Category Culture

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Susan Choi: ‘For so long I associated Dickens with unbearable Christmas TV specials’

The Booker-shortlisted novelist on the seismic effect of Sigrid Nunez, and wanting to write like Virginia Woolf

My earliest reading memory
Asking my mom if she could stop reading my bedtime book to me and just let me read it on my own, since I felt she was going too slowly. The book was either Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, both by Roald Dahl.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Stuart Little, and all his small, clever things – his tiny canoe, his tiny sailboat. He had such a relaxed demeanor and was so dapper! I also loved Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series – tiny people living under the floorboards and improvising household goods out of “borrowed” safety pins and match boxes and so on. Clearly I had a thing for miniatures.

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Wise by Frank Tallis review – how to turn your midlife crisis into a hero’s journey

A psychologist’s gripping guide to surviving dark nights of the soul offers both comfort and insight

I’m proud of how mild-mannered my midlife crisis is. While the cliche involves the purchase of a Porsche or a frantic fling with a colleague, I’ve mainly fallen back into the geeky preoccupations of my youth, such as founding poetry clubs and playing niche racket sports. Nevertheless, on the cusp of turning 50, and having just been beaten by my 11-year-old at Scrabble, I’m thrilled to have found a book that addresses my small struggle: an elegant discourse on the deep wisdom that I’m hoping will characterise my remaining years.

First, the author, a clinical psychologist named Frank Tallis, diagnoses the problem. Following some of the arguments in Ernest Becker’s 1973 study The Denial of Death, he proposes that such crises are at least partly the result of the western reluctance to face mortality. In Britain, we eschew open coffins, for instance. When our relatives die, as my mother did two years ago, they die in a hospital rather than at home. We can hardly even bring ourselves to say “die”, preferring euphemisms such as “pass away”. In this Instagram age, our lives are dominated by filters and distractions. The crisis strikes when reality can’t be held at bay any longer. We lose our parents. Then we notice, inevitably, that we are now at the front of the queue.

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Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash review – clever comedy for our conspiracy theory age

This tender satire of a dysfunctional American family’s search for moral guidance is precisely what our times need

Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her debut novel about the Flynn family, is a witty, quickfire book set in a small American town, punch-drunk on clever, skewering lists and infested typographically by the gnats that plague the local church the family attends (“explagnation”, “extermignation”).

The Flynns are in a mess. It was easy for Catherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve acquired three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine succumbs to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He’s rekindled her artistic ambitions, prompting her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and proclaim an open marriage. She doesn’t yet know that Jim has a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement (“each of these pussies has touched my life”).

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Ian McEwan calls for assisted dying rights to extend to dementia sufferers

The author, whose family has been impacted by dementia, says provision in living wills could clarify intentions when a person declines to the point they are ‘alive and dead all at once’

Legalised assisted dying should “gradually” be extended to dementia sufferers, the author Ian McEwan has said.

McEwan was “shocked by the snow-drilling attempts” by those opposed to the UK’s assisted dying bill, he told a public book event in London, citing its more than 1,000 amendments. MPs and peers backing the bill now believe it is “near impossible” for it to pass the House of Lords before the end of the session in May due to alleged filibustering.

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David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God by Peter Ormerod review – the making of a modern saint

An exhilarating account of Bowie’s spirituality and the quasi-religious nature of his work, from Space Oddity to Blackstar

It has become a tired cliche among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie died in 2016. It also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of a liberal order that has crumbled around our ears, Bowie prophesied the mayhem that has replaced it.

In his later years, he thought that we had entered a zone of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the internet – not its promise, but its menace. There is no plan and no order. There is just disaster and social collapse. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity through to the background violence of The Next Day and Blackstar, was always drowned or destroyed or incinerated: “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide” as he exclaims at the beginning of Diamond Dogs.

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Glyph by Ali Smith review – bearing witness to the war in Gaza

This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction

Never knowingly unknowing, Ali Smith pre-empts the most likely criticism of her latest novel, Glyph, when a character says: “I’m just not sure that books that are novels and fiction and so on should be so close to real life … or so politically blatant.”

