Category Sách & Tri thức

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Lucy Foley: ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging didn’t talk down to teenage girls’

The crime author on rediscovering Edith Wharton, and the brilliantly twisted author who changed her ideas about writing

My earliest reading memory
I have a distinct memory of sitting by the bookshelves in the first house we lived in and suddenly realising I could understand the words in lots of the books. It was like discovering I could perform magic – pulling out one book after the other and disappearing into other worlds. I bumped into a childhood friend the other day who told me she remembers being annoyed when I came for a play date at her house and the first thing I wanted to do was see if she had any books I hadn’t read.

My favourite book growing up
I loved Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge series as a girl. The exquisite intricacy of the pictures, their evocation of a hidden world … I’m enjoying rediscovering them with my four‑year‑old. The High Hills has a wonderful, Tolkien-esque quest element to it.

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Authority: Essays on Being Right by Andrea Long Chu review – scorching hot takes

The Pulitzer-winning critic has some choice words for the likes of Zadie Smith, Hanya Yanagihara and Bret Easton Ellis

Andrea Long Chu stands accused of not playing by the rules, of appraising works of fiction as if they were essays or confessions rather than aesthetic objects. “It is true that I tend to treat a novel like an argument”, she writes in the introduction to Authority, a collection of essays and reviews published between 2018 and 2023 in outlets such as N+1, Bookforum and New York Magazine. Long Chu – who won a Pulitzer prize for criticism in 2023 – believes “all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors”, and to pretend otherwise is to indulge a “pernicious form of commodity fetishism”. In her reviews, books betray their authors, invariably revealing some kernel of inadequacy – be it immaturity, myopia or just terminal dullness.

This approach borders on the psychoanalytical, and makes for fun reading. Long Chu diagnoses a case of “Munchausen by proxy” in Hanya Yanagihara, whose bestselling novels A Little Life (2015) and To Paradise (2022) are powered by “the misery principle”: “horrible things happen to people for no reason”, and the author is “a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health”. She notes a troubling tendency towards “infantile” idealisation of mothers and girlfriends in Tao Lin’s autofiction, and finds “something deeply juvenile” about the scatological motifs in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels. Moshfegh’s medieval gore-fest Lapovona (2022), fails to shock, because “You cannot épater le bourgeois without an actual bourgeoisie”; “the leading coprophile of American letters” is trying too hard to convince us she’s not a prude.

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Allan Ahlberg, beloved children’s author, dies aged 87

Working first with his wife Jane, and later with illustrators including Raymond Briggs and Bruce Ingman, he wrote more than 150 books

Author Allan Ahlberg, who delighted generations of children with colourful characters and nimble rhymes, has died aged 87.

Working with his wife Janet, an award-winning illustrator, Ahlberg produced a host of bestselling nursery classics including Burglar Bill, Peepo!, and Each Peach Pear Plum. After Janet’s death in 1994, he worked with illustrators such as Raymond Briggs and Bruce Ingman, with his career coming full circle in a series of collaborations with his daughter Jessica including Half a Pig and a pop-up set of anarchic variations on the tale of Goldilocks.

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Wrath of the Dragons by Olivia Rose Darling – Mr. Book Review

Wrath of the Dragons by Olivia Rose Darling is a romantasy novel feat. Elowyn and Cayden and a story full of drama. Dragons? Present. Romance? Marked-by-the-gods level intense. Political drama? Hmm.. Let’s see.. “Two fated lovers must unite against kingdoms to defend their home and crowns from those who wish to destroy them. With huge […]

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in July

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

The user-friendly short chapter format of Nicci Cloke’s Her Many Faces, designed for our internet-lowered attention spans, obscures the fact that this page-turning, multiple viewpoint thriller is actually a densely plotted novel full of amazing twists. This is the book you want to take on a long, boring journey you’re dreading. You’ll pray you finish it before you arrive at your destination.

Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver’s titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible.

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Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben review – rivals anything by Virginia Woolf

More than 40 years on from its first publication, this exploration of one woman’s thoughts and fantasies is a gem worthy of rediscovery

There’s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.

Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the same age as Belben was at the time of writing, and she recalls a similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as “a study of the human figure”, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is her own.

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When the Cranes Fly South by Lisa Ridzén review – a novel anyone will take to heart

A huge hit in Sweden, this portrait of one man and his dog as the end approaches is a simple yet effective meditation on mortality, love and care

Lisa Ridzén’s debut, which has been a runaway success in her Swedish homeland and elsewhere, demonstrates how sometimes the simplest storytelling can be the most effective. This is a novel with no clever structural devices or burden of symbolism and a setting so limited geographically that the reader ends up knowing precisely where everything is.

It is narrated by Bo, a former timbermill worker who has reached the age when people worry about him, and has a network of carers calling in three times a day. One of Ridzén’s inspirations was the team journal kept by the carers looking after her dying grandfather; very movingly, bulletins from the journal of Bo’s carers punctuate his narrative, the alternative perspective like a chill breeze through a briefly opened door.

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Sarah Jessica Parker in possible conflict of interest over Booker longlisted author

Actor and book prize judge’s production company in process of developing novel by Claire Adam

An apparent conflict of interest has emerged over the Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker’s judging of this year’s Booker prize.

A production company run by the actor is reportedly in the process of developing a book written by Claire Adam, whose second novel, Love Forms, appears on this year’s longlist, announced on Tuesday.

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Gwyneth: The Biography by Amy Odell review – Gwyn and bear it

There’s glamour, Goop and ghosting in this an unsparing account of Paltrow’s world

Gwyneth: The Biography opens, where else, with the vaginal egg, an episode that has come to stand for Paltrow’s general ability to sell dumb ideas to credulous rich women using widespread mockery as her marketing rocket fuel. (In case you need a reminder: this was the $66 jade egg Paltrow sold via her lifestyle brand Goop that promised various health benefits upon insertion.) Amy Odell’s book, billed as delivering “insight and behind-the-scenes details of Paltrow’s relationships, family, friendships, iconic films”, as well as her creation of Goop, takes no particular stand on this, nor on many of Paltrow’s more divisive episodes, instead offering us what feels like an earnest jog back through the actor and wellness guru’s years of fame. The author writes in the acknowledgments that she spoke to 220 people for the book, in which case we have to assume that a great many of them had little to say.

To be fair to Odell, whose previous biography was of Anna Wintour, another difficult and controlling subject – although Wintour did give Odell some access – Paltrow’s world is notoriously hard to break into if she’s not on board with a project; the author quotes numerous hacks tasked with profiling Paltrow for magazines who found themselves iced out of her networks, and the same happens to her in the early stages of research. Odell’s task only gets harder in the second half of the book, which tackles the Goop years. Since, she claims, many of its staff signed NDAs, those sections lack even the modest stream of gossip that enlivens the first half.

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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.

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