How to Be a Man: On the Booker-Winning David Szalay

A few weeks ago, on one of the busy, sticky, spectacularly unpunctual trains for which my country is justly famous, I sat next to a young man around my age. He looked put-together, ambitious, very London; he was wearing a nice, clean polyester suit and had an official-looking work pass dangling round his neck. What impressed me most, though, was the intensity, the care, with which he was reading his book. He kept flicking back and forth, underlining things, taking out his phone to make additional notes.

The Prophet and the Barbarians: On Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss, as is well known, lives on top of a mountain in a little hut. It is cold on the mountain. Sometimes, when the sun is shining, he ventures out to the moss-sprung slopes to pick mushrooms, but most of the time he just sits indoors, reading the Tarot, listening to the prophecies blown to him on the icy winds, the curtains of rain. He spends his evenings huddled by the fire, studying the works of the great heresiarchs: Basilides, Swedenborg, Clung. Only occasionally does he venture down into the valleys to meet the toothless hordes, usually when there has been another Taylor Swift concert or another presidential election.

The French Exception: On Laurent Binet and French Literature

If you are a diligent reader of the novels flowing out of the Anglosphere for the last five or ten years, there are a number of reasons why French literary culture might strike you as rather strange. First, French writers seem to be unusually responsive to current events: while we were all writing our neat little autofictions about that time someone was mean to us in our MFA program, Michel Houellebecq was concocting terrorist attacks and farmers’ rebellions with such sociological acuity that one or two of them actually came true.