Annie Ernaux - trang moi

Annie Ernaux, Ben Lerner, Books, Culture, Jordan Peterson, Sách & Tri thức, Sheila Heti

‘His favourite book was by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick’: how books perform on dating apps

Mentions of reading in Tinder bios are up 29% in the last year. But is searching for a fellow fan of one’s favourite author really a shortcut to compatibility?

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.

thanhtoong0
February 14, 2026

Annie Ernaux, Books, Culture, Elena Ferrante, Fiction in translation, Han Kang, Jonathan Franzen, Roberto Bolaño, Sách & Tri thức

‘It’s another form of imperialism’: how anglophone literature lost its universal appeal

There’s a growing appetite for stories from around the globe – if only we can avoid the cliches and exoticism of recent years, writes the International Booker nominee

When I heard that a major international broadcaster would be producing a TV series based on Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, as a millennial Italian writer I was enthusiastic. Durastanti’s book – a fictionalised memoir about growing up between rural southern Italy and Brooklyn, and between identities, as the hearing daughter of two deaf parents – was the first literary novel of an Italian writer from my generation to reach a global public. Published in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022, in a translation by Elizabeth Harris, its success was widely seen as a good omen, the sign that international publishers were starting to show interest in a new crop of Italian literature.

A further reason for my enthusiasm was that a big part of Strangers I Know takes place in Basilicata, where my father is from. It is one of the country’s poorest regions, right at the arch of Italy’s boot, a place so derelict and forgotten that the one nationally renowned book about it, Carlo Levi’s wartime memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli, owes its title to the idea that the saviour, crossing Italy from the north, stopped at a village before the region’s border: Basilicata was never saved.

thanhtoong0
August 8, 2025