Erica Wagner
Erica Wagner is a New Statesman contributing writer.
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Eleanor Catton and the problem with “literary thrillers”
Her new novel raises the question: is the genre code for a thriller that simply isn’t very thrilling?
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How David Milch reinvented TV drama
The memoir of the American creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood is a rich story of drink, drugs and…
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How George Saunders became literature’s Mr Nice Guy
The author of Lincoln in the Bardo on US politics, his “limited talent”, and the curse of being seen…
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Hilary Mantel’s death is an incalculable loss to our national life and literature
The late novelist’s extraordinary talent was to take our collective history and make it new.
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Salman Rushdie shows us that free speech is life itself
Rushdie knows how vital, how serious the business of storytelling is. Yet in my encounters with him he never…
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How TS Eliot found happiness
Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s…
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The rise and fall of the literary bloke
John Walsh’s excitable account of carousing with Martin Amis and other “big beasts” of the Eighties is a paean…
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Erica Wagner: The ghost stories that haunted my childhood
A book – a hardback, bound in clear plastic – which I read, and then read again, feeling that…
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