We live in an apocalyptic moment, when something truly hideous, long hidden just beneath the surface of everyday life, is breaking forth from the ground. The torture, rape, massacre, and kidnapping of roughly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 was only …
Did Virginia Woolf write the first trans novel?
“Yesterday morning I was in despair… I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: …
People are still being buried alive
I hadn’t given the dangers of being buried alive much thought before my visit to an Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia. I knew what every schoolchild knows — that some Victorians were so terrified at the prospect of …
Stephen King’s boomer propaganda
Of all the plagues on contemporary literary culture, the absolute worst is the notion that depiction equals endorsement: that every protagonist in every book is just a thinly-veiled authorial insert; that evil characters doing evil things reflect the morals of …
The problem with beautiful women
A group of little girls sit in a circle and play a game called “Honestly”. It’s a sort of crowdsourced truth-or-dare, except it’s only “truth”, and there’s only one question: Am I beautiful?
The asker closes her eyes, and the …
How I lost my sexuality
In hospital, one of the things that is never mentioned, and there really is no reason for it to be, is sex. There are no jokes, double entendres, or exchanged looks. The place is antiseptic in all senses. Of the …
The snake within the suffragette movement
A gardener and a suffragette meet by chance on a road by the River Thames. He is carrying a flower-pot, and she is on her way to burn down a house. So starts Stella Benson’s satirical debut novel I Pose …
Why men need bad-boy literature
In so many ways, the “crisis of masculinity” is a crisis of imagination. We have a vivid, if generalised, image of its victim: the lost boy of modernity surrounded with his clichés of video games, online porn and Jordan Petersons. …
Why you should read like a child
Back in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant grandly described the Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed childishness”. But we live, we’re told, in an age desperate to reverse it. Grown-ups, apparently, aren’t what they used to be. At a …
The cursed outposts of America’s empire
There is a distinct literary genre associated with imperial peripheries. In Britain, it is known as Greeneland, the world of Graham Greene — those dusty forgotten outposts where morality is suspended, the political illusions of the metropole are laid bare, …
Did David Foster Wallace predict the future?
Infinite Jest is frequently attention-repellent. David Foster Wallace’s brick-sized novel is physically challenging, an 800g book that forces you to flick back and forth to the errata. This is not optional. Major plot points hinge on throwaway glosses.
I was …
Milan Kundera’s last joke
Milan Kundera had the questionable good fortune to live through what seemed like the historic victory of his defence of the individual against the state — only to see his life’s work become shockingly relevant again before his death on …
Eat, Pray, Get Cancelled
This week has brought mixed news for beleaguered Ukrainians. Their army’s counteroffensive is taking a heavy toll on its own troops; there have been damaging missile strikes on the cities of Kryvyi Rih and Odesa; the breach in the Nova …
Mary Gaitskill: How a chatbot charmed me
If you think it is a strange, perhaps vexing idea to publish a “conversation” between a tech-ignorant writer of fiction and an AI chatbot, you are not alone. When my editor at UnHerd suggested the idea back in March, I …
Is anyone at home in Northern Ireland?
A few months ago, driven by some romantic impulse, I moved my family into a derelict farmhouse on a steep and remote Ulster hillside, recreating a rural Irish lifestyle my maternal grandparents eagerly fled at the first possible opportunity. Visiting …
