writers

Albert Camus

WRITERS

by Pablo García

Amélie Nothomb

Antonio Lobo Antunes

Antonio Muñoz Molina

Arturo Pérez Reverte

Grace Gummer in 'Love story', where she plays Caroline Kennedy. 2026, FX / DISNEY+

How Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep’s daughter, is carving out her own niche: ‘Her mother’s gift is now also hers’

In an era of nepotism, the actress has built her own career, most recently dazzling audiences with her portrayal of Caroline Kennedy. Approaching her 40th birthday, critics are already touting her as an Emmy favorite

This article is more than 3 years old

Interview

‘God, life is so strange’: Diane Keaton interviewed in 2023 on dogs, doors, wine and why she’s ‘really fancy’

This article is more than 2 years old

The Oscar-winning actor is back for the Book Club sequel. But what she really wants to talk about is big cars, her love for Woody Allen – and her unexpected passion

Catherine Shoard

Friday 5 May 2023

Even before her dog almost dies, my call with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Yany Prado / Gina / Sky Rojo

Yany Prado

GINA

SKY ROJO

 

Cameron Diaz and Jared Leto

 

CAMERON DIAZ AND JARED LETO

1999 was a year that captured the height of both Cameron Diaz and Jared Leto’s careers, with the pair making headlines not only for their work but also for their romantic relationship. By this time, Diaz was one of Hollywood’s leading actresses, having achieved stardom with roles in The Mask (1994), There’s Something About Mary (1998), and Being John Malkovich (1999). Leto, meanwhile, was carving out a dual path as an actor and musician, known for his performance in My So-Called Life (1994-1995) and his rising band, Thirty Seconds to Mars. Together, their relationship symbolized the intersection of Hollywood glamour and alternative edge, a pairing that perfectly encapsulated the eclectic energy of the late 1990s.

Milton H Green / Marilyn Monroe III

 

Milton H Green

Marilyn Monroe

Chelsea Lopez

 

 
Red Jacket by 3.1 Phillip Lim, Black Boot by Gianvito Rossi, Nude Dress by Spanx

CHELSEA LOPEZ

Actress Chelsea Lopez plays in front of the camera while giving us a peak into her minimal world of art and object. Chelsea changes the context of each prop through her interaction with them, and her personality shines as a character amongst objects. Peak inside her white box stage. 

Sydney Sweeney

 

Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Sweeney / Variety

 Sydney Sweeney

VARIETY

Sydney Sweeney / Red

 

Sydney Sweeney

RED

Carson doesn’t try to ‘make literature’ … Louis on the Nobel-winning writer. Photograph: Golli/

‘Sometimes she publishes notes she’s scribbled on her hand’: Édouard Louis on 10 reasons to love Anne Carson

The French author discovered Carson on a bus while stranded in a snowstorm and has been enthralled by her fearless imagination ever since

Édouard Louis
Friday 9 October 2026

1. Anne Carson is one of the greatest writers of our time. I discovered her work on a Peter Pan bus from New York to New England. I’d bought Antigonick in a bookstore a few days earlier, almost randomly. From the very first lines, I was enthralled. While we were on the bus, a snowstorm suddenly blanketed the roads, and the other passengers and I found ourselves stuck for 10 hours in rural America, surrounded by an entirely white landscape. I took my computer out of my backpack and started to translate Antigonick into French. Spontaneously. I was so absorbed by the power of Carson’s text that I didn’t notice the hours pass.

‘I went hiking with the Nobel prize winner Anne Carson in Iceland last year … OK, it was a short walk up a rocky incline.’ Photograph: TT News Agency

Digested week: Don’t worry about the plague, go and read some Anne Carson

Emma Broockes

Friday 9 Octobre 2026

Monday

“Anyone worried about pneumonic plague?” This is a friend – a medic – texting me after reading reports at the weekend of the 28-year-old Russian woman who died while working at a “plague research lab” in Siberia. Relying on details from the famously open Russian state guaranteed the presence of a certain dark subtext to the tantalisingly short news item. Namely: lab-grown disease cultivated for reasons unknown and with a 100% mortality rate escapes Russian facility into general population, eight hours’ flying time from London. In other words, we’re all going to die.

