Category Sách & Tri thức

Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign

Ncuti Gatwa leads star winners at first Speakies awards for audio storytelling

The actor won best performance for BBC drama Gatsby in Harlem at the inaugural British Audio awards, while Nicola Coughlan’s narration of Juno Dawson’s Queen B clinched best sci-fi audiobook

Audiobooks narrated by Ncuti Gatwa, Nicola Coughlan and David Tennant were among those recognised at the inaugural British Audio awards, the “Speakies”.

Gatwa’s performance in the lead role of Gatsby in Harlem helped it emerge as one of Monday evening’s biggest winners: it took three major prizes including audio of the year. The reimagining of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby also won best audio drama adaptation, while Gatwa took home the best performance award for what organisers described as his “remarkable poise and flair” in capturing Gatsby’s character.

Continue reading...

Holbein: Renaissance Master by Elizabeth Goldring review – a magnificent portrait of the artist

The first scholarly biography in more than 100 years of the man who immortalised the Tudor court does not disappoint

Much of what we know, or think we know, about the court of Henry VIII comes directly from the paintings of Hans Holbein. There’s the famous portrait of the king himself – puffy, phallic and cruel, looking more like a murderer than a monarch. But there is also ascetic Thomas More, hiding his cruel streak behind fine bones, and sly yet thuggish Thomas Cromwell, with those shifty eyes and the beginnings of a double chin. “Hans the Painter” did the wives too – an appropriately sketchy drawing of Anne Boleyn, a saintly portrait of Jane Seymour who died after giving birth to Henry’s heir, and a pin-up version of Anne of Cleves.

It was this last portrait that caused an international incident in 1539 when Holbein was sent by Henry to the Low Countries to check whether Anne was pretty enough to be his next wife. Based on Holbein’s portrait, Henry committed to the marriage in absentia, only to be horrified when the actual Anne arrived on the Kentish coast, looking “nothing so fair as she hath been reported”. The union lasted six months.

Continue reading...

Has Britain become an economic colony?

The UK could’ve been a true tech leader – but it has cheerfully submitted to US dominance in a way that may cost it dear

Two and a half centuries ago, the American colonies launched a violent protest against British rule, triggered by parliament’s imposition of a monopoly on the sale of tea and the antics of a vainglorious king. Today, the tables have turned: it is Great Britain that finds itself at the mercy of major US tech firms – so huge and dominant that they constitute monopolies in their fields – as well as the whims of an erratic president. Yet, to the outside observer, Britain seems curiously at ease with this arrangement – at times even eager to subsidise its own economic dependence. Britain is hardly alone in submitting to the power of American firms, but it offers a clear case study in why nations need to develop a coordinated response to the rise of these hegemonic companies.

The current age of American tech monopoly began in the 2000s, when the UK, like many other countries, became almost entirely dependent on a small number of US platforms – Google, Facebook, Amazon and a handful of others. It was a time of optimism about the internet as a democratising force, characterised by the belief that these platforms would make everyone rich. The dream of the 1990s – naive but appealing – was that anyone with a hobby or talent could go online and make a living from it.

Continue reading...

‘He was just trying to earn a few kopecks’: how newly translated stories reveal Chekhov’s silly side

With daft jokes and experimental wordplay, the first comprehensive translations of his lesser-known stories show Anton Chekhov in a new light

Few writers are as universally admired as Chekhov. As Booker winner George Saunders puts it, “Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.” Novelists from Ann Patchett to Zadie Smith cite him as an inspiration. His plays The Seagull, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard still pack out theatres internationally. In the past year alone, Andrew Scott wowed audiences in his one-man Vanya for London’s National Theatre and Cate Blanchett took on the role of Arkadina in The Seagull at the Barbican. But how much did you know about his silly side?

