By Maria Bregman I spent most of my twenties) ignoring romance novels. Actually, scrap that. I didn’t just ignore them. I actively looked down on…
By Maria Bregman I’ve been thinking about facial hair lately. Not in a hipster, coffee-shop-barista way, but in a “soul of the artist” way. It…
By Maria Bregman The numbers for the Helsinki Book Fair are in. 900 speakers. 17 stages over four days. You see figures like that, and…
By Maria Bregman So, the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to László Krasznahorkai. And the first question most people will ask is… who? Look, the…
By Sara Bright So Jilly Cooper is gone. And with her, it feels, goes the key to a certain room in the English house that…
By Maria Bregman To understand David Herbert Lawrence, it is perhaps best to start not with the scandal, but with the silence. Imagine a young…
By Maria Bregman There are certain books we encounter in childhood that are less like stories and more like formative experiences. They imprint themselves upon…
By Sara Bright There is a particular kind of quiet that descends with the autumn. It arrives on the first morning the air has a…
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic To read John Irving is to enter a world that is at once utterly familiar and profoundly strange.…
By Maria Bregman Language has always been a fluid, evolving entity, but the recent additions to the Cambridge Dictionary feel less like a gentle current…