Writers from Anne Tyler to Joan Didion and Tom McCarthy explore the possibilities and perils of remaking one’s life
October 2021
The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy review – tech-industrial sublime
This densely woven novel of cyclegraphs, MI6 agents, special effects and cybernetics is implacable and intermittently tedious, but then isn’t the world, too?
September 2021
The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy review – all work and no play
Time-and-motion studies meets motion-capture acrobatics in a hi-tech saga that’s big on detail but devoid of insight
July 2017
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy – review
Fifteen essays illuminate and revel in such culturally diverse subjects as Tristram Shandy and Zinedine Zidane
June 2017
Nicholas Lezard's choice
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy review – masterful essays
Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: illuminating Sterne, Proust and Joyce, this deft collection takes our understanding down new paths
June 2016
Remainder review – a slippery enigma
This Möbius strip of a story by Tom McCarthy is both intriguing and alienating
A freak accident leaves the protagonist with enough cash to rebuild his life in an unusual way in Omer Fast’s adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s 2001 novel
Remainder: Tom McCarthy and Omer Fast’s avant-garde explosion
Who better to film McCarthy’s highly experimental novel than a video artist who had never directed a feature before? The duo talk to Phil Hoad about antiheroes, zombie flaneurs and foreseeing the gentrification of Brixton
October 2015
The week in books
Man Booker prize 2015: one judge on the impossible task of choosing a winner
Man Booker 2015 shortlist: the stories behind the novels
September 2015
Books blog
Man Booker 2015 shortlist showcases tales of a globalised world
Though judges didn’t ‘go looking for diversity’, they found it in six challenging tales from writers of four different nationalities
July 2015
Man Booker longlist is the triumph of the new and diverse
A bracingly varied Man Booker prize longlist suggests that complaints about the whiteness of the literary world are finally being listened to, and addressed
March 2015
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy review – a brief theory of everything
Packed with daring cerebral insights and swashbuckling prose, McCarthy’s latest avant-garde novel could be about the futility of meaning. But then again…
Critical eye
Book reviews roundup: One of Us, Tears of the Rajas, and Satin Island
What the critics thought of Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us, Ferdinand Mount’s Tears of the Rajas and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy review – everything is connected
A corporate anthropologist contemplates the totality of modern existence in an ambitious avant-garde novel that fails to take flight. By James Lasdun
August 2014
Hard books for hard times: literary experimentation gains popularity
For some authors, a demanding era for publishing calls for complicated stories not cautious and conservative ones – and they're finding readers
June 2014
How technology rewrites literature
Writers including Tom McCarthy and Joe Dunthorne consider whether the coming of computers and the net has changed the way they write
March 2014
US authors take the literary prizes but British writers still pushing boundaries
As US writer George Saunders wins first Folio fiction prize, the message to young UK talent waiting in the wings is don't despair
January 2014
Small presses growing translated fiction's readership
Innovative and energetic publishers such as And Other Stories and Dalkey Archive are finding new routes to a committed audience
August 2013
Bradley Manning tells lawyer after sentencing: 'I'm going to be OK' – as it happened
Manning also given dishonorable discharge but sentence expected to be subject to immediate appeal
