It’s hard to think of many superficial affinities between Frank O’Hara, the queer poet and art critic whose urbane voice is synonymous with 60s Manhattan, and Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century Scottish privateer whose... Read more »
Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this... Read more »
Brandon Taylor’s third novel, following the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and 2023’s The Late Americans, is full of hands. It’s set in the years after a pandemic that made many people desperate “to... Read more »
Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits’ end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits... Read more »
Lucy Apps’s debut novel tells the story of 19-year-old Gloria, who is living in east London with her mum in the summer of 1999. Gloria has a learning disability and is past... Read more »
Set in the early 1960s, The Daffodil Days tells the story of a couple who move from London to the countryside, have a second child and attempt to settle there, but then,... Read more »
Tamma and Dan are 17-year-old best friends growing up in a California desert town blighted by the strip-mall nihilism of late capitalism. They’re poor. They’re unpopular. Their families are a wasteland. But... Read more »
The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a... Read more »
Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself –... Read more »