Reviews
Before our meeting, I had considered him to be something of a poseur and dilettante, a self-styled Great Man, in the classic Latin American model.
Peter Godwin’s desire to chronicle the breakdown of Zimbabwe in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, suffers from his reluctance to spend time in the country he calls home
The last sigh of the dying world of old imperial Japan
Christina Lamb tells the true story of a white farmer and his black servant before and after Mugabe in her illuminating and flawed House of Stone, says Jason Cowley.
Jason Cowley traces the career of the troubled, unique collective that changed the face of British dance music.
If interest in Houellebecq’s life and work remains inexorable, this is because, in many ways, the life is inextricable from the work.
She’s still deep, if occasionally unfathomable. Jason Cowley delights in an alchemist’s return.
Salman Rushdie vividly explores our post-9/11 world in Shalimar the Clown, says Jason Cowley.
WG Sebald’s last book, Campo Santo, offers further proof of his rare gift for tackling Germany’s pain, says Jason Cowley.
In portraying individual lives tethered to the forces of history, Philip Roth’s new novel revisits the themes of previous work. But it also reveals an unexpectedly benign and forgiving side, writes Jason Cowley.
I had once been scornful of Deedes, whom I imagined to be the personification of Conservative Man, but of late I had begun to read his journalism—columns, despatches from sub-Saharan Africa, countryside diaries—with intensifying respect and admiration.
Ideal for the MTV generation, Douglas Coupland’s fiction is becoming increasingly dark.
Michel Houellebecq’s Lanzarote portrays the author’s unheroic struggle against ennui.
James Wood, Britain’s most brilliant literary critic, has published a novel. Can the merciless arbiter live up to his own critical standards?
After more than a decade of silence, Donna Tartt is back with a new novel that draws on her childhood in the American South. Jason Cowley on the secret of her success.
Walden, in his desire for the curious story of the life and death of Beau Brummell to become more widely known, has gone ahead and translated Barbey himself. First, however, he offers his own thoughts on dandyism in an entertaining introductory essay.
John Lanchester’s powers of pastiche remain undiminished in his new novel, Fragrant Harbour.
Gerhard Richter at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
Coetzee’s gloomy hero questions life’s meaning in his new novel Youth, but to little purpose.