The week’s best arts and culture reads – including the
metamorphosis of a great novella, the rise of detective fiction and Alexander
McCall Smith in praise of WH Auden.
Laura Marsh | New York Review of Books | 21 September 2013
“Watson evokes the nightmarish experience Kafka describes — of a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect — through the vocabulary of ballet. Here you can see his leg turned out at the hip and his foot arched. But what he is doing with his toes makes the whole posture hideous. They wriggle like a millipede’s legs, as though beyond his control, and Watson looks at them in horror”.
