Rare is the Wuthering Heights adaptation that fails to ruffle the feathers of the Brontë faithful. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film was criticised for its grit and gloom while Emerald Fennell’s new version, which arrives in cinemas on Valentine’s Day, was described as “aggressively provocative” after test screenings. Perhaps now is the time to return to the source material. In the audioverse, there have already been readings by Michael Kitchener, Daniel Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Patricia Routledge and Joanne Froggatt, though I favour this 2020 edition narrated by Aimee Lou Wood, of Sex Education and The White Lotus fame.

Set in Yorkshire, Emily Brontë’s tempestuous novel opens with Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, visiting his sullen landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote farmhouse where he gets snowed in. Bedding down for the night, he stumbles upon the diaries of the late Catherine Earnshaw, who writes of her love for Heathcliff, an orphan brought by her father to live with the family. Later Mr Lockwood has a nightmare in which the ghost of Catherine begs to be let in through the window (a scene immortalised in song by Kate Bush). The following day he returns to Thrushcross Grange where he asks the housekeeper, Nellie, to tell him about the Earnshaws. Nellie shares a dark tale of abuse, revenge and doomed love.

Wood breathes fresh life into this tempestuous novel, capturing Nellie’s gossipy tone and the early wildness of Catherine and Heathcliff. As circumstances pull these once inseparable youngsters apart, that wild abandon curdles into desolation and discord that is carried down the generations.

Available via Penguin Audio, 13hr 58min

Further listening

Simply More
Cynthia Erivo, Macmillan, 3hr 43 min
The singer, actor and star of Wicked tells of her path to stardom and shares tips on how to stay focused on your goals in a book that is part memoir, part empowerment manual. Read by the author.

The Fathers
John Niven, Canongate, 11hr 16 min
Two new fathers meet in a maternity ward in this satirical novel from the Kill Your Friends author. Jada, a petty criminal and Dan, a successful TV writer, each resolve to make changes in order to do right by their infant sons. Angus King reads.

On the night of Boxing Day 2021, my dad’s body was found near a Cardiff hostel. His death, at 55, was as sudden as it was not. For years, alcoholism had been changing the shape of his heart.

He died less than a mile from his old office; top law firm, equity partner. Four miles from our once tight-knit home in a leafy neighbourhood. He had lost both his family and his job in 2019. Raised in Barry, working class, he had been proud of the beautiful life he had built for us. Others thought he “had it all”. He was widely adored, but drinking made him volatile. He was homeless and often behind bars in his final two years.

I saw my dad for the last time in the spring of 2019, just before I moved to Australia. I was no longer able to bear the distress and chaos caused by his addiction. From then on I saw him only in photos: an article about homeless people getting Christmas dinner; the police’s missing-person appeals. Where had my caring, clever dad gone?

I never spoke about his drinking. It seemed disloyal, then gloomy, then futile. He had been one of my closest friends. It was only after losing him for good that I realised I wanted others to know him. This came through writing, which I began compulsively the morning after the news. It’s what I do to keep my mind steady. I was five when my dad sat me down to write about an event that had shaken me: my brother’s first epileptic seizure in 1999. It was a lesson in how finding the words could help in the face of unthinkable things.

My memoir, Long Going, came out last summer. It’s the story of my life with and without the lightning-strike man who raised me. Our story resonates, it turns out. Readers say they found it surprisingly uplifting. I feel lighter since writing it.

At events, I’m often asked about my relationship with alcohol. My response is evolving. Like my dad, I never suffered hangovers. I could drink to oblivion with friends and wake up fine. Nowadays I’m vigilant. Since becoming a parent myself, I count myself among the rising number of sober-curious people. I know what’s at stake.

In June I was on a Tŷ Newydd writing course with Amy Liptrot, whose memoir The Outrun is an invigorating account of recovering from alcoholism in Orkney (the film adaptation, starring Saoirse Ronan, was released in 2024). Amy suggested to us that memoirs could be windows on to different worlds, or mirrors of our own worlds. Or sometimes, I wonder, both? Even writing my own book, my dad’s pencilled notes gave me a window into his world of prison cells and leaky tents.

Over the past year, I’ve been drawn towards other memoirs about addiction. Either I hadn’t realised these books existed or I avoided them. I’m not sure which is true, but I wish I had read them sooner.

