When HBO dropped its plan to adapt Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling novel The Corrections in 2012, the author was so relieved he says he performed his first and last cartwheel on the lawn of... Read more »
In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities... Read more »
Just as I am about to interview this year’s Women’s prize winner, debut American novelist Virginia Evans, at the party on a drizzly evening in a leafy London square, we are interrupted... Read more »
Israel’s attack on Iran is only the most recent example of its degeneration in recent decades, coming on top of its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank,... Read more »
In 1845 British citizens and companies were already legally prohibited from owning or buying enslaved people overseas, yet that year 385 captives were “transferred” to a British mining company in Brazil named... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryAsking my mom if she could stop reading my bedtime book to me and just let me read it on my own, since I felt she was going too... Read more »
Matt Giles, the thirtysomething protagonist of The Long Shoe, is having a run of bad luck. Shortly after losing his job as a bathroom salesman, he learns that he and his girlfriend... Read more »
A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken review – here’s how to really write your novel | Creative writing
Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.... Read more »
The American author Louis Sachar’s most celebrated book, 1998’s YA novel Holes, was a huge word-of-mouth success on both sides of the Atlantic. Its short, punchy chapters tell the story of plump,... Read more »