in lieu of a field guide

Restraint in fiction is a constraint, I suppose. One reads, say Coetzee, and one feels an Oulipian-like constraint, but a kind of constraint...

  Halfway through The Childhood of Jesus , I was asking myself more and more if Coetzee's novel is science fiction. I meant that in the ...

  ‘You and Fidel seem to get on well together,’ he remarks to the boy once they are alone. ‘He is my best friend.’ ‘So Fidel feels goodwill ...

  A writer deliberately wanted to be inscrutable on the page, and it was the fault of the reader not to see the thicket for the bush. In the...

  The streetlamps shone feebly, their shafts of woolly light only penetrating the dark of the pavements for a couple of yards, while the res...