What good books feature an animal?

The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Charlotte’s Web (1952), for starters (or where I started). And then Tulip in J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956); Chibi in Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat (2014); Behemoth in Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita (1967); the amazingly empathic dog-friend Lynx in Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (1963); that dead laconically opinionated crow in Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over (2024); the splendid pig Daisy in Henry Green’s Concluding (1948); the baby chicks in Clarice Lispector’s stories; and, always, the cats of Muriel Spark. Here’s Mrs. Hawkins’ advice to a would-be writer in A Far Cry from Kensington (1988):

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

And, then, a bit later in the book, Mrs. Hawkins remarks:

The book itself was exceedingly dull. But I had advised him only that a cat helps concentration, not that the cat writes the book for you.

What’s the use of apocalyptic fiction?

Alas, these days, apocalyptic fiction is way too useful! People enthralled by Fox News are electing climate-change deniers: even as the planet burns, scientists and experts are being replaced by frauds and fossil-fuel lobbyists. The fictions being sold by these liars are making for apocalypse now.

What makes good historial fiction?

When you believe it! As with The Wax Child, the forthcoming killer short, swift novel by Olga Ravn, the author of The Employees (2020). The book is narrated by the spookiest little wax doll ever (complete with its owner’s fingernails). Unnervingly believable – you can feel the fabrics and smells of 17th-century Denmark, and sense why a countess feels she’ll never end up with the other accused women, all much poorer, in the dungeon awaiting “trial,” even as her doll knows better…

I also love the special subversive spell of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s We Are Green and Trembling (2025), a wild, swashbuckling queer novel that turns inside-out the standard narrative of the conquest of the New World.  As the book starts, our hero Antonio (who has been a cabin boy, a muleteer and a conquistador) is dutifully writing a letter home to his aunt, the Mother Superior in charge of the nunnery in Spain from which he escaped as a young girl. Antonio executes one escape after another in this wild ride, while staging a one-man revolt against the system – he has deserted the army and stolen away into the jungle with two Guarani girls he’s rescued from slavery, and more changes are afoot in that magical lush forest. Cabezón Cámara is likewise undertaking a one-person revolt against all violence, conformity and tyranny, and that struggle is written right into the muscular grain of the writing.

Tell us about a novel about work.

On the Clock (2025) is a bracing plunge into generations of a working-class French family. Published when Claire Baglin was just 22, this debut novel indelibly braids together two skeins of one family story – a father who’s worked for decades at the same factory as an electrician and his daughter who slaves for a single summer in a fast food franchise. Baglin plumbs the reality of what are called “dead-end jobs,” the nuts and bolts of that, with the grease under the fingernails and the pride too. 

I also love Robert Walser’s The Assistant (1908), an utterly deranged book about an inventor’s assistant who suffers from a hilarious combination of little-to-do and an obsession with pleasing his employer: “When the master was in a jesting mood, one instantly became a poodle, as the task at hand required one to imitate this droll creature and nimbly catch all the jests and jokes in one’s mouth. When he was kind, one felt like a miserable wretch. When he was rude, one felt obliged to smile.”

And then there’s that incredible Olga Ravn novel I mentioned, The Employees, told entirely in disgruntled workers’ memos and staff reports, informing management on the frustrations of both the humans and the humanoids working on a spaceship far out in the galaxies… It’s not a trip that’s going to end well.

Why read literature in translation?

Well, the other option is to miss out on almost everything: only 5% of earthlings are native English speakers.

Tell us about a book featuring family.

