Books

"She taught me never to be ashamed of living a bold life"

"I wonder if the dystopian novels that we read...are really so far off from our own reality"

Lori Latour reviews the life and work of the 20th century German novelist Irmgard Keun.

It was recently announced that Penguin Classics would be publishing special editions of certain Marvel comic books. The comics will be part of a...

Any book that begins with the sentence “Every day is a good day to kill Nazis” is bound to catch my interest. Luckily for...

Originally posted as a webcomic series on Tumblr in 2019, Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper became an instant hit. It has been adored internationally for its...

I am well aware that for the sake of switching off from university, or from the cruel news about Ukraine, it is better to...

The Quilt and Other Stories is a 1994 compilation of short stories by Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991), a prolific writer of 20th-century India. She occupied...

Sonya Ribner interviews author Elaine Hsieh Chou.

a review of the book 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari

But it’s not good enough to leave it to often privileged tutors, canon-compilers and Education Secretaries to dictate which texts we study. Time and time again, they have failed to achieve even the remotest degree of representation, a damning outcome in a subject which is so linked to identity and the self. The texts we study at school and beyond should be chosen and shaped by the diverse populations reading them.

I think there’s just something special about holding a book in your hands, something unique and timeless that isn’t replicated in a e-book.

In the cultural moment of the pandemic it may be an attractive idea to compare present society to fictional dystopias. The sense of fear, the limits imposed on people’s rights, the ubiquity of screens, widespread surveillance, the spin tactics of the press, and the hypocrisy of leading political figures are all features of a dystopia.

"As the centenary of perhaps the two towering works of literary modernism, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, 2022 appears a natural time to reflect on the present day significance of these texts. Such an impulse can only be furthered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused many to use literary works as a means of processing, alleviating, or escaping from present reality."