I am an award-winning writer and editor living in London. Aside from books, I sometimes write essays and reviews. For the last few years I’ve been working on a history of Cyprus, published by Bloomsbury in 2024.
A dazzling literary detective story
Dostoevsky, it must be said, was no saint. He was famously cantankerous; he had at least one affair during his unhappy first marriage; he was also ruinously addicted to roulette. But he had a brilliant mind, at ease with contradiction, and was determined to use literature to pursue the moral consequences of the ideas that … Continue reading
Mary Gaitskill: a reckoning
The world is beginning to catch up with Mary Gaitskill. In the UK, there has been renewed interest following Serpent’s Tail’s 2019 publication of her 15,000 word New Yorker story, ‘This is Pleasure’, as a slim standalone volume last year,[1] followed in 2020 by the publication of her Granta essay ‘Lost Cat’ in an equally … Continue reading
The Year Without Atmosphere
It has been a year without micro-expressions. Those little momentary flickers across someone’s face that tell you everything, absolutely everything. So, mediated by a screen, you blunder on, or you nod heavily, willing your eyebrows and the creases around your eyes to do more work. You stoop to chat through your twelve-inch window like a … Continue reading
On Eliot’s translation of Spinoza
One of the most illuminating curiosities to have emerged from the study of George Eliot’s early writing is the amount of time she spent engaging with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. She began her life of letters as Marian Evans, translating David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus, which owes a debt to Spinoza, while still in her twenties. … Continue reading
I am the book murderer
We should never bisect the things we love. Friends, nations, puppies. I would argue an exception for pizza. But over the last 24 hours I have found that almost everyone on the internet agrees we should not chop books in half, even if they are very long. It started when my colleague saw half a … Continue reading
Whining into the void
This year, Faber is reissuing five novels by Thomas Bernhard, who rose to fame as a thorn in the side of the Austrian establishment, though he comes down to us as “Austria’s finest postwar writer”, in the words of Gabriel Josipovici. The first two of these reissues, Concrete (1982) and Extinction (1986), were released in March, with beautiful abstract … Continue reading
How to win at literature
On the evening of 5th July 2018, carefully selected guests filtered into Buckingham Palace for dinner with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. You might say that the invitation list had started to be compiled fifty years previously. There were ten authors present, oddly biased towards the first half of the alphabet: Julian Barnes, Paul Beatty, Peter … Continue reading
Alex Christofi 