Christopher Prendergast: 6 books

Marcel Proust was long the object of a cult in which the main point of reading his great novel In Search of Lost Time was to find, with its narrator, a redemptive epiphany in a pastry and a cup of lime-blossom tea. We now live in less confident times, in ways that place great strain on the assumptions...

Moving deftly among literary and visual arts, as well as the modern critical canon, Christopher Prendergast's book explores the meaning and value of representation as both a philosophical challenge (What does it mean to create an image that "stands for" something absent?) and a political...

"Eugene Sue (1804-57), like his contemporary Alexandre Dumas pere, was one of the most successful writers of his time. Les Mysteres de Paris, the novel for which he is most remembered, became a publishing sensation. In its serial form, it took the public by storm - readers fought for copies of...

What are counterfactuals and what is their point? In many cases, none at all. It may be true that if kangaroos didn't have tails, they would fall over, but they do have tails and if they didn't they wouldn't be kangaroos (or would they?). This is the sort of thing that can give counterfactuals a bad...

‘Annabel was a black and white figure in the distance, going in through the front doors. She worked behind the reception. I was a history teacher.’ As we meet Matt, lying across the backseat of his on/off girlfriend’s car, he begins a long confession. It starts with wrestling moves and...

Adventures in Grammarland is set in a fantasy world, where words are people and where, because of bitter conflict and disunity in the past, the land is now oppressed by the tyrant Ignorance. A young lad, Josh, embarks on a quest in Grammarland that requires him to grasp the rules of grammar, to understand...