Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(British, 1955– ) McAuley is a research biologist by profession; his science fiction began appearing in 1984. Begin with Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988), in which a telepathic astronomer investigating an uninhabited planet becomes aware of the presence of a powerful intelligence. Eternal Light (1991) finds Earth ruled by a religious cult called the Witnesses in the aftermath of an interst…
(Irish, 1955– ) Patrick McCabe's characters are irrepressible, they make you laugh and sympathize no matter what horrible acts they commit. His first-person voices pull the reader in and make it impossible to distance yourself when the violence erupts (and it will!). There is a huge pleasure for the reader in the exuberance and easy rhythms of McCabe's language. His books are …
(British, 1949– ) The success of this series about Botswana's only female detective, seems, on first glance, unlikely. There's little death, sex, or violence, the portly protagonist does little investigating (relying rather on woman's intuition and common sense), and the plots are intercut short stories. Glance again and the appeal is obvious. The style is undemanding, …
(US, 1933– ) Cormac McCarthy did not achieve fame until the publication of his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992), but when it came attention turned to its predecessor, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). This book is set in the south-west borderland between the United States and Mexico, and follows the experiences of the (unnamed) kid, as he gets involved with…
(US, 1912–89) McCarthy was a critic and an intellectual, and there is a satirical objectivity in her fiction, which revealed women's perspectives on previously taboo subjects. Her best-known novel, The Group (1963), observes eight women graduates seeking careers or husbands, taking lovers and (rather graphically) discovering birth control. The characters struggle to make sense of a w…
(British, 1953– ) McCrum was born in Cambridge, where he was educated at the University, before becoming an editor and writer. In the Secret State (1980), his first novel, is a good introduction to the unsettling world of political corruption and psychological isolation featured in much of his writing. As traditional values decay, the book's disenchanted bureaucrats cynically manipul…
(US, 1917–67) Born in Columbus, Georgia, McCullers suffered from an extraordinary range of illnesses throughout her life, which finally caused her to relinquish the idea of a musical career. She writes almost obsessively about outsiders. Often, as in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 1940), the outsider is a young girl nearing puberty. Mick Kelly wants to become a famous pianist, but sees that a…
(British, 1955– ) Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and read English at Oxford before working as a journalist. She has written two crime series which feature female protagonists; the Kate Brannigan novels, set in Manchester, are characterized by a witty and engaging style and the Lindsay Gordon novels feature the first ‘out’ British lesbian detective. McDermi…
(British, 1948– ) Ian McEwan has been at the forefront of English fiction since the mid-1970s. Known mainly as a novelist, he also writes short stories and screenplays. His pared-down style and even delivery maintain a sense of distance, and a McEwan book is typically a novel of ideas, engaging the intellect rather more than the feelings. Often he is concerned with the split between materia…
(Irish, 1934– ) McGahern's novels are evocative, slow-paced stories which portray the political and social development of rural Ireland in simple, often poetic prose. Begin with Amongst Women (1990), where the three Moran sisters attempt to re-create the festive Monaghan Day, anxiously evoking, for their father's sake, an idyllic past that never actually existed. As the narrat…
(British, 1950– ) The son of a former head psychiatrist at an asylum, Patrick McGrath made his name with Grotesque (1989), a blend of the traditional country house mystery and contemporary horror. Centred on the unsettling events that surround the arrival of a new butler at a run-down manor, where the head of the house is busy reconstructing a dinosaur skeleton, the book was quickly labelle…
(British, 1936– ) A Scottish teacher and poet, William McIlvanney's first crime novel, Laidlaw (1977), won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger. He had already achieved a strong reputation in mainstream writing, winning the Whitbread award in 1975 for Docherty, a son's view of his father's courage and endurance during the depression. Laidlawis a dark and …
