by Alexander Bubb It began with a case of mistaken identity. In 2016 I was growing deeply interested in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of short, pithy, epigrammatic poems translated from Persian by the Victorian man of letters…
by Daniel Cook Still revered as one of the world’s great historical novelists, Sir Walter Scott kept coming back to the supernatural, the eerie, and the macabre. Some of the novels even include extractable tales of terror: ‘The Fortunes of…
by Jürgen Pieters The painting on my new book’s cover was made by the Viennese artist Friedrich Frotzel (1898-1971). Its title – ‘The Old Bookcase’ – makes it even more appropriate. The library of comfort, as I make clear in…
by Geoffrey Marsh Given that there is little information about Shakespeare’s life, people ask what made me think there was enough to write another book. The short answer is I didn’t. While I would like to claim that Living with…
By Stuart Gillespie I was one of the two founding editors of this journal in 1992. Anyone involved with a publication for this long will have travelled far, and when I look back over the thirty-year lifespan of Translation and…
By Stanley Gontarski American outlier writer, William S. Burroughs, was a creative force, as a writer in his own right, and as a cultural theorist, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call “a society of control” or “a…
Participants in the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota have emphasised historical continuity in the experience of racist oppression in the United States.
Towards the end of Sally Rooney’s acclaimed novel Normal People, the two main characters, Connell and Marianne, talk sleepily one morning about whether it’s possible ever really to know another person. ‘I guess everyone is a mystery in a way’,…
Issue 6:1 of CounterText features ‘The Fever Chart’, a new and extraordinarily timely novella by John Kinsella. Begun in late 2019 as the author was emerging from a prolonged bout of feverish ‘flu, and finished in the first few weeks…