Anton Chekhov: Earliest Stories offers the first comprehensive translation in English of the stories, novellas and humoresques that the Russian author wrote in the early 1880s. And it is supremely juvenile in the best way. The reason many of these stories are now appearing in translation for the first time is because, explains editor Rosamund Bartlett, they have never been regarded by commercial publishers as “worthy” of Chekhov’s reputation. They are too childishly comical. During the translation process, she says, “we would just collapse in fits of giggles”.

Continue reading...

‘I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t’: Karl Ove Knausgård on the fallout from My Struggle and the dark side of ambition

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Fifteen years ago, discussing the success of his six-volume autofictional work My Struggle on Norwegian radio, Karl Ove Knausgård said he felt as if he had “actually sold my soul to the devil”. My Struggle had become a runaway success in Norway – a success that would subsequently be repeated across the world – but the project provoked anger in some quarters for its portrayal of friends and family members. This was a work of art that came at a price. Hence, for its creator, its Faustian aspect.

That experience lies at the root of Knausgård’s latest novel, The School of Night, the fourth volume in his Morning Star sequence, in which his typical character studies and fine-grained attention to the minutiae of daily life are married to a compelling supernatural plot involving a mysterious star appearing in the sky and the dead returning to life. Volumes one and three, The Morning Star and The Third Realm, cycled between the same group of interconnected characters, while the second book, The Wolves of Eternity, moved back to the 1980s and told the story of a young Norwegian man and his discovery of a Russian half-sister. Only towards the end of its 800 pages did the novel intersect with the events of The Morning Star. The School of Night, perhaps frustratingly for some, again moves backwards instead of forwards, this time to 1985 London, and follows the art school career of a young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who is pursuing his dream of fame as a photographer. Kristian, events reveal, is someone who will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to succeed. Charting Kristian’s rise and fall is an addictive and eerie reading experience.

Continue reading...

Sophie Hannah: ‘I gave up on Wuthering Heights three times’

The crime writer on actor Frances Farmer’s life-changing story of survival, her favourite self help and discovering Agatha Christie’s alter ego

My earliest reading memory
I was six, and in the lounge in my first home in Manchester. I was sitting cross-legged on the grey carpet, in 1977, when I finished reading whichever of Enid Blyton’s brilliant Secret Seven mysteries contains the mind-blowing (genuinely, for a six-year-old) twist that “Emma Lane” turns out to be a road and not a person.

My favourite book growing up
Up to the age of 12, Blyton’s Secret Seven and Five Find-Outers mysteries; from 12 onwards, it was Agatha Christie. Growing up, I was certain that no other kind of story could ever hope to be as satisfying as the very best mystery story.

Continue reading...

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck review – a kaleidoscopic study of transience

A collection of columns by the German Booker winner reveals a keen eye for details that mark the passing of time

Jenny Erpenbeck wrote the pieces collected in this compact yet kaleidoscopic book for a column in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; published in German in 2009, they now appear in an English translation by Kurt Beals, following the immense success of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, which won the 2024 International Booker prize.

It’s interesting and instructive to reflect on what German newspaper readers made of the column in the early years of the new millennium, nearly two decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall. For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form – apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrötchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele – she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

Continue reading...

Liars by Sarah Manguso audiobook review – livid tale of marriage gone awry

Rebecca Lowman narrates a superb, claustrophobia-inducing plunge into a relationship descending from bad to worse

Halfway through Liars, the story of a new relationship that becomes a marriage, our protagonist, Jane, is asked by a neighbour: “Why are you with him?” It’s a question that has been on the listener’s mind for some time.

Jane’s partner, John, lies about his feelings, his financial status, where he is going and where he has been. He is chaotic, lazy, resentful, entitled and given to getting drunk and spending money he hasn’t got. At the start of their marriage, Jane’s career as a writer and academic is on the up, while John – a visual artist and aspiring film-maker – has hit a professional wall. Time and time again, he insists they move cities for better work opportunities, which soon puts a spanner in his wife’s working life. It comes as no surprise that, after their son is born, Jane is left to do the parenting while her husband absents himself from his responsibilities.

Available via Picador, 6hr 7min

Continue reading...