(Indian, 1943– ) Mehta was brought up in India and educated at Cambridge. She now divides her time between London, India, and New York, where her husband is a leading publisher. She made her name with a non-fiction work, Karma Cola, a scathingly satirical examination of the invasion of India by consumer culture. Of her two novels, by far the more notable is A River Sutra (1993), a jewel-lik…
(US, 1819–91) At the age of 20, Herman Melville shipped on board a packet ship bound for Liverpool. Though traumatic, his experience as a deck hand instilled in him the love of the sea that was to take him on further voyages and inspire much of his work, including the magnificent whaling epic, Moby Dick (1851). Though massive and endlessly digressive, there is no better introduction to Melv…
(Guyanese, 1941– ) Melville's collection of stories, Shape-Shifter (1990), picked up major literary awards. The characters, lively and odd and often malevolent, stay in the mind. ‘You Left the Door Open’, about an abuser summoned by the imagination of the victim, is terrifying. The settings, whether in Guyana or London, are sharply observed, the language so full of colo…
(British, 1960– ) Michael writes about the lives of northern working-class women with compassion and accuracy, exploring the impoverishments and tragedies of their lives but never descending into grimness, sentiment, or political posturing. Her heroines are vividly real. Start with All the Dark Air (1996) which traces the pregnancy of Julie, living in a rubble-strewn wreck of a terrace with…
(British, 1960– ) Miller's three novels to date have been extravagantly praised for their lucid prose, sensuous imagery, and accomplished grasp of narrative. Ingenious Pain (1997) concerns James Dyer, born with a freakish inability to feel pain or emotion, progressing through society in search of his own humanity. Casanova (1998) finds the great lover in London in 1763, frustrated by…
(US, 1891–1980) Aged 40, Miller left America and settled in Paris, determined to become a serious writer; he certainly became a notorious one. His first novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934), was published in Paris and banned everywhere else until the early 1960s, as was its successor, Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Written in a confessional, exuberant, pell-mell style, the books chronicle Miller�…
(US, 1943– ) Miller's first novel, The Good Mother (1986), is the story of a child-custody battle lost by the mother due to a brief but, in the eyes of the court, damning incident between her child and her partner. Miller's later novels tend to revolve around similar unexpected but inevitable events and their consequences, like the tragic death of the young au pair in For Love…
(British, 1954– ) Mills came to public notice in 1998, when he became ‘the first bus driver to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize’ for his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts. The faintly patronizing publicity surrounding the book (the literary establishment treating him as a curiosity) unfortunately deflected attention from the work itself; The Restraint of Beasts is a pecu…
(Japanese, 1925–70) Mishima's autobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1949) describes his own sexual confusion as well as the chaos of post-war Japan. Bitterly ashamed of Japan's renunciation of her imperial past, Mishima founded a paramilitary society called the (Emperor's) Shield Society in the late 1960s. In ritual manner, precisely described in his short story …
(British, 1969– ) Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), is an intricate tapestry of interwoven stories set in China, Japan, Mongolia, London, St Petersburg, and Hong Kong. Though each has integrity as a stand-alone story, often with mesmerizing voices carrying the narrative, the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Through occasional interfaces (sightings of a charact…
(British, 1948– ) Moggach writes short stories and novels, some of which have been transferred to television. She chronicles all aspects of contemporary British life. In See saw (1997) the Prices’ comfortable family life slowly unravels when their eldest daughter is kidnapped by a couple who believe them to be wealthy. This is further complicated by the relationship that is formed be…
(US 1934– ) The son of a Kiowa father and a part-Cherokee mother, Momaday grew up among his father's people in Oklahoma and among pueblo Indians in New Mexico, where his parents worked as teachers. He is an accomplished poet, essayist, autobiographer, and painter as well as a renowned novelist. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel House Made of Dawn (1968), a shattered Second Wo…