Take Always Winning by Top Boy star Ashley Walters. Raised in Peckham, with his dad circling between prison and binges, Walters ended up in a young offender institution at 20. He ultimately managed to turn his life around, and forged a stellar acting career, most recently starring in hit show Adolescence. His reading of the audiobook is revealing, particularly on how he confronted his alcoholism and broke cycles by going into rehab. I saw my dad in Walters’ recollections of his arrogance. I saw myself in his memories of loved ones treading on eggshells, unsure which version of him to expect.

Alcoholism is known as a family disease, whether that means lurking in genes or spilling consequences on to those around the addict. A powerful testament to this is In the Blood, co-written by Arabella Byrne and her mother, Julia Hamilton. With admirable honesty, they reflect on what brought them to Alcoholics Anonymous nine months apart. Arabella and I held an event at Blackwell’s in Oxford during my book tour. Her mother was in the front row. My baby daughter was on my lap. It felt like we were breaking cycles together.

Thankfully, there is no shortage of memoirs about recovery. We need them. Haunted by his dad’s addiction, Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes is a gritty, gripping book about his own long struggle with addiction and homelessness before he went into rehab, found love and became a scholar. Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace beautifully articulates her journey into sobriety, alongside her dad’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

In reading these books, I inevitably look for explanations. Why didn’t my dad recover? What else could I have done? I won’t pretend to know the unknowable, but something does keep coming up. Each writer describes a moment of clarity that life would be better without alcohol. This simple inner conviction – rather than external pressure – takes them to AA or rehab. Here, ego and destructive patterns are exchanged for community and healthy habits. A day at a time, they continue to choose this better life, embraced again by loved ones.

I was told that my dad once said he’d rather die than go sober. Some things can’t be explained. He had so much to live for. He deserved to enjoy retirement and time with grandkids. Had he recovered, he’d have been an incredible presence in my daughter’s life – just as he had been in mine.

This month I’m marking his birthday with three events – from a bookshop in Chester, where he attended law college, to the homeless shelter that fed him on Christmas Day, to Bristol with Nacoa, the charity for children of alcoholics. I can’t change how my dad’s story ended, but I can pass on what he taught me about finding the words. Here’s to more windows opening, and fewer unthinkable things.

• Long Going by Sophie Calon is published by Honno Welsh Women’s Press. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

As a sliding doors moment, it leads to arguably one of the greatest “what if?” questions in literary history. Passionate about the theatre, Charles Dickens, then just 20, wrote to the famous Covent Garden theatre actor-manager George Bartley seeking an audition, saying he believed he “had a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I observed in others”.

Bartley responded saying they were producing “the Hunchback” and arranging an appointment. Dickens planned to take his sister, Fanny, to accompany him singing on the piano.

Then Dickens fell ill “with a terrible bad cold” and missed the audition. By the time the next season came around he had embarked on the parliamentary reporter job that would firmly set him on his path to novelist. Would the world have been deprived of his literary canon but for the timing of that cold?

Yet Dickens never abandoned his love of theatre, which is examined in detail in a new exhibition, “Showtime!”, opening on 23 July at the Charles Dickens Museum in London, highlighting his fondness of drama and the dramatic impact of his works.

It was evident in how he constructed stories, published as weekly serials with a cliffhanger.

In public readings he would physically act out episodes on tours around Britain and America. His most famous one, of the gruesome murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, was so intense it is said it contributed to his death, aged 58, in 1870.

The dramatic quality of his stories has lent them easily to innumerable adaptations over two centuries, from those brazenly pirated by the Victorian dramatist Edward Stirling at the Adelphi in London during Dickens’s lifetime to The Muppets Christmas Carol in 1992.

The actor Simon Callow, who has played many Dickensian characters on stage and screen, said: “Performing was central to Dickens’s life from a very early age. His father used to take him as a five-year-old to the local pub where he would recite and sing.

“Perhaps the pivotal moment of his life was his cancellation because of illness of an audition with the greatest actor-manager of his day. Instead he took a job as a parliamentary reporter and then the course of his life was set.”

But Dickens never stopped writing, directing and performing plays, said Callow, a patron of the museum. “All this came to a head in the public readings, which he performed for massive and astounded audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.”

