Stephen Phelan

In the early 1990s, Susannah Clarke started making notes for a story. She was teaching English to Fiat automobile executives in Turin, and then to equally “sweet and overworked” Basque business types in Bilbao. But she was also thinking idly about the English winter, and the picture on a jigsaw puzzle she used to have, which showed two old gentlemen in 19th century wigs, reading books in a huge library.

THE street where Jimmy McGovern lives is not like The Street he writes about. His house is surrounded by tall trees. They look best, he thinks, at this time of year, most of them having turned to gold. Leafiness is not the only difference between this side of Liverpool and the postwar dockside where he grew up. But from his perspective, McGovern hasn’t moved far, or changed much.

SUKKWAN Island, Caribou Island, Dirt and Goat Mountain. For a while it seemed that David Vann was not only building a body of work – and quickly, at a rate of almost one book a year – but also drawing some kind of map.

CONSIDER the macaw. The brightest bird in the rainforest comes in three main colour combinations – blue and yellow, red and green, and the particularly eye-popping scarlet macaw, its luminous plumage tinted with the full spectrum and tapering to iridescent golden tail feathers.

AN army brat born in Munich and raised on US bases in the Philippines, Japan, and the outskirts of Washington D.C., Denis Johnson had seen the world before he published a word. He started pretty early though, with his first poetry collection at the age of 19, and has since written stage plays, crime thrillers, foreign correspondence, dirty-realist short stories and post-apocalyptic fictions, a monumental fugue of a Vietnam War novel, Tree Of Smoke, and a luminous Old West novella, Train Dreams.

ON a freezing evening in March 2012, a sombre party of architects, planners, and local organisers met for dinner in the small Japanese port town of Ogatsu. Properly speaking, the town did not really exist any more, having been annihilated by the tsunami that struck the north-east coast of Japan’s main island, Honshu, almost exactly one year earlier.

THE same sun that rose in the Far East this morning is now setting on the hills above the Scottish Highland village of Tomatin. It glints along the blade of Jock Brocas’s sword and casts his shadow on a gold and purple landscape. In this light, Brocas looks as much like a mythic Japanese warrior as he ever will.

THE terracotta warriors came to Dublin when I was a kid. A small detachment of them, anyway – perhaps a dozen life-sized clay soldiers from an army of thousands. Most were infantrymen, arranged in marching formation. A couple were cavalry, mounted on sepulchral horses and frozen in mid-trot. Their eyes were open, their faces angled and shadowed in a way that made them seem splendidly charismatic, if also potentially wicked. They didn’t quite look alive, but you wouldn’t want to turn your back on them either.

HARUKI Murakami has nothing to say. The author admits this himself, and often claims to be a bit baffled by his ongoing compulsion to write, given that he has no particular points to make, nor even any stories to tell. He gets up at four every morning, sits down to his desk, and starts composing… Read more »

To win the Pritzker Prize for architecture is like winning a Nobel Prize for literature, they say. The chosen laureate ascends into the pantheon of their art, and critics of that art take to second-guessing the jury’s decision. Two years ago, when the relatively young and little-known Wang Shu became the first Chinese national to receive the Pritzker, his selection was widely read as a political statement, though the meaning of that statement was open to question.