Performance – not just to our colleagues and peers, but also to our families, friends, lovers and even to ourselves – has been an enduring preoccupation for Katie Kitamura, and it comes sharply into ...

Natalie Lawrence believes in monsters. In her latest book, Enchanted Creatures, she contends that “they are not imaginary: their forms are fanciful, but what they are is very real”. While she admits ...

“I was staring down the barrel of middle age, and my pockets were empty”, writes Megan Dunn in her illuminating memoir, The Mermaid Chronicles. “I’d spent my life … pursuing art – video art, then ...

Understanding Russia’s recent political and economic evolution is now more urgent than ever. Did western actors – governments, businesses and international organizations – contribute to the ...

This week, Toby Lichtig travels to Oslo to interview the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse; Natasha Lehrer heads to Zurich for a compelling new play by Deborah Levy.

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

Amity Gaige is a quiet phenomenon. Heartwood is her fifth novel in twenty years, and the third in a row that is both a gripping story and a flawlessly integrated feat of research. And it is so moving ...

David Gallagher remembers the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa and Laurent Binet whisks us to sixteenth-century Florence to explore the world of his novel ‘Perspectives’ ...

That master of the Irish short story, Frank O’Connor, once greeted Benedict Kiely (1919–2007) in Dublin with a hearty thump on the shoulder, and praise: “Another book of stories like A Journey to the ...

How should we live? How should society be arranged? Utilitarians believe that such questions reduce to one simple principle: the better action (or policy, or social institution) is the one that brings ...

This week, Peter Holland treads the boards in Elizabethan London in search of Shakespeare before the Globe; and Muriel Zagha on a captivating tale of cheese-making in the Jura.