Tim Parks

Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

Reading Against the Novel

In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant form of entertainment.

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

The Silence of Pius XII: An Exchange

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

A Text Adrift

How does the death of the author change the task of the translator?

A Game of Low Stakes

In Sam Riviere’s satire of the publishing world, literary competitiveness poisons intimate relations.

A Gift for Overkill

The Dutch novelist Willem Frederik Hermans loathed pious illusions and postwar complacencies.

The Eternal Colony

In Sicily there has been a dysfunctional mismatch for centuries between the many different local communities and the ideas and plans of those governing the island from afar.

The Visible Translator

The task of rendering a writer’s work in a different language used to be a vocation largely requiring self-effacement in favor of the text. That is changing.

Characters in Search of a Conflict

The life of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello, like those of his characters, oscillated between pathos and beffa: ironic, unexpected, crushing reversal.

Whatever It Takes

“Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron.

The Writer–Translator Equation

I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test the writer–translator equation.

The Fiction of Winners & Losers

Am I being reductive? All of narrative fiction, I’ve suggested, can be sorted into four grand categories.

Novels of Freedom and Disaster

Here is the force field of values and emotions that gives us our third category—a yearning to be free held in tension with an intense trepidation for the consequences.

Indulging with Control in Fiction

Could it ever make sense to include Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in the same narrative category as E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey?

A Novel Approach to Literary Categories

Why do we categorize novels as we do? Fantasy, Chick Lit, Crime, Romance, Literary, Gothic, Feminist… I want to propose a different way of categorizing novels—something that came to me after reading Dickens and Chekhov in quick succession.

Pandemic Journal, March 17–22

Dispatches on the coronavirus outbreak from Madeleine Schwartz in Brooklyn, Anne Enright in Dublin, Joshua Hunt in Busan, Anna Badkhen in Lalibela, Lauren Groff in Gainesville, and more.

The People’s Clowns

The Prison of the Past