Category Culture

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Andrew Miller, Awards and prizes, Booker prize, Books, Culture, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Sách & Tri thức, Tash Aw

Most global Booker prize longlist in a decade features Kiran Desai and Tash Aw

Chair of judges Roddy Doyle says the 13 ‘gripping’ titles in contention for the £50,000 award all ‘examine identity, individual or national’
• Comment: This year’s Booker prize longlist looks in new directions

Kiran Desai, Tash Aw and David Szalay are among the authors nominated for the 2025 Booker prize, on a longlist that features writers from nine different nationalities – the most global list for a decade.

The judging panel, which this year includes Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker alongside Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and chair of judges Roddy Doyle, also chose books by Katie Kitamura, Andrew Miller, Ben Markovits and Jonathan Buckley as part of their “Booker dozen” longlist of 13 titles.

thanhtoong0
July 29, 2025

Books, Culture, Sách & Tri thức, Science and nature books

After the Spike by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso review – the truth about population

We shouldn’t celebrate a falling population, according to this persuasive debunking of demographic myths

As a member of the 8.23 billion-strong human community, you probably have an opinion on the fact that the global population is set to hit a record high of 10 billion within the next few decades. Chances are, you’re not thrilled about it, given that anthropogenic climate change is already battering us and your morning commute is like being in a hot, jiggling sardine-tin.

Yet according to Dean Spears and Michael Geruso, academics at the University of Texas, what we really need to be worried about is depopulation. The number of children being born has been declining worldwide for a couple of hundred years. More than half of countries, including India, the most populous nation in the world, now have birthrates below replacement levels. While overall population has been rising due to declining (mainly infant) mortality, we’ll hit a peak soon before falling precipitously. This apex and the rollercoaster drop that follows it is the eponymous “spike”.

thanhtoong0
July 29, 2025

Books, Culture, Michael Longley, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Poem of the week: A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

An atheist’s complaint at the scant room made by the church for his personal commemoration of the dead

A Hundred Doors

God! I’m lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart review – is this the future for America?

Set a decade from now, this coming-of-age caper offers a child’s-eye view of family troubles in a ‘post-democracy’ USA

Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.

Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Books, Culture, Life and style, Sách & Tri thức

Tell us: what have you been reading this month?

We would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month

As part of The Guardian’s “what we’re reading” series, we would like to hear about the books you’ve particularly enjoyed this month.

Have you read a book in recent weeks – fiction or non-fiction – that you’d recommend? Tell us all about it below.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Biography books, Books, Culture, History books, Politics books, Sách & Tri thức, The Iranian revolution

King of Kings by Scott Anderson review – how the last shah of Iran sealed his own fate

A clear-eyed account of a difficult, complex man and his self-inflicted fall from grace

The last shah of Iran was a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: outwardly haughty and magnificent, inwardly insecure and indecisive, a Persian Richard II, self-regarding even in his own downfall. When he stood at the foot of his aircraft steps as he left Iran for the last time in January 1979, tears streaming down his cheeks and killer cancer working away inside him, surely even the stoniest heart must have felt some pity for this fallen autocrat?

Not so. The stony heart of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini contained only rage and a desire for vengeance towards the King of Kings (the Iranian monarch’s official designation). “This man has no place in Iran, and no place on Earth,” Khomeini told me in a chilling television interview before leaving Paris for Tehran. On the plane bringing him back from a 15-year exile a few days later to overthrow the shah’s regime, Khomeini muttered that he felt nothing – hichi – on returning home.

thanhtoong0
July 28, 2025

Books, Consumer rights, Culture, Law, Money, Sách & Tri thức, Society

Why we need a right not to be manipulated

From to airlines to broadband, companies exploit cognitive biases to get us to part with money. Here’s how to fight back

Many nations already enshrine a right not to be defrauded, and even a right not to be deceived. If a company sells you a new medicine, falsely claiming that it prevents cancer, it can be punished. If a firm convinces you to buy a new smartphone, saying that it has state-of-the-art features when it doesn’t, it will have violated the law. But in the current era, many companies are taking our time and money not by defrauding or deceiving us, but by practising the dark art of manipulation.

They hide crucial terms in fine print. They automatically enrol you in a programme that costs money but does not benefit you at all. They make it easy for you to subscribe to a service, but extremely hard for you to cancel. They use “drip pricing”, by which they quote you an initial number, getting you to commit to the purchase, only to add a series of additional costs, knowing that once you’ve embarked on the process, you are likely just to say “yeah, whatever”. In its worst forms, manipulation is theft. It takes people’s resources and attention, and it does so without their consent.

thanhtoong0
July 27, 2025

Books, Culture, Health, Mental health, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

‘How can I find meaning from the ruins of my life?’: the little magazine with a life-changing impact

After struggles with mental health and addiction, Max Wallis launched a poetry magazine – and it has transformed his life

One morning in February last year, I received an urgent call from the journalist Paul Burston, alerting me to alarming recent social media posts by a mutual friend, the poet and former model Max Wallis.

It seemed he had left his London flat in deep distress and was headed to a bridge. Our best guess was the Millennium footbridge by St Paul’s Cathedral. Then we heard that Max might have taken refuge inside the cathedral. While I scanned gaggles of tourists in the nave, he was intercepted and removed by ambulance. I was relieved to get a message later that evening that he was safe.

thanhtoong0
July 27, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Gillian Anderson, Life and style, Miranda July, Romance books, Sách & Tri thức, Sally Rooney, Sex, Yael van der Wouden

More sex please, we’re bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel

From the Women’s prize to the bestseller lists, authors are pushing the boundaries of how explicit the novel can be – and readers can’t get enough

When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden’s brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women’s prize for fiction last month, they weren’t just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July’s exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic’s work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality.

While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today.

thanhtoong0
July 26, 2025

Books, Culture, Sách & Tri thức, Teen books, Young adult

Children and teens roundup – the best new picture books and novels

A picture of patience; first days at school; a cruise ship detective; a terrible storm; time travellers; rebels in love and more

Put Your Shoes On by Polly Dunbar, Walker, £12.99
Late for a party, Mummy really wants Josh to put his shoes on – but he’s too lost in his imagination to hear until she shouts. Featuring a child’s inner world vividly evoked by Dunbar’s own sons’ drawings, this tender, relatable picture book encourages patience and communication.

The Tour at School (Because You’re the New Kid!) by Katie Clapham, illustrated by Nadia Shireen, Walker, £12.99
This irrepressibly bouncy tour of all the school essentials (including toilets, emergency meeting tree and library with possibly more than a million books) humorously distils the scariness of starting school and the thrill of making a new friend.

thanhtoong0
July 25, 2025

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