Category Sách & Tri thức

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‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”

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Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a press to publish Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai

The Irish novelist discovered the Hungarian writer two decades ago, and was excited by the verbal pyrotechnics of a rule-breaking storyteller

That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.

Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy.

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The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu; When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift; The White Octopus Hotel by Alexandra Bell; Darker Days by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; Remain by Nicholas Sparks with M Night Shyamalan

All That We See Or Seem by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, £20)
In this thriller from award-winning author Liu, Julia Z wants to leave behind the notoriety she gained as a teenage hacker. But she’s drawn into danger when she agrees to help a man whose wife, an artist skilled in the new art of “vivid dreaming” – using AI and virtual reality to allow her live audience into her stories – has disappeared. He has seen a video from someone claiming to have kidnapped her and hopes Julia can tell him who sent it. The near-future setting is convincing, and the story is rich in interesting ideas about potential developments in the use of AI and social media. Julia is a strong, complex character, and there’s a suggestion there could be a series of novels about her. Action-packed as well as thought-provoking, this is one of the best science-fiction books of the year.

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift (Arcadia, £20)
Like Swift’s previous novel, The Coral Bones, this book is powered by a passionate love of nature and deep concern for the planet’s future. Beginning with the character-forming effects of major events during the childhoods of the two main characters – Covid lockdowns for Lucy, the Chornobyl disaster for Hester – the novel tracks their separate journeys in climate activism and documentary film-making as both make their own contribution towards a better world, until 2070, when they meet at last. Evocative and beautifully written, this character-driven novel also inspires as an argument for rewilding in Britain.

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Natalie Haynes: ‘I’ll never read anything by a Brontë again’

The author and comedian on the immortal lines of Snoopy, discovering the heart of Homer’s Iliad and her culinary comfort read

My earliest reading memory
Harvey’s Hideout by Russell Hoban, illustrated by Lillian Hoban. Harvey is a muskrat with a grievance against his awful sibling. His sister Mildred feels just the same way. I read this at four or five curled up on a yellow beanbag next to the radiator, in Bournville, where I grew up. I honestly don’t think there is a better reading spot anywhere in the world.

My favourite book growing up
Peanuts. I loved Snoopy long before I became an author. But he is an inspiration to all writers, sending a novel to his publishers with an immortal covering letter: “Gentlemen, enclosed is the manuscript of my new novel. I know you are going to like it. In the meantime, please send me some money so I can live it up.”

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Raise Your Soul by Yanis Varoufakis review – an intimate history of Greece

The colourful former minister uses the lives of five female relatives to tell the story of postwar Greek politics

Yanis Varoufakis entered public consciousness as the academic in a leather jacket who briefly became Greece’s finance minister in 2015. For having the temerity to lecture his creditors on the folly of austerity, he was treated as the villain of the piece. Yet for all his swagger, he has always been a surprisingly sober thinker: Keynesian at heart, internationalist in instinct, he has built a reputation as a critic of dollar hegemony and Fortress Europe, a defender of both the precariat and refugees. You wonder if he’s experienced some schadenfreude in watching Germany’s economic miracle go bad of late – an implosion largely brought about by administering to itself the austerian medicine it once prescribed to the Greeks.

His latest book, the 10th since 2010, departs from his usual sober fare. This time, he offers a collective portrait of five unyielding women in his life who, in their different ways, thumbed their noses at patriarchy and autocracy. Written after thugs beat him up in 2023 in what he described as a “brazen fascist attack”, this is a therapeutic enterprise that doubles as a counter-history of postwar Greece.

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László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel prize in literature 2025

The Hungarian novelist whose books ‘reaffirm the power of art’ was announced as winner at a ceremony in Stockholm
• Nobel prize in literature 2025 live: László Krasznahorkai wins ‘for his compelling and visionary oeuvre’

The Nobel prize in literature for 2025 has been awarded to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, the Swedish Academy has announced.

The Academy cited the 71-year-old’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.

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Nobel prize in literature 2025 is announced – live

Follow along as the next winner of the world’s most prestigious literature prize is announced in Stockholm

Every October, the announcement of the Nobel prize in literature sends ripples through the literary world — but how does the Swedish Academy actually choose a winner?

It begins months earlier, when the Nobel committee, made up of a small group of writers, sends out nomination forms to a select network of individuals and organisations. Those invited to nominate include:

Members of the 18-person Swedish Academy, as well as similar literary academies around the world

Professors of literature and linguistics at universities and colleges

Previous Nobel laureates in literature

Presidents of national authors’ societies representing their countries’ literary production

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The Poems of Seamus Heaney review – collected works reveal his colossal achievement

The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time

Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaney introduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English lyric, peppering his lines with words like glarry, the Ulster word for muddy; kesh, from Irish ceis, a wickerwork causeway; and dailigone, “daylight gone” or dusk, from Ulster-Scots. It is this that gives his writing a mulchy richness and cultural resonance that remain unique in contemporary poetry. One of the key poems in North (1975) is a version of Baudelaire’s The Digging Skeleton, to which Heaney brings an Irish flavour – the skeletons dig the earth “like navvies”. It’s especially rich as digging for Heaney is also a metaphor for writing, while the archaeological metaphor resonates with the darkly symbolic bog poems.

Bringing all Heaney’s poems together in one volume, this collection lets us see for the first time all the archaeological layers that make up his oeuvre, from the talismanic Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the visionary long poem Station Island (1984), on to the parables of The Haw Lantern (1987) and the intimacies of The Human Chain (2010), the last volume published during the poet’s lifetime. A key poem in that collection, Chanson d’Aventure, describes his journey to hospital in an ambulance following a stroke: “Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked / In position for the drive”. The book also makes available at last Heaney’s prose poems, Stations (1975), released in a small press edition by Ulsterman Publications, which Heaney effectively kept under wraps as he felt the publication of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns – “a work of complete authority” – had stolen his thunder in this form.

Ask me to translate what Loeb gives as
“In a retired vale…a sequestered grove”
And I’ll confound the Lethe in Moyola

By coming through Back Park down from Grove Hill
Across Long Rigs on to the riverbank –
Which way, by happy chance, will take me past

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‘Catastrophic decline’ in Black representation in children’s books

A report by charity Inclusive Books for Children found that of the 2,721 books surveyed, only 51 featured a Black main character, down by 21.5% since 2023

The number of children’s books featuring a Black main character dropped by more than a fifth between 2023 and 2024, according to a new report by a literacy charity.

The report by Inclusive Books for Children (IBC) surveyed books published last year for readers aged one to nine. Of the 2,721 books surveyed, only 51 (1.9%) featured a Black main character, down by 21.5% compared with 2023.

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