Tag: Literature

'Upon sitting down to write this article, the immense prospect of narrowing down my entire life's reading experience to five books suddenly seemed to stare at me, chasm-like. Life does not always present itself to us in such neat sequences.'

When browsing the shelves of a bookshop, what I am most drawn to is art. I hunt for the brightest colour, the most striking typography, a good-looking image with which to decorate my bedside table. Book covers can use their beauty to their advantage, or even as a form of rebellion.

Faeries, elves, centaurs, wizards, dragons. In its purest form, fantasy is one of the most ancient literary genres, and fantastical elements can be found...

"One of my favourite parts of Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, is a ferociously intense public wrestling scene. It buzzes with an ever-moving pulse, choreographed by the beating of drums. They rise with the intensity of the fighting, and older men 'remembered the days when they wrestled to its intoxicating rhythm.'" Jimmy Brewer explores how Kerouac, Proust and Achebe capture the experience of live music in their works.

Joining this zoom call, Luke is sat in his childhood bedroom with a bookcase overflowing in the background. Luke immediately starts chatting and smiling,...

Art personalises and humanises the cold calculated figures, gives a face and a story to the numbers we are so used to seeing.

Nowadays, most people think of translation as an impartial, disinterested profession of fluent polyglots. Its history shows otherwise. In 1915, the renowned American poet...

this new canon shall – by learning to load and fire itself – exile us from even counting as its projectile or target

Dreams seem to straddle this boundary between fiction and reality, often informed by real life or perhaps made to help us cope with it.

"In the end, the same heatwave can inspire lewd lyrics or thoughts of doom and global warming."

For the music obsessives among us, the pieces of literature that stick longest in our minds are overwhelming those which take music itself as a subject....

Somebody once told me there are a lot of bad song lyrics out there. Imagine, for every subtle, elegant song you hear, there’s bound...

Just as Helen possessed the face that launched a thousand ships, Orpheus, the legendary musician and poet, charmed a thousand hearts with his music....

Being "protected" from anything that resembled queerness did not manage to make me straight