(British, 1939– ) Moorcock is a hugely prolific and popular author of science fiction novels. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as the editor of the New Worlds magazine whose work was much influenced by the psychedelic drug-oriented culture of the period, and which published, among others, Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard. Moorcock wrote a number of books in which Jerry Cornelius is th…
(British/Canadian, 1921–99) Born in Belfast, Moore served in North Africa and Europe in the Second World War, then worked for the United Nations before emigrating to Canada in 1948. He adopted Canadian citizenship and lived in California until his death. His work is wide-ranging and intensely involving: begin with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955). The heroine is a lonely, r…
(Anglo-Irish, 1852–1933) In his day, George Moore was regarded as a writer every bit as scandalous as Bret Easton Ellis in our own. Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, he studied painting in Paris as a young man, where he discovered the uncompromising, naturalistic, anti-romantic novels of French writers such as Zola. He introduced their techniques into his own novels, beginning with A …
(US, 1957– ) Moore is best known for her collections of short stories. In Self Help (1985) she emphasizes her characters’ neuroses and obsessions by playfully using the language of popular self-help philosophies in contemporary America. Her stories are finely crafted, using moments in ordinary lives to draw together whole lifetimes of disappointment and loss. Although her tone is wry…
(Italian, 1907–90) Born Alberto Pincherle in Rome, Moravia was also a journalist and noted cultural commentator. His novels and stories concern politics, psychology, and especially the erotic, and are filled with amoral, macho characters generally alienated from the teeming Roman world around them. They are written in a cool and detached prose. The Woman of Rome (1947), his first commercial…
(US, 1931– ) Toni Morrison was born in Ohio of working-class parents. Her novels are set in African-American communities, and she has explored both their sustaining and their self-destructive qualities. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), we see the impact of cultural icons (a blonde doll, Shirley Temple) from a black child's perspective, and explore the close correlation betw…
(British, 1923– ) Born in London and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, Mortimer has combined his career as a barrister with his success as a novelist and playwright. Begin with some of the stories featuring his best-known creation, the irascible barrister Horace Rumpole. Eccentrically on the side of the angels, his shrewd triumphs in many curious cases are recorded in such collections …
(British, 1923– ) Mosley's complex novels are serious and morally questioning, sometimes told in narrative fragments; their subjects are politics, science, and religion. This daunting combination is rendered palatable, however, by the relationships and human emotions with which his books also deal. The change from the realism of his early work to a more experimental style was signall…
(US, 1952– ) Nominated by US President Bill Clinton as his favourite mystery writer, Walter Mosley has used the traditional format of the private-eye novel to produce a revealing picture of the black experience in America. Spanning three decades, his series featuring Easy Rawlins and his psychopathic friend Mouse explores the racial and political tensions of Los Angeles, while remaining fir…
(Canadian, 1931– ) Munro writes short stories set in rural and semi-rural southern Ontario, where she grew up and now lives. She has been compared to Chekhov and Proust, but the brilliance of her stories is unique. They are set in a small, intimately known world (just as Jane Austen's novels have restricted settings) and they explore lives and characters with piercing insight. Their …
( Japanese, 1949– ) World-class novelist, translator (though not so far of his own work), and social commentator, Murakami ranks as one of the most fascinating Japanese writers available to the West. Surreal, homely, macabre, obsessed with the great issues of love, sex, and death, he twists reality, time, and memory to create worlds that pull the reader inside them and then proceed to pull …
(Irish, 1919–99) Few post-war novelists have divided critics as sharply as has Iris Murdoch. Admirers point to the imaginative generosity, the playfulness allied to fundamental seriousness, and the seductive readability in her work. Detractors accuse her of whimsy, artificiality, and affected melodrama. She was one of the few modern writers to have constantly measured herself—even th…
