The American author Elaine Kraf (1946–2013), who was also a painter and special-needs educator, was interested in those who deviate from social norms. Her debut, I Am Clarence (1969), features a ...

London in 1984 was a city of crumbling council estates, gleaming dockside developments, radical music festivals, antiracist protests and police violence. It was not a single capital city, Stephen ...

Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, a Comedy follows a woman over the course of a day during her stay in an artist’s retreat. The woman doesn’t use the term “artist’s retreat”, but she does call the ...

To Charles Lamb, a friend and colleague of Thomas Hood at the London Magazine in the 1820s, the humorist was “our half Hogarth”. Lamb had in mind etchings such as “The Progress of Cant”. Made in 1825, ...

Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam is a series of impossible elegies. The poems respond to the recovery from the River Thames in 2001 of the torso of a Black boy, named Adam by police officers. The unknown child ...

“People ought to be one of two things, young or old. No; what’s the good of fooling? People ought to be one of two things, young or dead.” Dorothy Parker has the fortune to be remembered as young – as ...

Daisy Johnson was the youngest-ever author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for Everything Under (2018), a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth that appeared when she was twenty-seven.

“I beg you to send me immediately the remaining Vols:”, Henry Fielding wrote to Samuel Richardson in October 1748. Fielding was requesting the final volumes of Clarissa; or, The History of a Young ...