Angel Kelly is an innocent abroad. To be specific, he is on a slaver bound for Brazil at the close of the eighteenth century, thinking to put his inheritance to fine use by founding a utopian ...

If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient Mesopotamia ought to be famous for its astonishing legacy of poetry and prose. For ...

The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the raw isolation of humankind”. She then retreated to an isolation of her own ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

In recent decades, critical thinking about the “liveliness” of the natural world has gained momentum. Anthropologists and Indigenous communities have articulated visions of an indivisible world ...

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio comes a decade after his version of the Inferno. That was set in the University of Essex; this is set on Mersea Island, which makes one wonder: where will his ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...

In Call Me by Your Name (2007), the book for which André Aciman is best known, the central lovers, Oliver and Elio, meet up years after a passionate affair that took place in Italy in the mid-1980s.

According to Scott G. Bruce, our “inner demons” represent the “last vestige” of more traditional ideas of an infernal hierarchy. The texts in his Penguin Book of Demons predate this inward turn, ...