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1. ‘Men in their 60s used Polaroids from the 1970s as their profile pictures’

“It’s a very barren landscape for me,” says Pauline Tomlin, 61. “A lot of men my age are not great at keeping themselves fit and healthy. I don’t know what happens – they seem to be all right in their 40s and 50s, and then they get to their 60s and you’re like: what the hell?”

Donna Ferguson spoke to single women in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s who opened up about dating in later life, sharing stories about the perils of online dating and what it’s like starting new relationships after your partner dies.

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2. Is this the world’s most eye-popping restaurant? The architectural marvel in a Leipzig industrial estate

Oscar Niemeyer changed the face of modern architecture – but who knew his final design was a diner in a space-age bubble on an industrial estate in Leipzig? Marion Lougheed visited the last wonder of the great Brazilian architect, who dreamt it up at the age of 103. And it’s a fine place for a sunset kombucha and gin.

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3. Abandon shipment: how an Amazon van got marooned on the UK’s ‘most dangerous path’

In the darkness of Valentine’s Day, a delivery driver was led by his GPS to the Essex mudflats at the mouth of the Thames estuary, where it meets the North Sea. Tim Burrows took up the tale of how the photo of the van became something of a sensation: “People thought they were looking at an AI image … ”

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4. ‘Like an electrical gong bath!’ The Sheffield supermarket going viral for the symphonic sound of its freezers

In Sheffield, Alim Kheraj investigated the mystery of three freezers at a supermarket that have had fans of ambient music revelling in their unique hum, describing it as “like an electrical gong bath”. 

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5. ‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story?

For the Long Read, Madeleine Schwartz told the astonishing story of the award-winning novelist being sued by the woman who claims he stole her story to write about the atrocities of the Algerian civil war.

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6. ‘She dared to be difficult’: How Toni Morrison shaped the way we think

“There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count. But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.”

Namwali Serpell wrote about how Toni Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics.

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I have waited years for this book. But before I tell you what it is, I had better tell you what it is not. On Morrison is not a biography. Except for scattered references, there is little here about Chloe Anthony Wofford’s birth and early life in Lorain, Ohio; her education at Howard and Cornell universities; her editorial work at Random House; or her phenomenal success as a novelist. Nor is this book for fans who turn to Toni Morrison for inspirational quotes or to score political points.

Instead, On Morrison offers readers who can tell their Soaphead Church from their Schoolteacher something they have long hoped for: a rigorous appraisal of the work. Despite her enormous contribution to American letters, Morrison’s novels are still too often read for what they have to say about black life, rather than how they say it. Song of Solomon and Jazz are more likely to be found on African American studies syllabi than creative writing ones. In her introduction to On Morrison, Namwali Serpell identifies the reason: “She is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach.”

Serpell, the author of two ambitious novels that straddle genres, generations and continents, brings to the project of reading Morrison an understanding of what it means to be difficult, and to be called difficult. She does Morrison the respect of reading her seriously. Across the book’s 12 essays, she identifies and critiques narrative strategies, puzzles over craft choices, compares formal techniques across novels, and chases edits and revisions in the archives.

This journey through Morrison’s oeuvre begins with The Bluest Eye. To tell the story of Pecola, the little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes, Morrison broke the narrative into parts, each filtered through a different character’s perspective, forcing the reader to “piece together the myriad overdetermined forces that have obliterated this young girl”. Pecola suffers horrifying abuse at the hands of her father, who eventually rapes and impregnates her. The fragmented narrative “is an effort to create a specific reading experience – not passive pity or easy demonising, but active reassembly and self-interrogation – through a formal structure”.

“The structure is the argument”, as Morrison often said. In Recitatif, the only short story she ever published, the narrative is built around five encounters between two women, Roberta and Twyla, over several decades. Early on, we learn that one of the women is white and the other black, but we are never told which is which. Morrison draws readers into a guessing game that demonstrates the arbitrariness of race and its dependence on contrast for it to acquire meaning. Serpell uncovers startling details in the archives. I did not know, for example, that Recitatif started out as a screenplay treatment for actors Marlo Thomas and Cicely Tyson.

Can the mystery of the women’s identity finally be solved, then? “Personally, I’ll never tell,” Serpell promises. Instead, she doggedly traces the transformation from treatment to story, finding more intriguing nuggets along the way. In June 1982, about the time the film was likely turned down, Morrison had just finished reading Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales, which is structured as a series of first-person vignettes that refrains from revealing characters’ races. A month later, Serpell writes, “Morrison submitted … a radical revision” of her story, this time with “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes”. It’s comforting to know that even geniuses take inspiration from others.

Elsewhere, Serpell identifies the humour in Morrison’s work, especially in Song of Solomon. The protagonist, Milkman Dead, visits his paternal aunt Pilate Dead, prompting her to quip: “Ain’t but three Deads alive,” and Milkman to respond: “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead!” Milkman embarks on an Odyssean quest to find out more about his great-grandfather, who escaped slavery by “flying” back to Africa. By grounding its narrative in folktales, Greek and African, the novel “syncretizes disparate traditions, both reinforcing the originary hybridity of archetypal tales and making them coincide and conflict in its mid-20th-century milieu”.

