Prufrock's Page

Cast your mind forward to 2050. In a biographical dictionary you read: 'Banville, John: Irish author of numerous novels, all of which ar...

John Updike's goal is 1,000 words a day. Richard Ford awakes at six so he can begin as soon as possible. Philip Roth follows Nathaniel H...

Editor Dan Crowe talks of the present and future of literary magazines , using Granta as a case in point: "With the deaths of George P...

Apologies for going on about Martin Amis' new book yet again, but here's another review by David Aaronovitch that's more sympat...

The New York Times Sunday magazine begins to serialise Benjamin Black's new novel , The Lemur .

After Stephen King, it's Elmore Leonard's turn to tell you about what makes writing stand out, with his Ten Rules of Good Writing . ...

David Twiston-Davies reviews A Wodehouse Handbook: The World and Words of P. G. Wodehouse by N.P.T. Murphy: "The great myth about P.G....

Reviews of Martin Amis' views on a post-9/11 world, The Second Plane , are being written, and all of them will, inevitably, mention Terr...

"...a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded...

"...when it comes to teaching creative writing, good intentions are nothing but paving material for the route to dull-prose hell."...

"The aura of a book I have yet to read, with its promise of rapture, surprise and edification, might be even more powerful than the aur...

Erica Wagner anticipates criticism and debate in introducing The Times' list of the Greatest British Writers Since 1945. (No Peter Ack...

He's written just two books in the last 15 years, once entertained notions of becoming a Trappist monk and returned to the US recently a...

"...the most fundamental character trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity. More than even the se...

An earlier report on debutant authors in The Guardian , that one overlooked, is fascinating in that it makes those rarefied creatures come ...

Those in the book business look back on 2007 as yet another year of uncertainty and possible decline, mediated by hyped new titles and techn...

The Hollywood screenwriters' protest shows no signs of abating. And now, literary lions are taking a leaf from their book: " 'I...

How did a "tiny Cambridge journal rise to conquer the literary world"? On the occasion of Granta's 100th issue, Simon Garfield...

Shortly after being elected, Kevin Rudd announced two new $100,000 prizes for Australian writing: a Prime Minister's Literary Prize for ...

Not just Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley and Norman Mailer, but also Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Potter and...the hardback. Sarah Crown looks at lite...

"Our father told us on a harmattan morning. Outside the dining room window, the wind was cold and dry, the whistling pine was swaying, ...

Websites. Videos. Podcasts. What a relief for self-effacing authors that there's now an alternative to facing the book-buying public.

“When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up. In that case they shouldn’t really pick up my book. It’s ...

So where are Gore Vidal, Karen Roberts, Vikram Seth, Alexander McCall Smith, Shyam Selvadurai, William Dalrymple, Shobhaa De and Carl Muller...

One supposes it had to happen. After years of universal rapture over his literary achievements comes this question about Orhan Pamuk : ...

“We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we ...

This is from a letter written by Salman Rushdie to Taslima Nasrin way back in 1994. It's time to read it again: "Taslima, I know ...

Even Richard Ford left him out of The New Granta Book of the American Short Story . Unfair. The time is ripe for a Malamud revival, and Joyc...

The role of a critic? "You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings," was Edmund Wilson's motto...

"Professor Wendell, in an essay on the Salem Witches, lays down the hypothesis that all the phenomena of suggestion and hypnotism, of c...

All you wanted to know (and more) about the relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. A Birkerts-like lament on the decline of re...

From The Education Guardian , a thoughtful and well-considered piece on whether to take that creative writing class or not. Two comments sta...

Next year marks the 5oth publication anniversary of a novel by a Nigerian that is heralded as "an inspiration for writers and readers n...

Literary agent Andrew Wylie speaks on his business, his rewards and on whether the future belongs to the e-book (it doesn't): "It...

Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Viktor Pelevin and Peter Carey, among others, says The New Statesman . (Please, let's not have more talk a...

One is of a generation that still recalls using typewriters in the office -- as well as occasionally writing reviews late at night at home o...

John Banville, writing as crime thriller author Benjamin Black, gets another set of excellent reviews for his second outing, called The Silv...

Merriam-Webster has announced that an expression popular with people that play online computer games was voted its word of the year for 200...

The five judges for the prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction have been announced . Among them are pop singer Lily Allen and BBC ...

The works of exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, living in India, have proved to be the hottest item in the Patna Book Fair. All her ...

You know this whole year-end 'best-of' round-up shindig has gone too far when even websites such as Cheapflights.co.uk get into the ...

Anyone remember Mad magazine's crazy sage, Don Martin? (One recalls in particular his endless, loopy variations on the frog prince story...

...is the title of Rushdie's new book , set in the court of Emperor Akbar and in Florence. Let's hope it continues the return to for...

“When you sit down to write something, it should mean something. This is a day of your life that you’re never going to get back. This is a d...

As it turns out , the famously curmudgeonly, pop-music-hating, child-abhorring Philip Larkin spent some time with a fellow-poet's family...

A.S. Byatt has an extremely thought-provoking essay -- in more ways than one -- in the TLS about how changes in the presentation of human ...

One can't help but admire B.R. Myers' independent, if utterly audacious viewpoint -- even if one wonders whether he's taking his...

As a struggling writer, do you find yourself writing in short, simple sentences using relatively few characters, featuring melodramatic plot...

Critic, essayist and author Elizabeth Hardwick died yesterday . She was 91. From a 1979 interview: "...I call myself a feminist in that...