Mario Vargas Llosa

Top 10 books about boarding school

From Evelyn Waugh to Molesworth, novels set in these places of privilege are microcosmic studies of oppression and rebellion

1949 An Interview With Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh, Age 26 (1930)
Henry Lamb (English, 1883-1960)
Collection of Lord Moyne

An Interview With Evelyn Waugh

By HARVEY BREIT
March 3, 1949

o matter how you look at him, Mr. Evelyn Waugh is a deceptive man: what meets the eye is at variance with what meets the ear. A remark he makes suggests cynicism, or perhaps a satiric humor, but Mr. Waugh's face--bland, pink and cherubic--suggests only innocence. In fact, expression on Mr. Waugh's face is at a minimum--a flicker of amusement, of naughtiness, an infinitesimal hint of wonder. In feature it's a little like a boyish Winston Churchill's. And Mr. Waugh's bowler, cigar and dapper, plump figure extend the resemblance.

1945 Brideshead Revisited / Evelyn Waugh's Finest Novel

 

Evelyn Waugh's Finest Novel

By JOHN K. HUTCHENS

My theme, says the narrator in Evelyn Waugh's latest, his most carefully written and deeply felt novel, "is memory, that winged host." And, with that, the brightly devastating satirist of England's Twenties and Thirties moves from one world to another and a larger one: from the lunacy of a burlesqued Mayfair, very glib and funny and masking the serious point in farce, to a world in which people credibly think and feel. Whether "Brideshead Revisited" is technically as expert, of its kind, as "Decline and Fall, "Vile Bodies" or "A Handful of Dust" may be debatable. The important point just now that it is bigger and richer, and that--to those of Mr. Waugh's admirers who might recently have suspected he was exhausting a rather limited field--it will almost certainly be his most interesting book in ten years: more interesting in story and in style, and not least in what it implies about its author and his growth as an analyst and an artist.

2014 Classic Book Review / ‘Scoop’ by Evelyn Waugh

 

Classic Book Review: ‘Scoop’ by Evelyn Waugh

Tolita Raymond
February 13, 2014

I recently read an article in which an author listed Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ amongst his favourite books. He said that he considered it superior to his masterpiece ‘Brideshead Revisited’.

 

JM Coetzee

Review

The Pole and Other Stories by JM Coetzee review – if this is his final book, it is a great one

This article is more than 3 years old

The Nobel laureate’s new collection of stories is concerned with death, desire and old age, glinting with flashes of humour and grand, existential strangeness

Declan Fry
Thursday 27 July 2026

Eileen Chang made it to 74. Woolf, 59. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 72. Wisława Szymborska, 88. Naguib Mahfouz managed 94 (a good innings). Baldwin, 68. Patrick White, 78. Soseki, 49. Cao Xueqin was about 40 or 50; the records vary. Beckett reached 83 – JM Coetzee’s current age. And Imre Kertész, brilliant, embattled – by Parkinson’s, by depression – lived to see 86.

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee review – a boy who challenges the world

The final book of Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is also its darkest, keeping the mystery at the books’ heart intact to the end

Steven Poole
Sat 4 Jan 2020 07.30 GMT

Martin Amis once complained that JM Coetzee had “got no talent”, showing perhaps that obsessive ranking of talent (here used in a far more debased sense than TS Eliot’s) is a pastime favoured by those who are not, like Coetzee, writers of genius. Even more improbably, Amis claimed that Coetzee was not funny, which bespeaks a cloth ear for the more sophisticated kind of irony. It would certainly surprise readers of the hilarious Slow Man, or indeed the first two novels in this sequence, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, in which a dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when reminiscent of Kafka (and Coetzee’s own early Waiting for the Barbarians) is illuminated by sparks of sardonic humour or sheer childlike silliness. The final book of the trilogy, however, as one might with trepidation expect from its title, is a far darker affair.

Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus

 

The Death of Jesus
by J. M. Coetzee
(Viking, May 2020)

J.M. COETZEE’S THE DEATH OF JESUS

May 5, 2020

by Marc Farrant 

During a 1992 interview with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee, critic Richard Begam surfaced the well-worn issue of the death of the novel, positing that literature had “fallen into a debilitating narcissism” which produces works “of interest only to the academic” before asking after Coetzee’s thoughts. Notoriously taciturn in public and thoughtful in interviews, Coetzee suggested that the tightening bond between writers and the academy has indeed led to more esoteric forms of the novel, and with regard to himself: “Yes, I may indeed be cutting myself off, at least from today’s readers; nevertheless, what I am engaged in doing is more important than maintaining that contact.” Since the 1990s, it is tempting to see a correlation between increased academic interest in Coetzee’s works and his decreasing engagement with, and from, the public. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize in 2003 largely recognized him as the preeminent writer of the South African experience, for example, as we see in the powerful apartheid allegory Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Disgrace (1999) grappled with the country’s uneasy transition to a post-apartheid state by reflecting on the career and disgrace of a middle-aged academic. The truth, however, is that by 2003 South Africa had receded into the rearview mirror and Coetzee’s new work, Elizabeth Costello, was positioned firmly on academic soil. This philosophical novel, featuring an eponymous academic protagonist touring the world delivering lectures on topics such as animal rights and renaissance humanism, set the tone for Coetzee’s writings in the 2000s, including the Jesus trilogy and its culminating installment, The Death of Jesus.