One such astounded spectator was Mark Twain, who wrote of one Dickens reading of a “spry, (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds … the very Dickens came! He did not emerge upon the stage – that is rather too deliberate a word – he strode.”

Emma Harper, the exhibition’s curator, said: “I don’t think many are aware of the extent of Dickens’s theatricality. And particularly that ‘sliding doors’ moment. I don’t know had he gone into acting as his main career whether writing would have been that side hustle for him. It’s a great ‘what if?’.”

Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster of the missed audition: “See how near I may have been, to another sort of life.” He said he still thought of the theatre. “I begin to be once more of opinion that nature intended me for the Lessee of a National Theatre – and that pen ink and paper have spoiled a (Theatre) Manager.”

Harper said: “His drama comes through. We have his reading copies where he is taking his own work, he’s editing it, he’s striking through on the book, glueing pages together, highlighting, writing in his own stage directions to make it as dramatic as possible.”

He said Dickens’s daughter Mamie, telling of watching him work, “describes how he jumps up from his desk, goes towards the nearest mirror and he acts out what he’s just written; he does all the faces, the voices and then he rushes back to the desk to write it back down again, so to check that his description matches what he wants his audience to experience.”

The exhibition, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, explores 200 years of performances of Dickens’s stories, from his own edited reading copies to letters, posters, playbills, programmes, photographs and props. Yes, and even including from the Muppets. “Can’t do this without the Muppets!” said Harper.

A short story competition run by the Guardian and the publisher 4th Estate is now open to entries from unpublished writers of colour living in the UK and Ireland.

The 4thWrite prize, now in its ninth year, offers its winner £1,000, a publishing workshop at 4th Estate and publication of the winning story on the Guardian website.

This year’s judging panel features Candice Carty-Williams, who founded the prize while working as a marketing executive at 4th Estate before going on to publish her bestselling novel Queenie.

“Returning to 4th Estate to judge the prize I started nearly a decade ago will most likely be the most meaningful full-circle moment of my career,” she said. “I cannot wait to see and discuss with my fellow judges how writing and stories have changed in the last nine years to reflect the world we’re in now. I am both honoured and excited to get into it.”

Joining Carty-Williams on the judging panel is the poet Caleb Femi, associate literary agent Monica MacSwan, athlete Jazmin Sawyers, 4th Estate publishing director Kishani Widyaratna and Guardian books commissioning editor Lucy Knight.

“It’s always a joy to dive into work that challenges, moves and surprises you – and I can’t wait to discover what this year’s prize has in store,” said Femi.

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MacSwan said: “With the move away from Twitter and zines closing down, prizes are more necessary than ever for new writers of colour to make their voices heard.”

The prize “has launched the careers of some of contemporary fiction’s brightest talents”, she added. Writers previously recognised through the award include Bolu Babalola, the author of Love in Colour and Honey & Spice, and Guy Gunaratne, who wrote In Our Mad and Furious City and Mister, Mister.

The prize “offers a vital and important platform for emerging writers of colour across the UK and shines brilliant light on the wealth of talent out there”, said Widyaratna.

The competition is open for story submissions of up to 6,000 words until 8 June. Writers aged 18 and over can submit entries via the 4th Estate website. A longlist will be announced by 10 August and the shortlist by 30 September, with the winner revealed in October at a London ceremony.

Last year’s prize was won by Yan F Zhang for her story Fleeting Marrow, which is based on the real-life deportation of Chinese seafarers from the UK after the second world war.

Naturally, a moment matters. In this case, a moment that was also, and might be considered still, a place: fixed, discernable, real. A community already dreaming of itself as a site of ferment and change, already wishing to stay the same. The idea was to capture and reflect something of this moment, this place, but also to capitalize, to fill a perceived void with what was presumed to be lacking. It being 1955, in New York City, a newspaper was the thing—one fashioned by and for the self-styled bohemians of Greenwich Village, a neighborhood of nearly two hundred square, trapezoidal, and triangle-shaped blocks in the city’s downtown.

