Richard Gwyn

Reflections on Insomnia (Part 1)

    As an interlude from the series of ‘poems to stay at home with’, I am posting an essay inspired by my reading of two recent books on insomnia: The Shapeless Unease, by Samantha Harvey, and Insomnia… Read More

That obscure object of the author’s desire

Three and half years ago on this blog I wrote about Adam Phillips’ book ‘Missing Out’, which explains how not getting what you think you want might actually be what you want. In the current issue of the… Read More

Confabulation, or making shit up

Post is delivered erratically in the village, and two issues of the London Review of Books land in my letter box on the same day. I read one of them, and am struck by a sentence in an article by the excellent… Read More

The use and abuse of similitude: the case of Pnin (continued)

After the party at his house, and being informed that is being fired by Waindell College and replaced by another Professor of Russian – who is in fact the nefarious narrator of the novel we are reading –… Read More

The past ain’t what it used to be

To Birmingham. On the train I read an article in the London Review of Books about memory and the ways in which we configure the past: our own past, in particular. This is a matter close to my… Read More

At Swim-Two-Birds and an absence of frantic sorrow

  My favourite novel when I was nineteen years of age and had just moved to London was At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien and it was with some pleasure that I dipped into an article by Colm Tóibín in… Read More

How to talk about books you haven’t read (and how to write like Kafka)

    I wake up early, make tea, return to bed, and start reflecting on the many, many books that I have not read, that I will in all probability never read. In an attempt to console myself… Read More