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[...] her habit of addressing the reader as if the reader were the same as her--'I don't know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham . . .'--has a fragile pathos to it. She wants to be one of us, and in some way she assumes she is. The very dullness of these children, their lack of rebelliousne…

Works of fantasy or science fiction that also succeed in literary terms are hard to find, and are rightly to be treasured [...] And just as one is triumphantly sizing up this thin elite, one thinks correctively of that great fantasist Kafka, or even of Beckett, two writers who impress can be felt, …

[...] As Roland Barthes rightly says in his Camera Lucida, a book with which Austerlitz is in deep dialogue, photographs shock us because they so finally represent what has been. We look at most old photographs, and we think: 'That person is going to die, and is in fact now dead.' Barthes cal…

[...] it's the difference between having an American passport and deciding you're going to live in Paraguay versus having a Paraguayan passport. If you're a high literary writer you can live there your whole life, but you have that fucking passport. Even if you never go home, the possibility of it …

[...] how much literary fiction deals with the absolute power that the rest of the planet lives under? It's almost none. But if you read any science fiction or fantasy, there's always a dark lord or a dark side or an emperor. It's always wrestling with this incredible power. The anxieties of the …