Founded by three veterans of the Second World War with zero journalistic or publishing experience, this paper would conjure its authority by other than the usual means. A sort of conjured authority, the men suspected—they were all men, and all white—might suit their market well. Tabloid in form, the paper would be printed weekly, chronicling, but also manifesting, with each issue the context from which it sprang. A context of questioning, confluence, independent thought, advocacy, a personal eye (and “I”) turned on matters of every kind, but mostly those too local or unusual to bear mention in the newspaper of record, headquartered uptown. They decided to call their publication the Village Voice, despite its rejection of that uptown paper’s univocality, and its mandate, in fact, of the opposite: of voices, voices everywhere.

The founders—a fledgling psychologist named Ed Fancher, the pseudoliterary Rotarian Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer, who provided fifteen thousand dollars, a short-lived column, and not much more—believed that time would clarify the nature and viability of their experiment, and time did, across a moment that comprised more than six decades, at least eight owners, and at least one mass-extinction event. When the latest of its publishers, the multibillionaire retail heir Peter Barbey, shuttered the Voice, in 2018, a Times article quoted a lament from the journalist Tom Robbins, one of the many marquee personalities who, through their decades-long association with the paper, became synonymous with its brand. “It’s astonishing that this is happening in New York,” Robbins said, “the biggest media town in America.” That second part struck a wistful tone even then, a year when social media added nearly a million new users every day and the global population was projected to spend a combined billion years online. By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything else.

Those outlets now referred to as “legacy media” have survived in part by adopting elements first innovated by the Voice, which, in its coverage of beats ranging from City Hall and CBGB to the odd foreign revolution, demonstrated a radical embrace of the subjective, a prizing of argument and opinion, of lived experience over expertise. Determined to both maintain and eat away at its own boundaries, it became a critical, journalistic, and publishing titan, a context unto itself. In the opening pages of “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” Tricia Romano’s new and raucous oral history of the paper, Howard Blum, a former staff writer, is the first to declare the Voice “a precursor to the internet,” an idea that recurs, with diminishing shine, throughout the book’s five hundred and thirty pages. Notes of elegy sound throughout, laments for something too good to last, but also for a moment of honest and urgent revolt. When there seemed no such thing as too many voices, or an excess of subjectivity—when, on and off the page, the persistence of silence and constraint were far more plausibly imagined than a world awash in personal truths.

Structured in short, chronologically ordered chapters, “The Freaks Came Out to Write” unfolds like the kind of epic, many-roomed party that invokes the spirit of other parties and their immortal ghosts. Romano escorts the reader from room to room, where a set of relevant players hold forth on the subject at hand. Here are Michael Smith and Lucian K. Truscott IV, hashing out how a line about the “forces of faggotry” made it into the latter’s firsthand account of the 1969 Stonewall protests. Over there, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, and Susan Brownmiller discuss the double bind of writing about women’s issues for a paper that afforded them, in Gornick’s words, “the most astonishing amount of space and time,” despite a workplace blighted by what the critic Laurie Stone elsewhere calls “ordinary, old-school, male fuckheads.” The sort of men who would publish a letter like the one written by James Wolcott, who would later become a staff writer, belittling her 1971 piece “On Goosing,” about being sexually accosted in public. “God help us if she ever gets raped,” Wolcott wrote. “We will be buried under an avalanche of rhetoric.”

Romano’s book is designed to abet a case for the Voice as a kind of nexus of twentieth-century incident, and most chapters offer an inside history of familiar events. We learn how the reporting of a local activist named Mary Perot Nichols helped defeat Robert Moses’s plan to build various highways across lower Manhattan; how an early profile of Spike Lee (instigated by Lee himself) led to funding for “She’s Gotta Have It,” his breakout film; how Wayne Barrett’s 1979 exposé of Donald Trump’s business dealings raised an alarm that would clatter for decades to come. Occasionally, this fervent dot-connecting grows strained, as in a chapter that intersects the Voice with graffiti culture, breakdancing, and the emergence of Jean-Michel Basquiat. But the over-all effect echoes the former editor-in-chief Karen Durbin’s conception of the Voice as “a great bar in the Village, a funky bar,” full of gossip, squabbling, and well-earned nostalgia. The longing is for a lost paradise of synergy and shared purpose, a season of what Guy Trebay describes as a “porosity” between worlds, when an eclectic staff, their subjects, and a growing legion of readers agreed on a core set of interests and values. “We all said some stupid things,” the longtime Voice movie critic Andrew Sarris says, of the savage feuding among his colleagues. “But film seemed to matter so much.”

