This article is about Hamlet and The Lion King. The coordinating conjunction ‘and’ sits rather uncomfortably between these two titles—the former is one of Shakespeare’s greatest, if not the greatest, plays, while the latter is the well-known Disney classic that most of us grew up watching. Perhaps I should even render my ‘and’ obsolete, for I am going to argue that The Lion King is Hamlet.

Despite his immense literary skill, Kurt Vonnegut, who died in April this year, was never really a household name, even in his native America. A fourth-generation German immigrant, he waited a long time for public recognition. His is not the most inspirational fiction I have read, nor is he the most skilled writer. However, Vonnegut’s uniquely bleak humour, entwined around situations bordering on the surreal and peppered with surprisingly funny and at times beautiful images, convey his thoughts memorably.

A text is owned by the person who created it, which raises the question of whether a translation – a complete change of language, a re-interpretation of the text – should be considered an original work in its own right. A translator has the power to change the tone of a text by their choice of vocabulary, to change its style by altering the syntax, to imbue new feelings into the words and redefine the audience of a text. All of this points to the idea of a translation as an entirely new and different creation.

W.H.Auden, were he alive, would be 100 this year. He said once: “In spite of all this einsam rubbish, poets are no lonelier than anyone else. Poetry itself is lonely, of course, in the sense that few people read it.” This is typical Auden, levelling mythical superstructures with a single quip; honest to the bitter end, even when that honesty meant admitting the uselessness of his own occupation (’poetry makes nothing happen’) or consigning a whole poem to the bin, as he did with ‘September 1, 1939′ because it was, as he put it, ‘infected with an incurable dishonesty’. But since his death in 1973 Auden’s reputation, which was dogged during his life by criticism of his flight to America after the beginning of the War, has enjoyed a popular revival. This renewed interest- an interest that is genuinely popular and not just scholarly-most probably rests on the appeal of just two poems from Auden’s entire output: “Stop all the clocks” and the previously mentioned “September 1, 1939″.

Horse Latitudes is an uncomfortable book, spatially speaking. Although Paul Muldoon’s latest collection is full of geographical references we are frequently made to feel that the world is very small, tied together in disquieting ways. Despite the poet’s reputation as an academic prankster and mock-pedant, in which he charmingly revelled in his recent reading at York, there is no mistaking the darkening tone of these poems. Here death is a major concern, and it is everywhere, inescapable.

In 1984, American author William Gibson published Neuromancer, a novel that was to herald the arrival of a new and influential subgenre of science fiction: cyberpunk. So what is, or was, “cyberpunk”? Novels classified as cyberpunk are invariably set in a dystopian future, where the laws of an oppressive society are enforced by extensive computer technology. The “-punk” suffix refers to the heroes of the genre: lawless rebels who subvert the technological dominance of major corporations in order to scratch out an existance for themselves.

Magical realism is a literary mode of which Salman Rushdie makes extensive use in his novels, often to convey a political message. It is a technique in which the author presents realistic characters, settings, and events but with elements of the fantastic or mythical which are accepted as a normal part of the world: for example, flying carpets and genies in an otherwise realistic environment. The question I want to address is whether the use of magical realism is actually an effective tool for putting across a political message.

Adepressing and dangerous document has recently come into my possession. Calling itself 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, the briefest glance at this list is guaranteed to leave any self-styled literatus feeling profoundly inadequate. Perusing the inventory drew to attention how narrow reading habits can inevitably become: of the books cited, I had read barely a tenth. Worse still, the existence of at least half had passed me by entirely, and many of the featured authors were completely unfamiliar to me; any pretensions to eruditeness were swiftly shattered. But however stung my pride, initial crushing gloom swiftly gave way to a spirit of rebellion. Why must I read this particular collection of books, I fumed. On whose authority are these claims to canonicity based? It may have only been intended as a bit of fun, but examining the list had led me, in a manner strangely reminiscent of Carrie Bradshaw, to ask a vital question of myself, “If the time I have available for reading is ultimately limited by my lifespan, what books should I most profitably be reading?”

Thomas Pynchon is not, despite popular rumour, the Unabomber. He is not a Branch Davidian, he is not a bag-lady called Wanda Tinasky and he claims not to be J. D. Salinger either. He is probably the author of a book of short stories and five novels, and on the 21st of November 2006 he published a sixth: Against the Day. Pynchon once remarked to a friend that “every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength”. It is certainly true that the mythology of this author exists apart from, and sometimes not even in parallel with, his literary reputation.

Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, is very much evidence of a maturation of themes introduced and explored in previous work, most notably Atomised. The conceit of Atomised was that the text was produced by a future race of neohumans as a eulogy to Michel, the father of their race. In The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq has extracted and adapted this notion of a race of neohumans, which has its birth in the Western society of the 21st century, but has supplanted the Michel story with that of a semi-religious cult which provides the chemistry and the ideology for the destruction of the human race and the ascendancy of neohumans.

Today, in Britain at least, people are often complacent about literature. They assume that it is “art” in the most ornamental sense, without real purpose or wider significance. As an English student I experience these attitudes depressingly regularly. For example, if I say to friends who study politics “We were talking about the relationship between the state and the individual” then it’s pretty likely that they’ll respond “Shouldn’t you be talking about themes or something?”. It’s rare that it occurs to people that politics and literature could have any direct relationship. Of course this was not always the case, and is still not in many countries, where literature is seen, depending on which side of the fence you are on, as either a threat to repressive governments or a dangerous fight for free expression.

