Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days,... Read more »
Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow’s general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery... Read more »
Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York... Read more »
The Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov was published quietly in the Anglophone world for years before he won the 2023 International Booker prize with Time Shelter, about an Alzheimer’s clinic that recreates the... Read more »
In 2019, the TV presenter and journalist Fiona Phillips booked a last-minute trip to Vietnam with a friend. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But not only did Phillips not invite her... Read more »
Shortly after her release from Ravensbrück in 1945, Comtesse Germaine de Renty attended a dinner party in Paris with old friends. One guest complimented her on how well she was looking, concluding... Read more »
While a great deal has been written about Toni Morrison’s fiction, her work as a senior editor at Random House is less well known. Dana A Williams, professor of African American Literature... Read more »
The narrator of American nonfiction author Michael Clune’s first novel is the 15-year-old Nicholas, who lives with his father in a housing development so cheap and deracinated it inspires existential terror. It’s a... Read more »
Writers sometimes talk of giving birth to their books, but probably very few are also working as doulas. It’s an experience that clearly informs Leila Mottley’s new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big,... Read more »