Romano, who covered the New York club scene during her eight years at the Voice, amassed her cast of characters from a combination of archival research and more than two hundred original interviews. Effectively a work of collage, the oral history must find unity through arrangement and juxtaposition, the recontextualizing of untethered quotes. Billed in its subtitle as “the definitive history” of “the radical paper that changed American culture,” “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” in foregrounding the disparate perspectives of its writers and editors, proposes paradox and contradiction as two of the Voice’s operating principles. Certainly an entrenched antagonism between the so-called whiteboys—gumshoe journalists who occupied the front of the book, including Barrett, Jack Newfield, and Nat Hentoff—and the nonwhite, queer, and women writers who dominated the culture and review sections seems to have powered the paper’s function and dysfunction alike. Residue of that bitterness clings to this history, outlasting many of the players in question.

Writers also dish on their favorite editors (Marianne Partridge, the paper’s first female editor-in-chief, was beloved by reporters; David Schneiderman slowly won the hearts of those who held his Times pedigree in contempt), the peak era (the sixties; no, the nineties; perhaps the decades in between), when and why it all seemed to go wrong (usually when someone sold the paper for a whopping sum, beginning with the multimillion-dollar payout to Wolf and Fancher, in 1970). True to form, mostly the writers talk about themselves, and one another: Harry Allen riffs on Greg Tate’s “rabidly combinatorial” critical voice; Paul Berman describes the British media critic Alexander Cockburn as “a brilliant stylist in a certain limited way,” producer of a “marvelous column if you ignore what he actually said in it.” Consensus forms around a culture of indulgence: “There was nothing that the Voice wouldn’t let you do”; “We never used one word when seventeen would do.” Brownmiller once counted the number of times “I” appeared in someone’s story. “You would think that they were the internet,” Gornick says. “They let us go on and on and on.”

The reader is left to wonder at the idea of Rupert Murdoch, who owned the Voice from 1977 to 1985, overseeing an era of prosperity and relative calm at a paper that by then had found a sweet spot between staying true to its outsider image and the successful retail of same. As long as the paper made money, it seems, Murdoch would tolerate even the constant attacks on him within its folds. The business side gets scant treatment in these pages; we learn of readership surges during the 1962-63 New York City newspaper strike and another across the latter half of that decade (when circulation grew to exceed that of of ninety-five per cent of American big-city dailies), but the paper’s economic systems remain largely obscure.

Until, that is, those systems come to dominate the story, beginning with the decision, in 1996, to make the Voice free, available around town in “urine-soaked boxes,” what the former editor-in-chief David Blum calls “the most disgusting distribution model I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” Then comes Craigslist, a series of sales to investor groups and media conglomerates, a scandal involving “adult services” ads and allegations of sex trafficking, and a lingering question about whether it all could have gone otherwise—if the Voice could have survived the erasure of the moment that defined it as an alternative, a thing apart from other things. Though aspects of its style and attitude have scaled uncommonly well, the paper’s success depended at least as much on its relationship to a fruitful context, a thing of scant value in a culture that mostly refers to itself.

Often, these days, I find myself in conversation with students seeking advice not about how or what to write but where to try and publish the thing they haven’t yet written. These students tend to be in transition, mid-pivot, escaping or avoiding work in one of the industries now described as a “space,” despite lacking much that qualifies as fixed, discernable, real. Confronted with this question, I always counter with one of my own—“What are you reading?”—in part because it was how I and every writer I know first set about attaching our blobby ambitions to an actual goal. It’s true that they can’t, or at least don’t, mention the Village Voice, in which I published almost two hundred and fifty reviews and stories over nine years, and which helped pay my rent as a writer new to the city. (In its current online incarnation, the Voice can feel like it exists mostly as a host to its vast archives; newly published stories appear on the home page, but the rest of the site’s various sections favor a selection of older pieces.) But you would not know, from the mild affront and confusion with which students greet my question—as though I had inquired after some unknowable data set, like the exact date and time of their deaths—that other publications do indeed still exist.

A familiar gulf opens between student and professor, then, one I have come to regard with more tenderness than annoyance. What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day. The legacy of the Voice resides in its embodiment of a time when publishing a neighborhood paper that would reflect for its readers, as Ed Fancher put it, “the intellectual and artistic firmament” of their community could matter as much as it turned out to do. ♦