Laurence Sterne
Mia Gallagher: “The imagination is a way of getting away from things that might be tough in reality.” Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne
Mia Gallagher: A decade spent making strange lost worlds

Mia Gallagher’s debut novel, Hellfire, was a resounding critical success – one of the best debuts of the year, according to the Observer – which saw (...)

Javier Marías at his home in Madrid. “I love Swift, Wilde and Heaney.” Photograph: Francis Tsang/Getty Images
Javier Marías: ‘General Franco always seemed ridiculous: a short, ugly man with a shrill voice’
  • Books
  • March 15, 2016, 06:00

The year 1980 was an exhilarating time to be alive in Spain. General Francisco Franco had died five years earlier, in November 1975. There followed a(...)

Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)
From Bram to Brooklyn: 10 great films adapted from Irish literature

Even the doziest domestic observer will have noticed that Irish cinema is passing through an unprecedented period of fecundity. Others are blowing ou(...)

Fintan O’Toole: “I thought perhaps JG Farrell might have been excluded on the basis that he was half-Irish, but so was Laurence Sterne, and Elizabeth Bowen, CS Lewis, Joyce Cary, Jonathan Swift and Iris Murdoch, none of whom was British, got in. Puzzling”
Fintan O’Toole’s top British novels

I was one of 82 foreigners enlisted for BBC Culture’s poll of the best 100 British novels. Each of us was asked to pick a top ten. Only half of mine (...)

David Butler’s latest novel City of Dis is published by New Island.
David Butler: ‘Great writers enrich experience, even the mundane’
  • Books
  • February 3, 2015, 15:00

David Butler is the author of three novels: The Last European (Wynkin de Worde 2005); The Judas Kiss (New Island 2012); City of Dis (New Island 2014);(...)

Portrait of Nikolai Leskov by Valentin Serov 1894.
Maverick of the Russian masters

‘Here is God’s plenty,” remarked the English poet John Dryden of The Canterbury Tales. A similar comment could apply to the work of the 19th-century R(...)