Category Fiction

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Books, Culture, Fiction, Irvine Welsh, Sách & Tri thức

Men in Love by Irvine Welsh review – the Trainspotting boys grow up

Three decades on from the author’s breakthrough debut, why are we still trapped in the Trainspotting moment?

It has been more than 30 years since Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting. To put that in perspective, it’s as distant to readers today as Catch-22 or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been in 1993. If you are anything like me, that doesn’t feel quite right. Because even at such a historical remove, there remains something undeniably resonant, something curiously current, about Welsh’s wiry, demotic, scabrous debut.

In part, this is explained by the sheer scale of Trainspotting’s success. It was one of those genuinely rare literary events, wherein a critically acclaimed, stylistically adventurous book catches the cultural zeitgeist to such a degree that it also becomes a commercial sensation, going on to sell over a million copies. Its cultural salience was further compounded by Danny Boyle’s cinematic adaptation, one of the highest-grossing UK films of all time, a visual intervention that seemed to crystallise the aesthetics of Britpop – high velocity, high audacity, high nostalgia.

thanhtoong0
July 14, 2025

Blogging, Books, Chuck Palahniuk, Digital media, Elif Shafak, Fiction, George Saunders, Hanif Kureishi, Howard Jacobson, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gaitskill, Miranda July, Publishing, Roxane Gay, Sách & Tri thức, Salman Rushdie, Substack

Where authors gossip, geek out and let off steam: 15 of the best literary Substacks

More and more writers are publishing newsletters – but which are worth your time? From Margaret Atwood to Hanif Kureishi, George Saunders to Miranda July, here’s our guide to the best

A peculiar aspect of the dawning of the digital age is that it has, in some respects, returned literary life to the 18th century. A hullabaloo of pamphleteers, the effective abolition of copyright – and a return to patronage networks and serial publication. In this context, then, the way in which literary writers are now turning to Substack – a platform that allows authors to send emails to a list of subscribers, and allows those subscribers to interact in comment forums – seems entirely natural.

Literary Substacks don’t follow a single pattern. For some, it’s a way of getting new work into the world, whether publishing a novel in serial form or hot-off-the-keyboard short stories; for others, it’s a way of interacting directly with readers (while building a handy marketing list); for still others, it’s a home for criticism, journalism, personal blowing off of steam, self-promotion, or a more direct version of the traditional writerly side hustle, teaching creative writing to aspiring authors.

thanhtoong0
July 12, 2025

Books, Culture, Elizabeth Strout, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout

A guide to the Pulitzer-winning novelist’s tales of small-town life, family secrets, and fraught relationships

American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers’ imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women’s prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre.

***

thanhtoong0
July 11, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Clare Chambers: ‘Iris Murdoch taught me that a novel could be about absolutely anything’

The author on Anthony Trollope, Andrew Miller, and why she sided with 19th-century coal miners

My earliest reading memory
I have the fuzziest memory of an illustrated Grimms’ fairy tale called Jorinde and Joringel from the time before I could read. I made my mum take it out of the library over and over again. It was about a quest for a flower with some special powers. I wish I could remember why it had such a hold over me.

My favourite book growing up
I think a sense of humour is forged in childhood and I remember crying with laughter as my older sister read me the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. It didn’t bother me that they were all about prep school boys – it was the comedy of embarrassment that really spoke to me.

thanhtoong0
July 11, 2025

Audiobooks, Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức, Samantha Harvey

Orbital by Samantha Harvey audiobook review – lyrical, hypnotic reading of otherworldly tale

Sarah Naudi reads the Booker-prize-winning novel about the daily lives of astronauts on the International Space Station

Tracking the movements of six astronauts on the International Space Station, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital – the winner of last year’s Booker prize – imagines the day-to-day lives of those who have chosen to be “shot into the sky on a kerosene bomb and then through the atmosphere in a burning capsule with the equivalent weight of two black bears upon them”.

Only basic information is provided about the crew, who are from Russia, the United States, Japan, Italy and the UK. Harvey is more interested in the tasks undertaken to keep themselves healthy and their lodgings shipshape. Simultaneously expansive and intimate, Orbital reveals how the usual routines of eating, sleeping and exercising are fraught with challenges when you are weightless: toothpaste foam must be swallowed rather than spat out and cutlery adhered to the table using magnets.

thanhtoong0
July 10, 2025

Africa, Awards and prizes, Books, Culture, Fiction, Islam, Middle East and north Africa, PEN literary prizes, Religion, Sách & Tri thức, Sudan

Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter prize for writing on migration and faith

Judges praised the Sudanese author for centring Muslim women, describing her writing as “a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration”

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

thanhtoong0
July 10, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Havoc by Rebecca Wait review – a Saint Trinian’s tragicomedy

A mysterious illness sweeps through an isolated girls’ boarding school, in a work brimming with horror, humour and hysteria

Even if it wasn’t perched on a cliff on the south coast, the position of St Anne’s, Eastbourne – the decaying girls’ school that is the setting for Rebecca Wait’s gleefully macabre new novel, Havoc – might reasonably be described as precarious. Deeply eccentric, staffed by the barely employable, and permanently teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, St Anne’s hangs on, against all the odds. And then, in 1984, Ida Campbell turns up on the doorstep, in possession of a full scholarship and rather a lot of baggage.

Sixteen years old and already an outcast, Ida is in flight from her hapless mother, her foul-tempered sister, the small community in the Western Isles to which they have been transplanted, and the nameless scandal that has ruined their lives. St Anne’s is to be Ida’s salvation, but it soon dawns on her that the school might not be quite the refuge she had hoped for.

thanhtoong0
July 9, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Northern Ireland, Sách & Tri thức, Short stories

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review – an extraordinary debut

This brilliant short-story collection confronts the knotty truths of Northern Ireland’s bloody past

The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney’s North (1975), Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman (2018), and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them?

“I believe, these things, they’re the making of us,” a character says at one point. He’s talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland’s past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it.

thanhtoong0
July 7, 2025

Books, Culture, Fiction, Sách & Tri thức

Paula Bomer: ‘If you describe yourself as a victim, you’re dismissed’

Having made waves as part of the alt-lit movement, the US author is poised to go mainstream with The Stalker, her most exhilarating work yet

When I arrive at Paula Bomer’s apartment building in south Brooklyn I am briefly disoriented in the lobby, until I hear the yapping of dogs and amid them, her voice calling my name. Bomer is tall and striking, in her mid-50s. I met her last year at a reading in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she seemed like someone who cared almost manically about literature and also like someone who would be fun to hang out with, two qualities not always confluent. I had heard of these anxious dogs before, when she and I met for dinner a few months ago, and she disclosed that her life was now spent managing canine neuroses.

“I got them when my dad died,” she says, in between offering me matcha, coffee, tequila or wine (it’s 2.30pm on a Sunday; Bomer doesn’t drink any more, save a glass of champagne on selling her book, but doesn’t mind if others do). “The dogs were a mistake,” she says, “But that’s OK, I’ll survive it.”

thanhtoong0
July 6, 2025

Barbara Kingsolver, Books, Culture, Fiction, Pulitzer prize, Sách & Tri thức, Women's prize for fiction

‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel

Demon Copperhead, the author’s retelling of Dickens during Virginia’s opioid crisis, was a global success. Now she has used royalties from the novel to open a recovery residence

In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there’s a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book “hard to read”. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, “because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.”

Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion.

thanhtoong0
July 5, 2025

Trending now