Patti Miller at the grave of Marcel Proust in the Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris.
Reading Proust aloud: ‘How can it be that deeply flawed and terrible humans have the capacity to create?’
This article is more than 3 years old
One hundred years after his death, our daily reading shows us that humans can conjure the utterly extraordinary
Patti Miller Saturday 11 November 2022
In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.
What is missing from the Guardian’s 100 best novels list
Readers share their reflections on the best works of fiction in English, and ask whether popularity or lightheartedness disqualified books from consideration
22 February 2026
As an avid reader, I was excited to go through your recently published book list (100 best novels, 16 May). However, I swiftly became disillusioned at the old-fashioned and frankly elitist lens used to judge the “best”. Why were there so few modern books? Why does “best” so often seem to equate to misery?
Marcel Proust writes, with only the faintest irony, that “the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.”
Marcel Proust on What Writing Is
In the last volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust famously describes the transformation of himself as an author.
By William Benton
Proust died at fifty-one, in Paris, of pneumonia, on November 18th, and last year was the centenary of his death. Since I first read “In Search of Lost Time,” his immense and unique autobiographical novel, a long passage about what writing is—from “Time Regained,” the seventh and last volume—has stayed with me. It takes place at the mansion of the Princess Guermantes, where the narrator has been invited to a musical reception. On his way to the Guermantes’s, he encounters by chance M. de Charlus, a member of the Guermantes family. Ancient and ruined by a stroke, Charlus is like a ghost of a possible future for the narrator himself. At this point in the novel, the narrator is nearly middle-aged, bored, over-sophisticated, and aware that, for lack of talent, he is not the writer he had dreamed of becoming. Everything in the first six volumes is behind him—Swann, Gilberte, Vinteuil, Albertine—although unwritten as yet.
Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor review – a beguiling biography
How did a simpering, high-class layabout write a work of such profound moral seriousness?
Kathryn Hughes
Thursday 19 November 2015
Athird of the way through this beguiling biography, Benjamin Taylor offers a statement from Marcel Proust that he believes explains why the (arguably) greatest novelist of the 20th century dribbled away nine years of his life translating Ruskin into French before getting down to writing À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. “There is no better way of becoming aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself that which a master has experienced. In this profound effort that we make, it is our own way of thinking, together with the master’s, that we bring to light.”
Funny and full of sex: why you should read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Readers strike an encouraging note for those sceptical of the joys of Proust, saying it has plenty to make it worth perservering
I read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time over a nine-month period. In answer to Mike Bromberg (Letters, 26 May), a great deal happens besides the famous madeleine incident: the advent of electric lighting, motorcars and aeroplanes, not to mention endless romances and social intrigues. My memory is that every hundred pages or so of tedium would yield five to 10 pages of the most revelatory reading that I have ever experienced. Was it worth it? Totally. Would I do it again? Probably not. But I won the bet. Bill Gaver London
Daunted by Proust or Joyce? Letters from Ian Arnott, Mike Bromberg and Andrew Keeley on giving up on a long read
26 March 2026
Dave Patten says Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was unreadable (Letters 22 May). When I was a student of French in the 1970s I attempted to read it in French, but gave up after volume one. The only person I knew who had read it all in the original French was one of our lecturers who told us he had done it to pass the time one long summer vacation when he was laid up with gout. À chacun son gout, I suppose. Ian Arnott Peterborough
Exploring the tumultuous life and lasting legend of Ernest Hemingway on the island he called home
Jane Ammeson
4 January 2026
I drove into Old Havana in a pink Chevy convertible with pink and white striped leather seats and fins so sharp that even a shark would go green with envy. It’s exactly like the car my great aunt bought after her divorce, but had to sell when she remarried, as her new doctor husband said it was too sexy.
"Hemingway House Key West, Florida United States" by Michelle Maria, available under CC BY 3.0. Cropped from original
Key West through Hemingway's eyes
How the writer's favorite island continues to preserve his stories, traditions, and spirit
Jane Ammeson
4 September 2026
Returning from Spain, where he had covered the Spanish Civil War along with Martha Gellhorn, a young blonde he had met at Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite bar, Ernest Hemingway discovered his wife Pauline had spent an extraordinary amount of money to build a pool in their backyard, the first one on the island of Key West.
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages.
This new collection of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in America. She has won numerous awards for her work, most recently the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award. Readers familiar with her work will recognize her signature style of layered, rich detail, stories within stories, and intertextuality in settings from America, China, and Europe.
Seamus Heaney was born into a Catholic nationalist family in the mainly Protestant unionist Northern Ireland. When he was eleven, he won a scholarship to a boarding school, St. Columb’s College in Derry. He went on to university teachers’ college in Belfast, publishing his first book of poetry when he was twenty-seven. Forty-four years later, he is the author of a dozen poetry collections, numerous translations, plays, prose, and countless chapbooks and limited editions. His following is so large that crowds lining up to hear him are dubbed “Heaneyboppers.”
One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review – freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI
This article is more than 9 months old
One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits
Anthony Cummings
Tuesaday 11 November 2025
In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.
Jeanette Winterson in her haunted 18th-century house. Photograph: Kate Peters
Jeanette Winterson: ‘I’d like to go up in space as a very old lady and just be pushed out’
This article is more than 1 year old
The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author on being a good landlord to a grumpy ghost, her optimism about AI and the ideal size for cats
Sian Cain
Saturday 26 April 2025
Your debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit turns 40 years old this year. How do you feel about it at this point in your life?
Can you believe it? I find that astonishing. I’m always having to think about it because people keep bothering me about it! Its next iteration is a musical, and then I really hope that’s the end. Just let me go! Obviously I love Oranges and I revisited it again with [her 2011 memoir] Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? and the musical too. Surely, by the rule of three, this is it? Then I can live in peace and plant potatoes.