(Austrian, 1880–1942) Born in Klagenfurt, Austria, Robert Musil trained as a military officer, a scientist, and a philosopher before coming to his vocation as a novelist. He wrote stories, fables, and two plays, but is best known as the author of The Man without Qualities (1930–43), a lifelong work regarded as one of the masterpieces of European literature, despite remaining unfinish…
(Russian/US, 1899–1977) Born in St Petersburg to an aristocratic family with estates (grandfather Minister of Justice to the Tsar, grandmother a baroness), Nabokov's privileged future was curtailed by the 1917 Revolution; after studying at Cambridge he lived a migrant life in Berlin and Paris, before fleeing the Nazis in 1940 to settle in the United States. His early novels we…
(Trinidadian, 1932– ) V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, into an Indian Brahmin family. He is much admired abroad and much criticized in the Anglophone Caribbean where his characterization of Caribbean people is seen to be one-dimensional. But few deny that he is a major writer. His masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), is the fullest portrait we have of a East Indian family in the pr…
(Indian, 1906–2001) Narayan, one of the first internationally successful Indian novelists to write in English, was renowned for his creation of Malgudi, the remote, self-enclosed fictional town where most of his novels and short stories are set. Taken to be representative of rural southern India, Malgudi is relatively sheltered from political disturbance and social change, and there is a ti…
(US, 1950– ) Naylor was born into a black working-class family from the rural South, and became a sort of street preacher before enrolling at Brooklyn College aged 25. The characters in her novels live out their lives in troubled but distinctive black communities of both rich and poor. Begin with Mama Day (1988), an unusual love-story which moves from New York to the imaginary offshore isla…
‘o (Kenyan, 1938– ) Ngugi's writing concerns itself with the struggle for Kenyan independence. The political message of his play, I Will Marry When I Want (1977) led to his arrest and detention without trial in 1977. In the same year he renounced the use of the colonizer's language (English) and committed himself to writing only in his native tongue (Kikuyu). Weep Not, …
(Charles Nordhoff, US, 1887–1947, and James Norman Hall, US, 1887–1951) Captain Nordhoff and Lieutenant Hall met while they were flying French planes in the First World War. After the war they formed a writing partnership and took one of the most celebrated shipboard mutinies ever for their subject matter. Mutiny on the Bounty (1932) is a well-researched, gripping adventure story, de…
(US, 1938– ) Oates is fascinated by violence of all kinds. In Them (1969), which won the 1970 National Book Award, the main character, Maureen Wendall, whom Oates states is based on a student she taught at the University of Detroit, faces conflicts and challenges as she struggles to cut free of her grim, poverty-stricken roots. Wonderland (1971) traces the fate of a boy, Jesse, lone survivo…
(British, 1914–2000) Patrick O'Brian is a writer of sea-going Napoleonic war novels in the tradition of C. S. Forester's Hornblower. His heroes are Jack Aubrey, the bluff English navy captain, and Steven Maturin, his Irish ship's surgeon; a more complicated character who struggles with an addiction to laudanum whilst pursuing interests that range from natural history to…
(Irish, 1932– ) O'Brien was born in a small village in Co. Clare. After marriage and the birth of two sons she moved to her current home of London, where she began writing and got divorced. Begin with The Country Girls (1960), for the film of which O'Brien later wrote the screenplay. Though drawing on the poverty and narrowness of her Catholic upbringing, it is a witty and exu…
(Irish, 1911–66) ‘Flann O'Brien’ was one of several pseudonyms adopted by Brian O’ Nolan while working as a senior civil servant in Dublin; as Myles na Gopaleen he contributed a long-running humorous column to the Irish Times. At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) was recognized as a modern classic only on its reissue in 1960, belatedly hailed for its comic boldness and sophi…
(Irish, 1963– ) As well as being a novelist and short-story writer O'Connor is an astute commentator on the Irish male at home and abroad. He worked for the British Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, the setting for Desperadoes (1994) where Johnny Little goes missing and his divorced parents try to find out more about his disappearance. O'Connor's writing deftly balances t…
(Irish, 1900–91) ‘Sean O'Faolain’ was the pseudonym of John Whelan, a one-time director of Republican publicity who later became a distinguished editor and biographer, and was widely regarded as one of Ireland's finest short-story writers. His works are both lyrical and realistic, portraying the clash between Catholic and secular values in Irish society, often wi…