One reason On Morrison was such a joy to read is that I felt guided by a writer who shares both my admiration and my fear of lionising. Serpell happens to be African and an immigrant, facts that I think attune her to the centrality of the black experience as well as the estrangement of peripheral characters. Morrison read widely, learning from African elders such as Camara Laye (for whose novel The Radiance of the King she wrote an introduction), Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head. By contrast, she could be incurious about Native American characters in her earlier novels, an oversight she addressed in A Mercy.

At times Serpell’s tone slips from the ruthlessly observant “I” of the critic into the “we” of the professor guiding students through a thorny text (she teaches at Harvard). Though she agonises over panning the woman she calls “my elder”, she admits Morrison’s poetry is “not good” and pours deserved scorn on a messy post-9/11 essay that is unworthy of Morrison’s intellect.

Yet such criticisms only reinforce the integrity of her analysis. With On Morrison, Serpell has managed to deliver a book that works on many levels: as a study of craft, as a critical appraisal, and as a tribute to an artist who was difficult in all the right ways.

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 at Howard University, sets out to fill this gap, offering an impeccably researched account of Morrison’s stint at Random House between 1971 and 1983, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights and the Black Arts movements. Reflecting ideas generated by that convergence, Morrison’s novels – described by the Nobel committee, when they awarded her the prize in literature in 1993, as giving life to an essential aspect of American reality – were driven by an unwavering belief in the possibility of African American empowerment through self-regard. Williams’s interest lies in showing how Morrison’s editorial career was informed by the same invigoratingly insular ethos. Whether writing or editing, her work was aimed at producing “explorations of interior Black life with minimal interest in talking to or being consumed by an imagined white reader”.

Morrison saw early on how that kind of insularity could be wielded as both a weapon and a shield. Addressing the Second National Conference of Afro-American Writers at Howard in 1976, she urged the audience to recognise that “the survival of Black publishing, which […] is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on, which is the energies of Black people – sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us”. These words could well have been repurposed as a mission statement for her editorial career, which, as Williams points out, consisted of “[making] a revolution, one book at a time”. Change was coming in America. Morrison’s contribution would be to work towards change in the overwhelmingly white world of publishing: “I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,” she said during an interview for the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, released in 2019. “But that couldn’t last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.”

Toni at Random traces the path that led from Morrison’s Jim Crow childhood to her storied literary career, briefly documenting her early years, during which storytelling was an “ever-present pastime”, as well as her academic life (Howard, followed by graduate studies at Cornell), before moving on to chapter-by-chapter case studies of some of the publications she oversaw during her stint at Random House. At times Williams’s book reads like a catalogue of those works, from The Black Book (a compendium of black life in America) to work by June Jordan, Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as autobiographies of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and Muhammad Ali, and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (which was reissued in 2019). Nevertheless, it is a fascinating catalogue, not least because it is full of thrilling behind-the-scenes insights into what it took to get them published.

Morrison was keenly aware that success depended on proving that books such as these could sell; demand would have to be so high that, as Williams writes, “even the most recalcitrant salesperson would have no choice but to fall in line”. The first job was making sure the books were excellent. Williams provides a number of examples of Morrison’s exacting standards, including the fact that, while working on a collection of Huey Newton’s essays, she recommended deleting the weak ones and editing the rest, “even those that had been previously published”. But Morrison was also required to navigate “the irony of the need to be appealing to white people while also preserving enough distance from them to maintain Black privacy”, keeping one eye on the bottom line even while the other was on black consciousness. On one memorable occasion, when the poet Barbara Chase-Riboud stonewalled her about doing publicity (loftily describing it as “tap [dancing] for prizes and coverage”), Morrison fired off a flinty letter reminding her that Random House was “a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stock rooms”.

Morrison could be blunt when she had to be but, alongside this, Williams paints a picture of her as a fiercely protective editor, chasing blurbs and championing her projects with passion, tenacity and a moving sense of urgency, “scared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really are”. In addition, Williams highlights her convivial and collaborative approach, which led to the development of close friendships with a few of her authors including, famously, Angela Davis, who lived with Morrison and her sons for a time while they worked on her autobiography. It is astonishing to consider that at the same time as doing all this Morrison was also busy raising two sons and writing her own novels, frequently leveraging her literary status in service of her editorial campaigns. Williams includes references to a 1978 interview in which Morrison hinted at how exhausting this was: “I want to stop writing around the edges of the day … in the automobile and places like that.”

Which makes it even more astonishing to consider how little has changed since she fought this fight. According to Dan Sinykin, writing in Literary Hub in October 2023: “In 1971, when Morrison became a trade editor, about 95% of the fiction published by the big commercial houses was by white authors. By 2018, that number only dropped to 89%.” In August 2024, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris pointed out in the New York Times that following the hiring of “a small but influential group” of black female editors in 2020, many had “lost their jobs or quit the business entirely … [leading] some … to question publishers’ commitment to racial inclusion”.

In the UK the position is hardly any better. The fight is still necessary, and still exhausting. However, Williams’s book is a timely reminder of the need for an inward-looking response, and of the joy to be discovered along the way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is best when it is penetrated by Morrison’s own voice, in the form of excerpts from her correspondence. Here, for example, is Toni attempting to persuade Bill Cosby (with his reputation as yet untarnished) to write an introduction for The Black Book: “Let me just say … I want to publish books about us – black people – that will make some sense – to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” At the time she wrote those lines, I was one of those black children, and I am grateful that the books she published did exactly that. The same spirit of gratitude permeates Williams’s scholarly, informative and highly readable book.

Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship by Dana A Williams is published by Amistad (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.