Literature- Page 5

Craig Raine’s collected essays, More Dynamite, is a collection that blows holes in fellow poets’ work, and ends leaving the poetry landscape very battered and bleak Craig Raine has a passionate love

Two new books about reading are polar opposites. Alexander McCall Smith's musings are platitudinous while Nick Hornby reads like someone you’d love to chat with until the sun came up

Characterisation and a sense of place have been sacrificed for a magical realist atmosphere in Peter Ackroyd’s latest novel, Three Brothers

Perhaps the Booker judges awarded Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries the prize to ensure that their getting through all 836 exhausting pages of her frustrating novel wasn’t in vain

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel displays all the bravura imagination of the rest of his oeuvre, but sees the elusive writer finally coming to terms with the world

George Herbert is the poet's poet. John Drury's biography is at times infuriatingly simplistic, but succeeds in its scholarship

The Dark Road is a novel that transmits the reality of human suffering at the hands of the Chinese government

MaddAddam occasionaly misses the mark, but at its best is an existential voyage and an exploration of storytelling itself