In Alexis Wright’s incredible masterpiece Praiseworthy (2023) there is a crazy brother-hater named Tommyhawk, who hates his big brother Aboriginal Sovereignty, beloved by all but his own evil, demented little sibling, who dreams only of being adopted by a wealthy white lady. The siblings are amazing in Robert Walser’s The Tanners (1907), supporting one another endlessly... Also fantastic are Louisa Jepp and her grandson Laurence in Muriel Spark’s first novel The Comforters (1957) – a debut that confirms her supernatural talent and that she was likely a witch. (We meet Laurence on the first page – before our heroine Caroline starts hearing voices – in his grandmother’s room, “prying into her messy make-up drawer, patting the little bottles like a cat and naming them. She could never persuade him that this was wrong. After all it was a violation of privacy. Very often Laurence would say, ‘It would be wrong for you but it isn’t for me.’”) And there’s also that fabulous little girl, the poisoner, in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), protected at such lethal cost by her big sister. Siblings make real the weave of so many books, providing a sort of built-in warp and weft: I love the consistent, casual irritation Delia feels for her brothers in Natalia Ginzburg’s debut novel The Road to the City (1942), and also the deeply weird planetary gravitational pull of Daniel on his sister Virginia in Clarice Lispector’s The Chandelier (1946). Siblings in particular are goldmines.

Can poetry be funny?

Yep: how about Gavin Ewart’s poem “From The Atheists’ Handbook,” in its entirety: “I’d sooner put my trust in a drunken dentist than in God.” Or that useful Lawrence Ferlinghetti line:  “Don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out.” Or Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay”:

You remember too much,My mother said to me recently.Why hold onto all that?  And I said,Where can I put it down?

Or Stevie Smith’s “To an American Publisher” (also in its entirety):

You say I must write another book? But I’ve just written this one.You liked it so much that’s the reason? Read it again then.

What book crosses vital boundaries?

T. F. Powys’s super weird and compelling novel Unclay (1931) springs to mind – it’s about Death visiting an English village. A forgotten 20th-century masterpiece, it’s curiously vibrant with joie-de-vivre – in its small village, trees listen and wait, and a whole world comes alive. One spring day, the innocent clergyman Mr Hayhoe (who prefers reading Jane Austen to his Bible) meets a smartly dressed stranger on a country lane, searching the ground for something he has lost. Mr Hayhoe wonders if he might be an insurance agent, as he causes a “curious feeling of cold dread,” and asks him his name. “My name is Death,” the man replies. “A Suffolk family?” rejoins Mr Hayhoe. Mr Death has lost a vital parchment with God’s orders to “unclay” two people in the village (the evocative word Powys chooses for Death’s task of relieving people from the sad pains and burdens of life and love). Deciding to stay in the village of Little Dodder until he locates the parchment, Mr Death gets a job as the gravedigger and meets the villagers with their strange obsessions – a woman who thinks she is a camel and a man who thinks nut trees will defend him from love. And over the course of a beautiful summer, Death discovers that “Love is as strong as death” and acquires a taste for life…

Tell us about a trilogy.

Yoko Tawada’s new three-volume novel is set in a sunnily dystopian near-future. Hiruko, a climate refugee in Scandinavia, is desperate (after her home country, the Land of Sushi, has vanished into the sea) to find someone who can speak her mother tongue. As she searches, what she finds instead are wonderful friends who try to help her. Their shambolic journey starts in Scattered All Over the Earth (2018), carries on in Suggested in the Stars (2024), and will soon wrap up – even if no reader will want this crazy trip to end – with Archipelago of the Sun (all from Granta).  What’s mind-bending is how Yoko can wring so much laughter out of so sad a situation…

What can books say about nature?

There’s a very weird, century-old, and and terrifyingly prescient climate-change novel, Into the Sun (coming soon from Akoya), by the great French-Swiss author C. F. Ramuz. With a radical, polyphonic sweep (each chapter is narrated by a unique voice), Ramuz builds a shockingly moving mosaic.  He tenderly relates all the beauty of the countryside, all the strength pulled from the land, even in its doomed state. It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in the gravitational system.” Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: “Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things … And yet nothing is visible for the moment.” And, yes, at first the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, like paper lanterns. The sun is orange-red at first, then red, then black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things –  the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. It’s as if in all its beauty, the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.

