There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching... Read more »
M is a celebrated film actor. A star since childhood, now the face of a major fashion brand, she has been famous all her life. That her career closely resembles Natalie Portman’s has... Read more »
When people think of Alan Turing, they might imagine he was arrogant, isolated, humourless, tortured. A better way of remembering the father of modern computing would be, an academic argues, as “playful,... Read more »
There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and... Read more »
A story widely accused on social media of being written using AI has gone on to win the overall Commonwealth short story prize. Jamir Nazir’s story The Serpent in the Grove went... Read more »
The prominent literary magazine Granta will no longer publish the winning entries of the annual Commonwealth short story prize after one of this year’s winners drew widespread accusations of AI use. The... Read more »
In early May, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners for its influential Short Story Prize, which recognizes unpublished short fiction. One of the awardees, a Trinidadian writer named Jamir Nazir,... Read more »
A never-before-published short story by Edith Wharton, the first female Pulitzer prize winner, who encapsulated the so-called gilded age of US society in bestselling novels including The Age of Innocence, received a... Read more »
‘His father was ever a man of few words,” begins Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, a lengthy and ambitious story set in the aftermath of the Irish famine. Land opens in 1865 on... Read more »