Orpheus descends into the underworld. His music charms the gods. They grant him one condition: he may bring Eurydice back to the light, but he must not look back at her. He looks. She vanishes.For mos...

I was surprised a few weeks ago to get an invitation from Yana Lantratova, Russian Federal Commissioner for Human Rights, to deliver a speech on human rights to the International Youth Festival in Eka...

Review 31 is an online literary review.

“In humdrum fashion one goes slowly crackers.” from “The Hole in the Sky” The 85-year old British writer Rosalind Belben is having a moment. At least four of the eight books…

YouTube video by Timothy Kenny

The Novel Is Dead. This Time It's for Real

YouTube video by Shaun Belcher Writes

Gabriel Josipovici's new novel consists of over 500 short sections, ranging from a single line to a page: A man advances into the darkness. As he does so he ...

Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first j...

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity. 1   It has been a plea...

Interview with Lars Iyer This is a full-length version of a written interview conducted by Lisa Akhila Plakolm and Juliane Werner of the GlobalBernhard project team, based in the Department of Comp…

On submission and resistance to AI-generated literature   To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they ...

I wonder how many of those of us who write exclusively on literature and read only novels, poetry, literary criticism and occasionally into ...

In the aftermath of an historical crisis, reality becomes a task for poetry to recover: that which, as Paul Celan writes, had to be ‘sought out and won’.

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point.  The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo , translated by Sophie H...

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point.  The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo , translated by Sophie H...

‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In […]

Harold Pinter stars in Samuel Beckett's acclaimed study of mortality and memory.

A glimpse into philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s formative encounter with Martin Heidegger, told through his notes from the Le Thor seminars. What does it mean for thought to have a time of its own? In Th...

From Spain’s most celebrated author, an inventive, quietly radical novel that explores how books illuminate our livesIn Camera Obscura, Enrique Vila-Matas ...

For me, fiction is a space of plainness and excess.             Amina Cain When TS Eliot read Dante for the first time, he noted a discrepan...

Gabriel Josipovici joins Jewish Chronicle chief fiction reviewer David Herman to explore the interplay of fact, imagination, and flight.

En mars 2024, le site Espace Maurice Blanchot a initié un webinaire qui, à raison de trois ou quatre fois par an, rassemble plusieurs intervenants autour d’une thématique donnée. Nous sommes heureux d...

In 1985, I read two books. The following year I read a lot more, and it was then I began to keep a list of each book I finished. I've kept t...

This isn't the usual novel-author interview. As a reader of novels listening to interviews with novelists I'm almost always disappointed bec...

I have now been in Caracas for 48 hours and the contrast between what I have seen, and what I had read in the mainstream media, could not be more stark. I drove right through Caracas, from the airport...

In this deeply affecting English-language debut, German writer Hermann reflects on the connections between art and experience, d...

The blog of author Dennis Cooper

In the 20 years of writing This Space, I have neither used advertising nor asked for support, but AI has wiped out my source of income, so please consider buying me a book (even contributing to a tiny

A year of limited reading. Three books stood out: Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind , Giorgio Agamben's Self-Portrait in the Studio , and W...

The former editor of Artforum, fired in the wake of 7 October, reckons with two years of division, fear and silence

One clear memory I have of David Lodge's review of The Book of God is that he described its author as being "a novelist deeply influenced b...

Today in 2015 my blog-collection  This Space of Writing was published as a book . An ideal Christmas gift. Not a happy memory to be honest;...

December 6, 1942. Peter Handke is 83 years old today. One of the distinct pleasures of my life has been translating some of Handke’s work, including Voyage by Dugout, To Duration, A Journey t…

One of the outstanding poetry journals of our time.

Much of online activity related to literature involves posting quotations from novels, invariably without commentary and attributed to the b...

I cannot imagine a dinner party that would not be improved by violence.

Byung-Chul Han says in The Crisis of Narration that modernity "is animated by a belief in progress" and its narratives "radiate an aura bec...