(British, 1972– ) O'Farrell's first novel, After You'd Gone (2000), met with rapturous reviews. Slipping between different characters, times and voices, the novel centres on Alice who is lying in a coma after a suicide attempt. Gradually the stories of Alice's passionate love for her partner John, of her mother's complicated and secretive life, and of a wi…
(Irish, 1897–1984) O'Flaherty was born on the Aran Islands, fought in the First World War and then for the Republican cause. His first successful novel, The Informer (1925), powerfully conveys the Dublin slums and the dynamics of Republican circles; its protagonist is the powerful but limited Gypo, who betrays an IRA man for the £20 reward and is then pursued himself. O'…
(British, 1968– ) The Booker-shortlisted Our Fathers (1999) gives us three generations of a Scots family: Hugh Bawn, once ‘Mr Housing’ responsible for the tower blocks which swept away Glasgow tenements; his son, Robert, alcoholic, depressed, and abusive; his grandson, Jamie, living in England in a career which undoes everything Hugh tried to achieve. If you've ever won…
(US, 1905–70) After doing numerous unskilled jobs, O'Hara became a journalist in New York. His varied experiences coupled with his proficiency as a writer produced novels and short stories about the country-club set in suburban Pennsylvania as well as urban tales of petty gangsters and call-girls. Start with Butterfield 8 (1935), which is based on a real murder. It is the sad story o…
(Nigerian, 1959– ) Most of Okri's fiction explores the unscrupulous politics of contemporary Nigeria and the resilience of the African people. In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for The Famished Road (1991), a magical novel about the spirit child, Azaro, who glides between the real and imagined world. Set against a crisis of Nigerian democracy, the novel was widely celebrated …
(Canadian, 1943– ) Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje moved to Britain in 1953, and now lives in Canada. He is well known as a poet, and his fictional prose is intensely poetic. The English Patient (1992, joint Booker Prize winner) tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in a crumbling Italian monastery as the Second World War comes to an end—the exhausted nurse, Hana; the…
(British, 1903–50) Orwell was one of the most influential English writers of the twentieth century. His real name was Eric Blair, which he dropped when he started writing seriously. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a social documentary about his true-life experiences doing menial jobs for a pittance. The change of name is significant. It signalled the shedding of…
(US, 1928– ) Ozick is an unabashedly literary writer, but her work is nevertheless firmly rooted in everyday details, especially those related to Jewish culture and to her native New York City. Although she draws on a wide array of sources—Jewish theology, the biography of the British writer George Eliot, the writings of the Polish surrealist Bruno Schulz—her fiction focuses o…
(US, 1922– ) Paley has lived and worked in New York, the city and its multi-ethnic character being integral to her stories, which reflect her Russian-Jewish heritage as well as urban realities. Her collections are vivid and entertaining, showing her fine ear for dialogue, and often concern women trying to survive and raise children, with or without men. The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)…
(US, 1947– ) V. I. Warshawski (Vic) is the private eye heroine of Paretsky's novels and was one of the female sleuths who helped redefine the genre. Tough, streetwise, intelligent, and fiercely independent, she tackles the cases that come her way with gusto, often to the dismay of her close friends Lotty and Max and her neighbour Mr Contreras, co-owner of Vic's dog, Peppy. War…
(US, 1893–1967) At 23 Dorothy Parker was hired by the fashion magazine Vogue as a caption writer. Very quickly her bright talent as a penetrating observer and wickedly comic satirist put her at the centre of New York intellectual society. She became as famous for her acerbic wit, often quoted, at the Algonquin Hotel Round Table ('With my crown of thorns, why do I need a prick like yo…
(British, 1954– ) Born in Manchester, Parks has lived in Italy since 1981, and his more recent novels range satisfyingly across cultural and geographical divides. Start with Europa (1997, Booker Prize-shortlisted) which charts the coach-journey from Milan to Strasbourg of Jerry Marlow, one of a group of lecturers taking a petition to the European Parliament. As he travels Marlow reflects on…