From James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Nicholson Baker, the ‘circadian novel’ can pack lifetimes of experience into 24 hours
October 2018
Top 10s
Top 10 deaths in fiction
From Dickens to Woolf and Updike, novelists have taken on a dark but compelling challenge: to imagine their characters’ final experience
October 2016
Tips, links and suggestions
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
January 2015
The 100 best novels
The 100 best novels: No 68 – Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
Robert McCrum: Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece about the last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico is set to the drumbeat of coming conflict
October 2014
‘Lost’ Malcolm Lowry novel published for the first time
Under the Volcano follow-up In Ballast to the White Sea typed up from copy after manuscript was burned in a fire
August 2014
Top 10s
The top 10 restaurants and bars in modern literature
From the Restaurant at the End of the Universe to the cabman's shelter in Ulysses, chef and author Michael Gibney reviews the best eating and drinking in books
July 2014
Tips, links and suggestions
Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?
Tips, links and suggestions
Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?
November 2013
Reading group
Choose December's Reading group book: Family
More than any other month, December belongs to kinfolks – so they're the focus of our next Reading group. Which family is up to you
October 2013
Reading group
Under the Volcano: fuelling a thirst for Malcolm Lowry
Sam Jordison: This book has whetted an appetite for more Lowry – luckily there are some fantastic online resources to aid further study
September 2013
Reading group
Under the Volcano: the alchemy of alcohol
Has there been a more alcoholic book than Malcolm Lowry's tortured classic? For his antihero the Consul, booze brings tragedy, but also revelation
Reading group
Under the Volcano: dizzying filmic prose, washed down with symbolism and alcohol
Malcolm Lowry's writing certainly requires a different way of reading - but there's so much delight to be had just from moving through the pages line by line
Reading group
September's Reading group: Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
This month will be spent in the company of a modern masterpiece about the final day on Earth of a disgraced diplomat in Mexico, explains Sam Jordison
July 2013
Summer voyages
Summer voyages: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Why do writers drink?
November 2011
Under the Volcano: a modernist masterpiece
Chris Power
Malcolm Lowry's feverish novel has so many potential interpretations, reading it only once is just not enough
September 2009
Art beat
Art beat: Knitted poetry and necrorealism
Vanessa Thorpe
Vanessa Thorpe: Next week Liverpool remembers the work of novelist Malcolm Lowry, and there's a display of brutal Russian art
December 2007
A rare eruption
Lives and letters: Malcolm Lowry will always be associated with his allusive masterpiece Under the Volcano. But, argues Michael Hofmann, his other works, too, contain marvels
June 2007
Through a glass darkly
Fifty years after his death, Malcolm Lowry remains an unsurpassed chronicler of humanity's lower depths.
