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Rumours of My Demise by Evan Dando review – eye-popping tales of drugs and unpredictability

An indie-pop darling details his rise to fame and subsequent public humiliations with appealing frankness

Evan Dando’s autobiography opens in early 2021. The singer is living in a mouldering trailer on Martha’s Vineyard. He has a $200-a-day drug habit and is subsisting off a diet of cigarettes and cheeseburgers that he can’t chew because the heroin, cocaine and amphetamine he’s injecting have caused his teeth to fall out.

It’s all a very long way from Dando’s brief burst of fame as frontman and solitary longstanding member of the Lemonheads: two big albums in 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray, and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, a huge hit cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, an era with Dando’s face taking its place alongside the Betty Blue and magic eye posters on halls of residence walls, the Docs-shod female student’s pin-up of choice. But it’s also not totally unexpected, at least if you have even a glancing knowledge of the singer’s subsequent travails. Mainstream success was short-lived: Dando succeeds in sabotaging his own career in a blaze of hard drugs and wildly unpredictable behaviour. For the last 35 years, drugs and unpredictability – rather than music – is what Dando has become known for. The book’s blurb mentions “heroin chic”, but in truth, Dando’s dissipation is almost impossible to put any kind of romantic gloss on. To his credit, he doesn’t bother, instead recounting one public humiliation after another with a what-can-you-do? shrug.

A cocktail of heroin and cocaine puts paid to a show designed to impress investors who’ve just bought a share of Dando’s song publishing for $300,000, but it’s just one of many gigs that collapse into chaos: he falls offstage, or the police are called and he’s led away from the venue in handcuffs. The Lemonheads miss their slot at Glastonbury because Dando is holed up in a hotel, doing heroin: when he does eventually turn up, he performs an unscheduled solo set, but the crowd throw bottles and boo him offstage. He hangs around Oasis in their pomp, even writing a song with Noel Gallagher: it has to be removed from a Lemonheads album at the last minute, because Gallagher deems it an “embarrassment”.

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Lyra’s last story – exclusive extract from Philip Pullman’s final installment in The Book of Dust trilogy

Thirty years ago, The Northern Lights introduced the world to Lyra Silvertongue. Now, Pullman completes her story in The Rose Field – plus listen to an audiobook extract read by Michael Sheen

She washed herself as well as she could in the little basin with its lukewarm water, and looked in the mirror dispassionately. The bruises on her face were fading, but she was tanned by the sun, and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose not far off from being actually burnt, so she must find some cream or ointment to deal with that. A broad-brimmed hat would help too.

She spread a very little of the rose salve on her nose and lips, her cheekbones and forehead. Then she sat down and thought about Ionides.

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The Captive by Kit Burgoyne review – a literary novelist tries his hand at pulp horror

A kidnapping goes the way of the occult in a gory, wildly entertaining romp from Ned Beauman, writing under a pseudonym

As we meet Luke, a nervous footsoldier in a revolutionary cell, he is on the point of carrying out his first proper operation. He and his colleagues – veteran activist Cam, and fire-in-her-belly true believer Rosa – are about to kidnap Adeline Woolsaw, 23-year-old scion of an obscenely wealthy clan who run an outsourcing company called the Woolsaw Group.

The company’s parasitic, money-grabbing, cost-shaving, data-siphoning activities stand for everything that is sinister and wrong with the conjunction of capitalism and state power. But the problem its opponents have is that the Woolsaw Group’s activities are so far-reaching, and its public profile so blandly corporate, that the public can’t be persuaded to pay any attention to its wickedness: “it’s ‘the largest public service outsourcing company in the UK’, which is so boring your brain just switches off. Which is good for the Woolsaw Group.” The hope of our wee terror cell, essentially, is that kidnapping the Woolsaws’ daughter will wake people up by putting a human face on it.

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Certified organic and AI-free: New stamp for human-written books launches

As machine-made books flood online marketplaces, a new UK initiative is introducing an Organic Literature stamp to help readers identify books created by real authors

A new UK start-up is taking aim at the growing wave of AI-generated books, launching an initiative to verify and label human-written works.

Books By People has launched an “Organic Literature” certification, partnering with an initial group of independent publishing houses.

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Humanish by Justin Gregg review – how much of a person is your pet?

From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds

In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,” he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk”.

The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

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Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai review – growing up in public

Clambering up bell towers, dancing the night away and falling in love – how ‘saint’ Malala forged a new identity

Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,” she writes in her new memoir.

Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.

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Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett review – remembering terrible men

In the latest novel from the acclaimed avant garde author, the narrator considers the impact of the relationships she’s left behind

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,” Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015’s Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn’t know, and she’s still in search of it. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”

Bennett was concerned then – and remains concerned now – with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator’s momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since, as she’s been drawn to working on larger scales. In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Künstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator’s early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex.

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‘After the reading, the poets hold each other’: what happens when Ukraine’s largest literary festival comes under Russian attack

Fiona Benson was invited to Lviv’s BookForum by Ukrainian poet-soldier Artur Dron’. She recounts falling in love with the city and its thriving literary culture, before an air raid siren sounds

I had been working on Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry project for two years when the invitation came to travel to the country’s largest literary festival. I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a journey to a war zone, but I was assured that visiting BookForum in Lviv, a city so far west it’s practically in Poland, would be safe. I had been leading poetry workshops with exiles and editing translations of Ukrainian poetry, including soldier Artur Dron‘’s collection We Were Here, published last November. So, when Artur and his translator – the incredible poet Yuliya Musakovska – asked me and language professor Hugh Roberts to attend, I couldn’t say no.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the city: its gorgeous architecture, its cafes, its parks full of trees, and its writers. Lviv’s inspired, robust literary culture puts the UK’s own underfunded, last-gasp scene to shame. On the first night of the Forum, Hugh and I attended a nonstop music and poetry event in a nightclub at which both Artur and Yuliya read their poems, and revealed what utter rock stars they truly are. I don’t know why I was surprised; We Were Here, written on the frontline before Artur was even 22, is a masterpiece. It is full of lucid, clear-eyed accounts of his experiences in the trenches and on the battlefield, elegies for his comrades, humane portraits of the suffering of bereaved civilians and furious adaptations of liturgies and prayers. One of his poems is published below.

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Poem of the week: My Mother by Claude McKay

Two sonnets absorb with calm clarity a boy’s anguish at his mother’s loss

My Mother

Reg wished me to go with him to the field,
I paused because I did not want to go;
But in her quiet way she made me yield
Reluctantly, for she was breathing low.
Her hand she slowly lifted from her lap
And, smiling sadly in the old sweet way,
She pointed to the nail where hung my cap.
Her eyes said: I shall last another day.
But scarcely had we reached the distant place,
When o’er the hills we heard a faint bell ringing;
A boy came running up with frightened face;
We knew the fatal news that he was bringing.
I heard him listlessly, without a moan,
Although the only one I loved was gone.

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After Oscar by Merlin Holland review – Wilde’s grandson on the legacy of a scandal

The playwright’s only living descendant traces the shadow cast by his trial – and his rehabilitation as a gay icon

Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read. His plays are performed. His words are quoted. He reclines in effigy on both the Strand and the King’s Road. He even has a commemorative window in Westminster Abbey. But it was not always so.

When he died in Paris, in 1900, aged just 46, the obituaries were not generous. There was a feeling of relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed the scene, and a general hope that he and his works would soon be forgotten. The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that nothing he wrote had “the strength to endure”.

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