Seamus Heaney, laureate-in-exile and the unchallenged patriarch of living English-language poets, returns to us now–with a new volume of poems–almost unchanged after more than forty years in print.

Last year the Oxford Literary Festival took over the town. Zadie Smith spoke in the town hall, Richard Dawkins in the debating chambers, Jasper Fforde in the Union building, and a whole host of other events spread out across the city as though trying to capture the imagination of passers-by through the process of literary osmosis.

So, this was going to be the showdown between two of the most controversial and influential writers, philosophers, scientists, artists and whatnots perhaps ever: Strindberg vs. Nietzsche. In the end it turned out to be a little bit of everything. A defence of good writing, a critique of good writing, morality, religion, an insight into two men’s lives and what a great thought requires (nothing).

If you were to mention the simple words “Don Quixote”, most people, whether they have read the book or not, muster up images of a battered knight. This picture would not be complete without his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza. So what is it about this novel that so captures people’s imagination? Last year was the 400th anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its popularity is still going strong.

When looking at the modernist canon, the innovators that tower above all others are inevitably James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Virginia Woolf is grudgingly also granted a place, less for her innovation than for her femininely aestheticized version of the modernist novel. But, as Gertrude Stein furtively asked, “Who came first?” Why is it that most students at university today are unaware that Gertrude Stein published her Three Lives in 1909, that “Pointed Roofs”, the first chapter of Dorothy Richardson’s epic novel Pilgrimage, came out in 1915 and May Sinclair’s Mary Olivier was published in 1919? All incredibly innovative–and truly modernist–yet published long before Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Why are these works not on every syllabus, to be compared to the male modernist tradition? Why are they not even mentioned?

On a train in Canada last year, I was reading a copy of Ulysses when a Canadian guy stopped beside me and said, “Whoa, you’re reading Ulysses? Good luck!” It was an experience that was often repeated during my trip, and even when I returned home. The novel carries a fearsome reputation, even among the best-educated. Yet why should the majority of the reading public be so frightened by a novel that is, after all, more than eighty years old? Shouldn’t the controversy surrounding it have died down by now? The answer to these questions seems to lie not merely in Joyce’s novel, but also in the work of later writers and in our own contemporary fiction.

Of all the dead spots on the bookworm’s radar, the most unjust is probably South American literature. The Motorcycle Diaries probably forms the limits of many people’s awareness of South American literature, unless you include backpackers, who can often be spotted disembarking the plane with a dog-eared copy of García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. In any case, mention the names of the great South American authors to most people and you are unlikely to get a response; Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa are probably dead names to them. In ignoring this literature, however, people miss a great deal of subtle, beautiful writing, exemplified particularly by the work of Pablo Neruda.

In an interview given to the New York Times, Laura Esquivel explained that she doesn’t “like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects”. As a writer, she aims to fulfil the expectations she carries as a reader. Consequently, Esquivel’s style is a slap in the faces of many modern authors whose books are filled with existential quests, dry language and disheartened characters; books for which Esquivel has no patience. What she likes are novels that tell “stories behind which there are truth, something real and above all something emotional”. This is precisely what she achieves in Like Water for Chocolate.

George Orwell thought there was such a thing as good writing. Objectively good writing. I happen to agree. I have always regretted that I’m not a good writer myself. But I have always prided myself on recognising if something is good. It’s the same with music. I can’t play an instrument to save my life, but I have always been able to pick up the unknown gems before they break to the public. If it’s possible to listen to or read something and recognise it as good before it has been more widely recognised as such, perhaps there really are qualities to music–and writing–that are objectively good or bad.

Where do you start with Naked Lunch? Whilst not as incomprehensible as Finnegans Wake, sitting down to the midday meal with Burroughs and then afterwards trying to discuss what actually happened isn’t a million miles away from attempting to explicate Joyce’s final opus. Nevertheless, this ostensibly tricky and horrifying ‘novel’ is actually a text of completely accessible humour, insight, and pathos once one begins to understand its author and genesis. As in fellow beat Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs fuses life and art to dazzling effect in Naked Lunch, following his own maxim that “there is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.”

The work of white South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee often concerns itself with the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. When Coetzee won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, president of the committee Per Wastberg observed in his speech, “Coetzee sees through the obscene poses and false pomp of history, lending voice to the silenced and the despised.” By representing the exploited, Coetzee reveals the unspoken story, the silence of the victim. In this way, he directs our attention to the often tyrannous nature of storytelling itself: that we do not hear the suppressed voice, merely the loudest one.

The recent BBC adaptations of Shakespeare have got me thinking. Modernising classic literature is not a new concept–Virgil, Chaucer, Dante and countless others have had their work updated, whilst Joyce used the story of Odysseus’ decade-long travails in The Odyssey to shape Leopold Bloom’s single day in Ulysses. Shakespeare himself has been set in the ghettos of New York, nineteenth-century Japan, American high schools and 1920s Britain. But to what extent does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when you change the words, the character names and the setting and even alter the plot?