An Autumn Sunset by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton
fotografata da David Levine

Poesia della settimana: Un tramonto autunnale di Edith Wharton

Nota soprattutto per i suoi romanzi, la scrittrice fu anche, a tratti, una poetessa di grande talento, come dimostra questa riflessione su un cielo infuocato. 

Jhumpa Lahir / The Namesake and Me

 

The Namesake and Me

Lauren Olmeda

July11, 2017

I have a tattoo on my left ribcage; it is made up of four lines, drawn to look like the silhouette of a small house, but without a line sealing it at the bottom. To me, it signifies that home is an open-ended concept, one without a lock on the door, one that can be returned to over and over again. The protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, like me, lives between two worlds but never feels fully comfortable or accepted in either. This purgatory sets the course of his (and my own) life, sneaking up on him in moments he least expects it and driving some of his most important decisions. He does not know quite when to give in to the pull of his ancestry or to the illusion of American-ness he has cultivated his entire life. I grew up stretched across an ocean, pulled between Germany and the United States from the age of barely fifteen. Having moved abroad at such a young age, I was malleable and moldable, ever-changing yet desperately trying to retain whatever American identity I had managed to create by then. I was resistant to my new home, never referring to it as such but instead calling it “this place.” I blamed my parents for yanking the rug out from under me and transporting me to a new continent just as I was beginning to discover myself. I was hesitant to make friends, not wanting to abandon the ones I’d left behind and for whom I stayed up till 5 AM, chatting away online as if we were still in the same time zone. Even as I settled into my new school, the sense that I was betraying who I thought I was nagged at me with persistence. I wanted to be happy, but being happy felt like giving in, accepting my reality, instead of rebelling against it as I’d sworn to do from the very first day.

Julie Myerson / What I see in the mirror

What I see in the mirror: Julie Myerson

'When I was 35, I considered having a rose tattoo – my kids flatly forbade it and I'm extremely grateful'

Julie Myerson
Friday 8 July 2011 22.59 BST

I see a woman of 51. But it's strange and oddly comforting to notice that the dreamy, unformed face of my 13-year-old self is somehow still there, too.

‘The people in the photo’ /A French novel by Hélène Gestern

‘The people in the photo’ 

A French novel by Hélène Gestern

Kate Wilkins
March 3, 2014

Hélène Gestern’s deftly crafted debut novel won heaps of prizes in France (‘Eux sur la photo’, Arléa, 2011). Will its English translation, `The People in the Photo‘ – published in the UK by Gallic Books this February – follow suit?

 

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson: the US queen of gothic horror claims her literary crown

This article is more than 4 years old

Ignored by critics during her lifetime, the Haunting of Hill House author is now recognised as a great American novelist

Sarah Hughes

Sun 23 Oct 2016 00.04 BST

She has been cited as an inspiration by Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris. Now the American author Shirley Jackson, once memorably described as writing “not with a pen but a broomstick”, is set for a long overdue reappraisal on this side of the Atlantic.

Shirley Jackson’s Disappearing Act

Underrated for most of her life, the author of "The Lottery" is at last experiencing a revival.
Jane HuSeptember 26, 2016

“And the first thing they did was segregate me” goes the opening line of Shirley Jackson’s 1941 short story in the New Republic. In the enigmatically titled “My Life with R. H. Macy,” an unnamed Macy’s shopgirl narrates her first day at the store until the moment she abruptly walks off the job forever. Although this was Jackson’s first publication in a commercial magazine, the first sentence is typical of the blunt and uncanny style for which she would later become known. The story also prefigures a career in which she’d frequently be discriminated against and misunderstood. She was 25 at the time. This is how the magazine’s bio line introduced her to the public: “Shirley Jackson, the wife of Stanley Hyman, is living in New Hampshire and writing a novel.”

