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Literary criticism

February 2025

  • Montreal architecture is the focus of Canadian author Kev Lambert’s award-winning novel.

    In brief: May Our Joy Endure; The Future of the Novel; Literature for the People – review

    A sharp satire set in the world of architecture; a fresh take on present-day fiction; and the rags-to-riches history of the Macmillan publishing brothers

January 2025

  • Portrait of the author David Lodge at his home in Birmingham, 31/03/2008 photographed by Sophia Evans

    David Lodge obituary

    Booker prize-nominated author and critic who was known for his Catholic novels and satires on academic life

December 2024

  • detail from The Temptation and Fall of Eve, 1808, by William Blake

    Book of the day
    What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade review – the afterlife of Paradise Lost

    The writers, philosophers and politicians who have raided Milton’s epic poem for inspiration
  • photo of man with green background

    ‘How many dead Palestinians are enough?’ The unbearable prescience of the late poet Refaat Alareer

    The author and academic was killed in an Israeli airstrike a year ago. A posthumous collection of his work, If I Must Die, tells the stories of Gaza in a plea for change
  • Edwin Frank, founder of the New York Review of Books, Quo Vardis, Dean street, for New Review, 21/10/2019. Sophia Evans for The Observer

    Book of the day
    Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel review – 100 years of magical thinking

    Edwin Frank’s finely judged survey of modern fiction from Dostoevsky to Sebald will have you reaching for novels you hadn’t thought about in years

November 2024

  • An engraving of Satan tempting Eve inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    Book of the day
    What in Me Is Dark review – the incredible afterlife of Paradise Lost

    Orlando Reade’s fascinating study of John Milton’s famous work, through the eyes of myriad readers from Malcolm X to white supremacists, shows how it has provoked the widest range of responses and interpretations

August 2024

  • A young WH Auden on a dock at Cherry Grove on Fire Island, New York.

    Observer book of the week
    The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness review – a deep dive into the poet’s early years

    Nicholas Jenkins’s exhaustive volume – part biography, part literary study, part marathon – draws together the many influences on the young writer, from the first world war to his fascination with the lead mines of the Pennines

July 2024

  • A black and white image of Marlon Brando in a cap-sleeved T-shirt.

    Book of the day
    Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America by Ralf Webb review – sex and the literary lions

  • Edna O'Brien at her home in London.

    Edna O’Brien: her fearlessness paved the way for today’s female Irish writers

  • Thom Gunn, in his early 40s, with dark hair and beard, wearing a tie-dye vest in what looks like a hotel bar with a chandelier in the background

    Book of the day
    Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life by Michael Nott review – the poet laureate of Haight-Ashbury

  • Frederick Crews posing for a photo at his home in Berkeley, California on August 14, 2017.

    Frederick Crews obituary

May 2024

  • Paul Auster.

    ‘Getting a book idea feels like a buzz in the head’: Paul Auster – a life in quotes

    The author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died at the age of 77. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life

April 2024

  • Deirdre Madden, Hanif Abdurraqib and Kathryn Scanlan.

    Eight writers win ‘freedom and time to write’ with $175,000 Windham-Campbell prizes

    Honours that span fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry go to practitioners around the world including novelist Deirdre Madden and poet Jen Hadfield

March 2024

  • Portrait Of Lord Byron<br>Colorized engraving shows a portrait of British poet and writer George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), early 1800s. (Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images)

    Byron: A Life in Ten Letters review – dispatches from a lusty life

  • illustration by Bill Bragg

    ‘End of the world vibes’: why culture can’t stop thinking about apocalypse

February 2024

  • A book on Donald Trump by New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman is displayed at a bookstore.

    The Washington Book review: Carlos Lozada on Trump and other targets

    The New York Times critic won a Pulitzer for a reason – he knows better than anyone how to read the US political scene
  • Portrait of the British poet known as Lord Byron.

    Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer review – wrong but Romantic

    An impressively rounded portrait of the raucous and manipulative poet, venereal scars and all
  • Hannah Arendt in 1949.

    Observer book of the week
    We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience – review

    The rise of rightwing populists has sparked renewed interest in the political philosopher’s writing on totalitarianism, and Lyndsey Stonebridge’s timely biography is compelling and original

December 2023

  • Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem in France in November 1968.

    African writer ruined by row with Graham Greene finally gets chance to shine

  • One of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

    Book of the day
    The Notebook by Roland Allen review – notes on living

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