Category Culture

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Stephen King’s son among writers boycotting British Library event in solidarity with striking workers

King’s son, Joe Hill, joins V Castro and Keith Rosson in withdrawing from the Tales of the Weird festival this weekend in support of industrial action

Horror authors are used to pushing the boundaries of fiction, but for some in the field there’s one boundary they won’t cross – a picket line.

Several writers including Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King – who has just released his first novel in a decade, King Sorrow – have withdrawn from a seasonal spooky event at the British Library this weekend over worker pay at the central London institution.

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Derek Owusu: ‘I didn’t read a book until the age of 24’

The writer on bingeing Henry James, his friendship with Benjamin Zephaniah and a confidence-boosting classic

My earliest reading memory
When I was about four or five, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster parents, and my foster dad was trying to teach me how to read using those Biff and Chip books.

My favourite book growing up
I never read a book until the age of 24, so there wasn’t a favourite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with St Mawr by DH Lawrence, then EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Time Machine by HG Wells, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.

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Attention by Anne Enright review – sparkling reflections on life and literature

Unabashed and morally generous, the Booker winner writes like a sharp, funny, fallen angel

In addition to producing eight novels over the past 30 years, Anne Enright has always written nonfiction around the edges. This has mostly taken the form of essays for the literary pages of the NYRB, the LRB and, indeed, the Guardian. Attention is a collection of 24 of the best, each with a new brief introduction by Enright herself. The work is culled mostly from the past 10 years, with the latest dated “Autumn 2025”, which suggests that she was still blowing on the ink as it went to press.

A decade ago most of these pieces would probably have been called “personal essays”, but that now seems redundant. Everything is personal with Enright, which is what makes you want to read her even on subjects that don’t initially appeal. The cocaine trade in Honduras, say, or the production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in a sodden field in the Aran Islands. And just when you worry that things might, actually, be getting a bit too fine-grained, such as the revelation that on holiday her husband likes to study menus carefully before choosing a restaurant, while she is more likely to dive in and scream for chips, Enright lobs in a line that explodes her text. Leaving her beloved Venice after a holiday with said husband, she is struck by the thought that the next time she visits, “I do not know if the disaster will have happened or not, because one day it will happen. One of us will die; the other will remain.” And just like that we are taken to the deepest, darkest mystery not just of Enright’s marriage, but of the kind of relationship that we might long for ourselves.

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Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah audiobook review – coming-of-age saga in Tanzania

Three young people step boldly into their adult lives in this elegantly narrated novel from the Nobel laureate

The Nobel prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah is known for his portrayals of east Africans and the after-effects of colonial rule. Opening in Zanzibar in the aftermath of independence, his 11th novel, Theft, spans half a century as it documents the lives of Karim, Fauzia and Badar. We learn how young Karim is treated as “an afterthought” by his mother, Raya, who divorces her much older husband and leaves her son behind to start a new life.

Mother and son are reunited several years later in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where Raya has married a pharmacist named Haji. Karim, who grows up to be handsome, intelligent and more than a little conceited, gets a scholarship to study in the city and meets Fauzia, who is training to be a teacher and is keen to avoid the fate of other “mute daughter[s] laid out for deflowering”. She and Karim marry, and the pair open their home to Badar, a former servant of Raya and Haji’s who was abandoned by his parents as a child.

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Heart the Lover by Lily King review – a love story to treasure

A companion novel to the brilliant Writers & Lovers, this delightfully witty tale of college romance matures into midlife poignancy

The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.

So my heart initially sank at Heart the Lover’s cover promise that our main character would soon be “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games” – good grief, save me from the raucous card games! But obviously the caveat here is what it always is: a good writer will make it matter. I had faith, therefore, that everything would be all right, since Lily King is an exceptionally good writer. Indeed, she could probably write a book-length account of her most recent dream and I would still rush to read it.

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Where to start with: Paul Bailey

The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights

Paul Bailey, who died last October aged 87, was best known as a novelist of comic brilliance, wide-ranging empathy – even for the worst of his characters – and a cleverness that was never clinical. His fiction was frequently occupied with the impact of memories on our lives, and usually heavily driven by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet and more besides – so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.

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Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith review – essays for an age of anxiety

From cultural appropriation to gender, Smith nails the politics of creativity. But on actual politics, she is less assured

Accepting a literary prize in Ohio last year, the novelist Zadie Smith described “feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity”. Smith is only 50, but there is indeed something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, opinion pieces, criticism and eulogies for departed literary heroes – Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.

In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár, a once revered conductor who finds herself shunned by the younger cohort, takes on existential proportions: “Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach any more – and the seas are rising!”

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Black British book festival launches publisher

BBBF organiser Selina Brown announced the new project, focusing on undiscovered authors, following a decline in the publication of Black literature

The organiser of the Black British book festival, Selina Brown, announced earlier this month that the festival will launch a publishing collaboration with Pan Macmillan, focusing on “raw talent”, in particular writers who have not been traditionally published.

The publisher will commission adult and children’s books, set to hit shelves from 2027.

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The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie – a haunting coda to a groundbreaking career

From an afterlife fantasy to a tale of loss in Mumbai, death is a recurring theme in this story collection – an echo of the novelist at his peak

Towards the end of Knife, his 2024 book about the assault at a public event in upstate New York that blinded him in his right eye, Salman Rushdie offers a thought experiment:

Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don’t believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer’s life in 1989. The books are their own journey.

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From White Teeth to Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s best books – ranked!

Twenty-five years on from her dazzling debut, and as a new collection of essays comes out, we assess the British author’s best books

How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and poster girl for multi­culturalism at 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking Chinese‑Jewish autograph hunter, the dangers of fame and the shallowness of pop culture, of course.

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