Shirley Jackson / The Man in the Woods

The Man in the Woods

By Shirley Jackson

April 21, 2014

Wearily, moving his feet because he had nothing else to do, Christopher went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against his progress, hating the dust beneath his feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads, everywhere. He had been walking since morning, and all day the day before that, and the day before that, and days before that, back into the numberless line of walking days that dissolved, seemingly years ago, into the place he had left, once, before he started walking. This morning he had been walking past fields, and now he was walking past trees that mounted heavily to the road, and leaned across, bending their great old bodies toward him; Christopher had come into the forest at a crossroads, turning onto the forest road as though he had a choice, looking back once to see the other road, the one he had not chosen, going peacefully on through fields, in and out of towns, perhaps even coming to an end somewhere beyond Christopher’s sight.

 

Vladimir Nabokov
by David Levine

Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s Novels 

BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL on JUNE 16, 2018 

In 1937, Vladeslav Khodasevich, an émigré poet and champion of “V. Sirin’s” work, wrote, “Sirin [Nabokov] proves for the most part to be an artist of form, of the writer’s device, and not only in that . . . sense of which . . . his writing is distinguished by exceptional diversity, complexity, brilliance, and novelty.” Khodasevich went on to say that the key to all Sirin’s work was his ability to put all his literary devices on display, with little or no attempt to conceal them, thus entertaining his readers more with the revelation of how the magician performs his tricks, than with the trick itself. “The life of the artist and the life of a device in the consciousness of an artist—this is Sirin’s theme.” Khodasevich, although he had not yet read The Gift—purported to be Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest Russian novel—had discovered the most important element of Nabokov’s fiction.

Nabokov, 40 years on / 13 things you probably didn’t know about the Lolita novelist XLISTO 2017

Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov, 40 years on: 13 things you probably didn’t know about the Lolita novelist

40 years after his death, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita continues to mesmerise and shock in equal measure. His greatest achievement however, is not the story of Humbert Humbert's perverse affection, but rather his own artistic endurance as a writer

A secret of Nabokov

The secret of Nabokov's sexual style

Lolita was a taboo-breaker, but Nabokov always denied it was pornographic. David Lodge on how poetry and humour come together in his writing about sex

BIOGRAPHY OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

David Lodge

Saturday 7 June 2014 08.30 BST

W

riting well about sexual intercourse is not easy, and it has got more, not less, difficult as virtually all legal restraint on the explicit description of sexual acts in literature ceased in most western democracies from the 1960s onwards. Censorship in the past was often oppressive and silly, but it also presented a stimulating challenge to writers, to which they responded by finding subtle ways to convey their meaning indirectly, or more courageously by gradually testing and extending the limits of socially acceptable explicitness. There are a limited number of possible sexual acts. Now that the novelist is expected to describe them, how does s(he) achieve originality? How to avoid revealing, or appearing to  reveal, his/her own sexual predilections and fantasies?

Sea Oak by George Saunders

George Saunders SEA OAK by George Saunders AT SIX MR. FRENDT comes on the P.A. and shouts, "Welcome to Joysticks!" Then he announces Shirts Off. We take off our flightjackets and fold them up. We take off our shirts and fold them up. Our scarves we leave on. Thomas Kirster's our beautiful boy. He's got long muscles and bright-blue eyes. The minute his shirt comes off two fat ladies hustle up the aisle and stick some money in his pants and ask will he be their Pilot. He says sure. He brings their salads. He brings their soups. My phone rings and the caller tells me to come see her in the Spitfire mock-up. Does she want me to be her Pilot? I'm hoping. Inside the Spitfire is Margie, who says she's been diagnosed with Chronic Shyness Syndrome, then hands me an Instamatic and offers me ten bucks for a close-up of Thomas's tush.

 

 This article is more than 3 years old

Review

Liberation Day by George Saunders review – a hell of a ride

The characters in these absurdly funny stories are trapped by hyper-capitalism and their own foolishness, as Saunders investigates the prisons we make for ourselves

Anne Enright
Thrusday 20 October 2022

Zadie Smith / Interview with George Saunder

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George Saunders

By Zadie Smith

Photographed by Richard Burbridge

February 15, 2017

Some writers work within a tradition, and some create a world from whole cloth. There aren’t many who can do the whole-cloth bit, but George is one of them. Within the universe of American writing, there really is a continent called GeorgeSaunders-Land, where the people speak funny, and the social contract has either broken down or been bent out of all recognition, and our most intimate lives feel like reenactments of something we maybe saw on TV. If he were just a vicious satirist, he would still be hugely enjoyable, but what sets him apart is his willingness not only to go into the heart of darkness but to suggest possible routes out. The cool kids don’t dare do that, but George always has, and without sanctimony or even a hint of righteousness. I once heard him describe satire as “the inverse praise of good things.” Seen from this perspective, George’s career has been a 20-year praise-song to the power of language, the grandeur of the visible world, and the awesome possibility of genuine enlightenment. That we can even see this through the parade of holy fools, venal idiots, smiling demagogues, degraded environments, and twisted corporate spaces he has presented us over the years is a testament to his extraordinary skill.