Jonathan Mcaloon

In her 2010 novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver examined the American healthcare system with a spiky sensitivity. Big Brother (2013) took on American obesity, and The Mandibles (2016) thoroughly imagined a doomsday economy. Shriver’s latest book, The Motion of the Body Through Space, casts the same keen eye over the ‘fetishising of fitness’.

In 2017’s Goldsmiths Prize-winning novel H(A)PPY, Nicola Barker strewed pages with multicoloured text. The Cauliflower, her joyful previous offering, employed winky-face emoticons while telling the story of a 19th-century Hindu mystic. In her 13th novel I Am Sovereign, huge fonts careen, in the space of an exclamation, into tiny fonts. Bold and underlined text prickles

Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler for order and rules — admits that ‘the truth isn’t always the right way’. A wasting disease has given her dementia, ‘but is kind enough to leave the summer of 1969 intact’. She dips in

On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a decade — recognises the tendency of reviews of the form to begin with ‘an obligatory paragraph on “The Short Story” in capital letters, rather than talking about the work’. Power’s debut collection is itself a

As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he was born. He has a tendency almost to romanticise his loneliness, turn it into witticisms. It ‘would have been sad,’ he thinks, ‘a man of my age going back to some wrinkled version of his

It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of her wonderful 2010 book The Possessed —a chimera of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism — she declares: I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life… and that,

A short-story renaissance has been promised since 2013. That year Alice Munro won the Nobel, Lydia Davis won the Booker International, and George Saunders’s bestselling collection The Tenth of December won the Folio Prize. The rise of the form was declared, but it is mainly now that we’re reaping the harvest. Established novelists such as

Good historical fiction takes more than research. Henry James once said that writers needed to shed everything that made them modern to feel their way into a completely alien world view — a near impossibility. But this ideal historical novel, bristling with ancient prejudice, would be rather heavy going for a general readership, and successful

When I first read Jane Austen I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to impress a girl who read her. I didn’t get the girl, but I got the novelist: persuading myself that I was the only 16 year-old boy in Newcastle who had read Jane Austen. Not yet subtle enough to appreciate the extent

There is a question which writers (and readers) of literary fiction get tired of hearing: which bits really happened? The traditional and respectable answer is that this doesn’t matter. Everything in the book will have been transformed by art, and isn’t something that comes straight from an author’s imagination more autobiographical, more telling, than things

James Wood is arguably the most celebrated, possibly the most impugned, and definitely the most envied, literary journalist living. By his mid twenties he was the chief book reviewer for The Guardian. From there he moved to America’s The New Republic, then, as of 2007, The New Yorker. He also teaches at Harvard. There is

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent

People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people naturally associating innovative, serious and challenging art with the marginal. This no doubt plays up to Iyer’s own theories about

Every so often a writer renovates a whole literary landscape from underneath. Armed to the teeth with slang and learning, Saul Bellow reinvented American prose with The Adventures of Augie March in 1953, and it took thirty years for a Martin Amis, a disciple of Bellow, to bring English up to date with Money. But

The joke has been made by Jack Stillinger, an American editor of Keats, that there have been so many treatments of the poet’s life that we know him better than his contemporaries did, and better than most people we see every day. This brilliant new biography by eminent Keatsian Nicholas Roe has caused controversy with

Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one lover… one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon… [had] never been drunk… never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone.’ Born at