Peter Lewis on the pleasures and pitfalls of translating German to English, from imponderable subclauses and outlandish compound nouns to the translator’s bête noire, the innuendo.
Translator and blogger Katy Derbyshire gets us up to speed on the German literary scene with 11 contemporary books in translation you should be reading.
Equal parts thrilling romp and grim, unflinching inspection of the contemporary immigrant experience, Albert Enrique’s short story collection Hypothermia is literature at its bravest.
For our Germany theme, Michael Spring inspects three works of fiction that explore the amazing change between the country of the past and present, and forces us to consider whether ...
Explore the London haunts the great German thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on our London walk, designed by Marx expert Heiko Khoo.
Is social media changing our language? Dale Lately looks at slanguage, speakwrite and the unlikely precedent of Virginia Woolf’s txt spk.
Is Dido lifting her lyrics from Jacques Prévert? Are Bloc Party paying tribute or plagiarising? Clémence Sebag investigates the relationship between pop music and poetry, from Mick Jagger to Metallica ...
KS Silkwood’s King of the Jungle is an acerbic, energetic polemic of a novel, that revels in the hilarity and dilettantism of London’s art scene.
In the third instalment of his column, The Written World, author Ali Shaw explores the desert as the cradle of literature, religions and wars, and also as a mirror held ...
For our Transgression theme, Thomas Chadwick revisits a Russian classic in which the laws constraining man can be broken, as long as you consider yourself extraordinary. First published in 1866, ...
Within Sabine Gruber’s Roman Elegy Lochlan Bloom enjoys not only the sensations of life in the Italian capital but also the wonderful depiction of tensions that have existed between Germany ...
Idiopathy‘s hilarious prose, which is at turns terse and sharp and sprawling and circular, is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace at his most entrancing.
Should writers resist the temptation to watch their creations come to life on screen? Oliver Francis on how the film versions of James Bond changed Ian Fleming’s conception of his ...
Daniel Ellis reviews Matt Hill’s debut novel, The Folded Man, and finds much to savour in this dystopian tale of broken Britain.
Gwen Smith is intrigued by the prospect of a new print-only feminist magazine that promises to “fight fire with fire”.
One hesitates before calling A Tale for the Time Being a “novel of ideas”, which presupposes an imbalance toward themes over character, but it would be impossible to truly enjoy ...
Emma Cooper discusses the theme of transgression in one of her favourite books, MJ Hyland’s This Is How.
A decade ago the web remained quarantined indoors, anchored to desktops by Ethernet umbilical cords, and a good novel could still help to pass the time on a heaving tube ...
Global warming. Now, there’s a phrase that can divide opinion, stir up controversy and shine a spotlight on apathy It’s nearly impossible to discuss without resorting to well-trodden rhetorical ground ...
Sam Dodson ponders why we are so stung when the truths revealed in a celebrity memoir turn out to be lies. Conversely, why do we willingly watch, read and engage ...