My wife, Susan, and I lost our minds. For more than two weeks at the beginning of February, we were locked in a ritual that became the center of our day, the center of our conversation—watching first the six-hour original 1979 BBC version of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (not to be confused […]
A new illustrated edition of Finnegans Wake, as imagined by artist John Vernon Lord for the Folio Society, matches James Joyce’s extravagant word games with elaborately collaged pictures, shedding a brilliant new light on Irish literature’s ‘book of the dark’. Here, Lord explains the thinking behind the images. Frontispiece The frontispiece illustration doesn’t apply to […]
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provided me with my first experience of the film trade, and in retrospect it was an unusually benign baptism of fire. The director and I got along fine. I enjoyed an amiable relationship with the screenwriter, who as a former instructor in the black arts at a […]
James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved by many… and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck? When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that he didn’t […]
Newly translated by John K. Cox, The Attic was the first novel by Danilo Kiš, the Serbian writer whom Susan Sontag called ‘one of the handful of incontestably major writers of the second half of the century’. To call it a confident debut would be an understatement of sizeable proportions. Composed variously of prose, letters, […]
“We have swayed from our road to such extent, that we are probably on the right track” – Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet) To paint with thoughts is to possess the colors of sensation so intense that the daybreak they create abstracts new worlds. The gaze thus becomes an eyepiece of unutterable landscape of […]