In the decades after the death of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1675, few knew his name or work. He was so unknown that his paintings were sold with the forged... Read more »
If Jane Austen’s novels run on closed social worlds, courtship rituals, status anxiety, gossip and relentless scrutiny of who’s coupling with who, it follows that the obvious contemporary equivalent would be reality... Read more »
Illustration: Javi Aznarez In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco instructed all citizens to remain in their houses due to a pandemic, the first thing I did was order all... Read more »
Fiction Fiction Cursed Daughters Oyinkan Braithwaite Repeat a family story often enough, and it becomes a kind of legend – or a curse. The Faloduns at the centre of Cursed Daughters share... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryMy parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in... Read more »
‘There’s a place in Italy in need of someone. Why don’t you look into that?” Inspired by his two-year stint directing a writers’ residency, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, with these... Read more »
Andy Warhol sent Paul a Brillo box. Fran Lebowitz called Peter “a genius about sex”. The ending of Susan Sontag’s second novel was inspired by a bunch of Peter’s photographs. Sontag dedicated... Read more »
My earliest reading memorySitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not... Read more »
Geoff Dyer, author I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case... Read more »