Nox by Anne Carson / Family Album

 

Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine

Family Album

By Sam Anderson

22 April 2010

Few things in this world have the power to make me clean my desk. One of them, it turns out, is Anne Carson’s new book-in-a-box, Nox. Before I even opened it, I felt an irresistible urge to spend twenty minutes purging my worktable of notes, napkins, magazines, forks, check stubs, unpaid bills, and fingernail clippings. The urge struck me, I think, for a couple of reasons. For one, Nox is unwieldy. It is, very deliberately, a literary object—the opposite of an e-reader designed to vanish in your palm as you read on a train. It comes in a box the size of my external hard drive, and its pages fold out, accordion-style, to colonize all your available space. More than that, though, the book radiates a kind of holy vibe that seems to demand some gesture of ritual cleansing. It’s a public facsimile of a deeply private object: a scrapbook Carson put together as a memorial to her older brother, Michael, who died unexpectedly in 2000. New Directions has reproduced this unique collage lushly, in full color, with such thorough devotion that some pages show nothing but the backs of staples. Processing it, as a reader, seems to require several acres of clear space—mental, physical, emotional, attentional—every inch of which Carsonfills, immediately, with her own special brand of clutter.

On Rosalía by Anne Carson

On Rosalía

Anne Carson

10 September 2026

 

Ihave​ a Rosalía hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning and asterisking her eyes she held their shrieking out around her like a magic cloak and changed them all to rabbits or a vase of tulips inside its folds. The white crinolines. The shrieking. So much to understand. At her every inhalation of breath the entire audience screamed as if she were raking their individual spines with her fingernail, each spine. That voice can do anything. And the persona blooms out to contain it. Imagine seducing twenty thousand people like this every night on a tour of God knows how many cities, I can’t.

Gloves on! by Anne Carson

 

Anne Carson

Gloves on!

Anne Carson

15 August 2024

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

Fox and Hedgehog / The myths of Anne Carson

 

Illustration by Lily Qian.

Fox and Hedgehog

The myths of Anne Carson

EMILY WILSON
4 June 2024

Be Canadian. Be zany. Be moody. Be relatable. Write about your mother. Write about desire. Write about trauma. Write about loneliness. Write about grief. Write about nature. Write about the body. Invoke universals. Make it mythic. Tell it slant. Do not use rhyme. Do not use meter. Use short lines. Leave a lot of space on the page. Juxtapose your words with quivery line drawings in ink or paint or collage.

‘She does not subjugate or manipulate her words. She lets them be’ … Anne Carson. Photograph: TT News Agency

‘Infinite genius’: Yiyun Li on Anne Carson

When her sons died the Book of Goose author turned to Grief Lessons, Carson’s translation of four plays by Euripides. She reflects on the ‘life sustaining’ work of an extraordinary writer

Yiyun Li

Friday 9 October 2026

It is preposterous to agree to write a short piece on Anne Carson’s work. The task is impossible, akin to that of solving the mathematical problem of dividing zero by zero. If one had the power to solve it, perhaps one would have some confidence in attempting to write about Anne Carson’s work. Attempting, I say, not succeeding. In attempting to do so, I shall emphasise that all words fall short in extreme situations, which not only include unfathomable losses (of children, in my case) but also include articulating anything about Anne Carson’s work.

Anne Carson
Photograph: Peter Power

Where to start with: Anne Carson

From essays on sexual jealousy to retellings of classical Greek tragedies, here’s a guide to the Nobel prize-winning writer’s catalogue of work

Fiona Sampson

Thursday 8 October 2026

A

nne Carson, the Canadian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in literature, is an exhilarating choice by the committee. The sheer range of writing she has been producing since the mid-1980s is exceptional: poetry, essays, translations, collaborative artwork, and works that find intriguingly under-explored meeting points between scholarship, graphic design and personal rites of passage.