What makes good erotic fiction?

I think there’s a power in wondering what’s going on in the wings, what’s unsaid (one wonders, for example, how the green sea monster lover in Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs Caliban (1982) makes love – what’s actually in his green pouch?) I guess, to me, yearning is erotic, as in Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline (1991). Or say, Jane Eyre: who can figure out how Mr Rochester casts his manly spell, yet he does, and you feel – with Jane – pulled to him. And then again, sometimes I find more obvious things a bit intoxicating, such as the “swimming” together of Dostoyevsky and his wife in Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden (1982) or the pangs of Humbert Humbert… I think this part of this Elizabeth Bishop poem, found in her papers after her death, is one of the sexier things going:

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;It is the prickling air that wakes us up.If lightning struck the house now, it would runFrom the four blue china balls on topDown the roof and down the rods all around us,And we imagine dreamilyHow the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightningWould be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of viewOf night and lying flat on one's backAll things might change equally easily,Since always to warn us there must be these blackElectrical wires dangling. Without surpriseThe world might change to something quite different,As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

What is a short story for?

A hammock?  Subway rides?  The couch?

What makes good dialogue?

It’s easier to think who makes good dialogue – William Gaddis, Keith Ridgway, Helen DeWitt, Toni Morrison, Henry Green, Marcia Douglas, Raymond Chandler, Adam Mars-Jones, César Aira, Robert Plunket, Rosemary Tonks, John Keene, Adania Shibli, Jonathan Buckley. But what makes good dialogue? I’m not sure but I have a taste for cross-grained unhappy dialogue, with people not really listening to one another – it’s so Real Life. I think Rachel Ingalls is a master of that mode. Starring one of her classic, spectacularly foul husbands, her 1987 novel In the Act starts:

As long as Helen was attending her adult education classes twice a week, everything worked out fine: Edgar could have a completely quiet house for his work, or his thinking, or whatever it was. But when the lease on the school’s building ran out, all the courses would end – the flower arranging, the intermediate French and beginning Italian, the judo, oil painting and transcendental meditation.

She told Edgar well in advance. He nodded. She repeated the information, just in case. He said, “Mm.” Over the next two weeks she mentioned the school closure at least three times. And, after she and her classmates had had their farewell party, she told him all about that, adding, “So, I’ll be at home next week. And the week after that. And so on.”

“Home?” Edgar said. “What about your adult education things?”

She went over the whole history one more time. At last he was listening. He looked straight at her and said, “Oh. That means you’ll have to find something else to occupy yourself with on those afternoons.”

“I suppose so. I might stay home and paint here.”

“I’ll be busy up in the lab.”

“I could make a kind of studio down in the cellar.”

“I’ll be working. I need absolute peace and quiet.”

“Well, painting isn’t very loud.”

“Helen,” he said, “I’d like to have the house to myself.”

She never got angry with him anymore; that is, she’d discovered that it did no good: he’d just look at her coldly as if she were exhibiting distressing habits usually encountered only among the lower species. Raising her voice – when she’d been driven to it – produced the same reaction from him. She’d learned to be argumentative in a fudgy, forgiving drone she’d found effective with the children: enough of that sound and the boredom level rose to a point where people would agree to anything. Edgar had a matching special tone for private quarrels: knowing, didactic, often sarcastic or hectoring. Whenever he used it outside the house, it made him disliked. It was a good voice for winning arguments by making other people hysterical. His hearing seemed to block off when it started.

She said, “If you’d like the house to yourself, you can have it. Maybe you wouldn’t mind fixing some supper for us while you’re here. That way, I’d have something to look forward to, soon as I get in from walking around the block five thousand times.”

“There’s no need for that.”

“OK, you can take me out. Twice a week. That’ll be nice. We could see a lot of new movies in just a month.”

“You’re being unreasonable.”

“Of course I am. I’m a woman,” she said. “You’ve already explained that to me.”

“Let’s not get into that.” .