Glyph, which follows sisters Petra and Patch as they reflect on childhood attempts to grapple with the finality of death following the loss of their mother, goes further than any of Smith’s recent work in robustly answering this charge. While the Seasonal Quartet playfully anatomised the social fracture of post-Brexit Britain, and immediate predecessor Gliff dealt with the violence of the securitised state, Glyph, in its explicit engagement with the Israeli government’s apartheid and genocide in Palestine, raises the ethical stakes decisively. To engage in a Smithian pun – this is Art in the Age of Mechanical Mass Destruction.

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The Bed Trick by Izabella Scott review – a bizarre story of sexual duplicity

A brilliant analysis of the trial of Gayle Newland and the literary and social antecedents of ‘sex by deception’

In September 2015, Gayle Newland stood trial accused of sex by deception. It was alleged that she created an online identity as a man and used this character, Kye Fortune, to lure another woman into a sexual relationship, which was consummated repeatedly with the assistance of a blindfold and a prosthetic penis. The woman believed she was having sex with Kye until one day her ring caught on his hat and she felt long hair. Tearing off her blindfold, she realised her male lover was actually her female friend. As these lurid, almost fairytale details seeped out, the case went viral. “Sex attacker who posed as man found guilty” was one of the milder headlines.

The trial caught Izabella Scott’s attention because it was a real-life example of a plot device she recognised from literature. The bed trick can be found in folk stories and operas, in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Often told for comic effect, it concerns sex by trickery and deception, under cover of darkness. “The plot suggests,” Scott writes, “that, in bed, anyone might be mistaken for anyone else.”

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Green Dot author Madeleine Gray: ‘Chosen family is big in the queer community’

Madeleine Gray has followed her hit debut with a sharp take on complicated parenting. She discusses love, sex and famous fans

Madeleine Gray remembers the first time she had an inkling that her debut novel might become a big deal. When she received news of her advance from her agent, she was “expecting a pittance”; the number was in the six figures. “I thought: holy fuck, there’s been a mistake,” the 31-year-old author laughs. “By the time Green Dot was published last autumn, it had already been hailed as one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and was quickly beloved, drawing comparisons with Bridget Jones, Fleabag and Annie Ernaux. Nigella Lawson and Gillian Anderson posted praise for the book.

Were those celebrity endorsements exciting, I ask her. “I’m gay,” she replies, her enthusiasm leaping through the screen; “are you kidding?! I follow Gillian on Instagram, obviously.” When she saw Anderson post a selfie with the book, “the scream that came out of me was primal”.

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Should we sell our kidneys?

Allowing payments to organ donors would undoubtedly save lives. So what are the psychological – and political – impediments?

Right now, about 7,000 people are awaiting a kidney transplant in the UK. According to NHS figures, in 2024/25 only 3,302 adult kidney transplants were performed. The charity Kidney Research UK states that “just 32% of patients receive a transplant within a year of joining the waiting list and six people die every week while waiting.”

People who experience kidney failure need either lifelong dialysis or a transplant to survive. Yet even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, that is by no means the end of the story. Kidneys from deceased donors last an average of 10 to 15 years, those from a living person 20 to 25. If (or rather, when) a transplant fails, the affected patient once again needs dialysis or a donated organ.

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‘To say I was the favourite would imply I was liked’: Mark Haddon on a loveless childhood

As a bookish child with a distant father and a disapproving mother, the Curious Incident author retreated into a world of his own. Looking back, he asks what it means to lose parents who never showed you love

When I see washed-out photographs of English life in the 60s and 70s – cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes – I feel a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?

Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention that gives everything inside a memorable fierceness? The way one could lie, for example, on a lawn and look down into the jungle of the grass to see earwigs and woodlice lumbering between the pale green trunks like brontosauri lumbering between the ferns and gingkos of the Late Jurassic. The way a rucked bedspread could become a mountain range stretched below the wings of a badly painted Airfix Spitfire. Or do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and unloving?

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