Poem of the week: The Butcher of Eden by Pádraig Ó Tuama
What counts as grace is intriguingly rethought in a sly retelling of humankind’s biblical Fall
The Butcher of Eden
Now God made Adam and Eve coats of skins and dressed them.
– Genesis 3:21
Category Sách & Tri thức
Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang review – a daughter of China speaks again
The bestselling author returns with an account of how her homeland has changed – and the personal costs of fame
Remarkable success notoriously brings its own problems. Wild Swans, first published in 1991 and written by Jung Chang with the help of her husband, Irish-born historian and writer Jon Halliday, had a global impact few authors dare to dream of. It told the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China – Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself – and became one of the most popular nonfiction books in history, selling more than 13m copies in 37 languages and collecting a fistful of awards and commendations. For any author, following that would be a challenge. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang’s own departure from China in 1978, and revisiting episodes from the earlier work with added detail.
Wild Swans was Chang’s second book: her first was a biography of Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the early 20th-century revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which, she volunteers, had deservedly little impact. Wild Swans was different: animated by a powerful family story, set against the dramatic political background of war and revolution and enlivened by Halliday’s formidable narrative talent, it was an instant hit.
‘I was writing at my lowest ebb’: Scottish author Len Pennie on domestic abuse and the power of poetry
Len Pennie won praise and faced criticism for exploring domestic abuse in her award-winning debut. She talks about partying sober, writing in Scots, and why she’s rooting out stigma in her follow-up collection
When Len Pennie’s debut, poyums, won the discover book of the year prize at this year’s British Book awards, it was the first poetry collection to do so for 10 years, and the first winner written in Scots as well as English. It’s likely that the 25-year-old can claim another first: she must be the only winner to have had her ID checked at the awards ceremony to verify her age.
It’s true that Pennie is strikingly fresh-faced. She doesn’t drink alcohol (she often finds herself tidying up and doing the recycling at parties, and when I suggest that she must be a popular designated driver, she laughs and tells me she hasn’t got a licence. “I’m useless and sober!”). But she has been through experiences that by rights might put years on a person.
‘I’ve seen so many people go down rabbit holes’: Patricia Lockwood on losing touch with reality
The Priestdaddy author on quitting social media, Maga conspiracies and how her second novel grew out of a period of post-Covid mania
There is a thing Patricia Lockwood does whenever she spots a priest while walking through an airport. The 43-year-old grew up as one of five children of a Catholic priest in the American midwest, an eccentric upbringing documented, famously, in Priestdaddy, her hit memoir of 2017, and a wellspring of comic material that just keeps giving. Priests in the wild amuse and comfort her, a reminder of home and the superiority that comes with niche expertise. “I was recently at St Louis airport and saw a priest,” she says, “high church, not Catholic, because of the width of the collar; that’s the thing they never get right in TV shows. And I gave him a look that was a little bit too intimate. A little bit like: I know.” Sometimes, as she’s passing, she’ll whisper, “encyclical”.
This is Lockwood: elfin, fast-talking, determinedly idiosyncratic, with the uniform irony of a writer who came up through social media and for whom life online is a primary subject. If Priestdaddy documented her unconventional upbringing in more or less conventional comic style, her novels and poems since then have worked in more fragmentary modes that mimic the disjointed experience of processing information in bite-size non sequiturs. In 2021, Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she wrote of the disorienting grief at the death of her infant niece from a rare genetic disorder. In her new novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, she returns to the theme, eliding that grief with her descent into a Covid-induced mania, a terrifying experience leavened with very good jokes. A danger of Lockwood’s writing is that it traps her in a persona that makes sincerity – any statement not hedged and flattened by sarcasm – almost impossible. But Lockwood, it seems to me, has a bouncy energy closer to an Elizabeth Gilbert than a Lauren Oyler or an Ottessa Moshfegh, say, so that no matter how glib her one-liners, you tend to come away from reading her with a general feeling of warmth.
Review: The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore | Summary |
The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore is story based in Dream Harbor — that small town where everybody knows everybody, and love is all over the place. But something is cookin…let’s find out. If you are fan of Dream Harbor series, and like to get Free Book reviews of The Strawberry Patch Pancake House, you […]
Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie review – practical climate optimism
A data scientist rebuts 50 arguments against green technology with lively pragmatism and authority
What are we going to do about the climate crisis? As extreme weather events become the new normal, we still hear from “sceptics” who think the energy transition is unnecessary, a massive leftwing plot. Hannah Ritchie, a global development data scientist and the author of Not the End of the World, has followed that work up with a book that addresses 50 objections to the adoption of greener technology.
To start with, we need some tough love. It’s time, Ritchie insists, to abandon the slogan “Keep 1.5 alive”, referring to an aspiration to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. “The 1.5C target is dead,” she announces flatly. “The public – who are repeatedly told that 1.5C is still within reach – will start to lose trust when we pass that target.”
No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes review – a thrilling take on the Golden Fleece myth
Medea tells her side of the story in a reimagining of the ancient Greek stories that puts women centre stage
The women of myth have been talking – and they’re pointing the finger at us. Myths are “mirrors of us”, writes Natalie Haynes in Pandora’s Jar, her book of essays on the women of Greek mythology. “Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth.”
Considerations of culture and bias have been central to the recent wave of mythic retellings focused on women, from Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s Iliad trilogy to Haynes’s own triad of novels set within the classical Greek world (The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind). This latest is a reimagining of the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and, true to form, it centres the women.
Wainwright prize for nature writing awarded to memoir about raising a hare during lockdown
Debut author Chloe Dalton’s ‘dream-like’ book Raising Hare follows the writer from London to the countryside
A memoir about a woman who rescued a hare during the pandemic has won this year’s Wainwright prize book of the year.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton follows the author from London to the countryside, where she looked after a leveret during lockdown.
How to Save the Internet by Nick Clegg review – spinning Silicon Valley
Instead of recognising that social media harms mental health and democracy, the former deputy PM and Meta executive repeats company talking points
Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.
The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it. As he puts it: “The real purpose of this book is not to defend myself or Meta or big tech. It is to raise the alarm about what I believe are the truly profound stakes for the future of the internet and for who gets to benefit from these revolutionary new technologies.”
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai review – a dazzling epic
Longlisted for the Booker, this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature
On a trip to see his grandparents in the Indian city of Allahabad, journalist Sunny Bhatia flicks through the morning papers, and is immediately at sea: what can the convoluted sentences before him – “TTIM files complaint against MSL at JM Rastra. MP(LTTK) holds GL Mukti strike to blame for Vasudev debacle. BORS reverberates in KLM(U) case” – possibly mean? His bewilderment at an India he cannot decode is, equally problematically, mirrored by the incomprehension he experiences in New York, where he occupies a junior role at the Associated Press.
Fortunately, there are other more readily accessible stories: a woman sold at a cattle fair in Rajasthan, and a retired railway clerk in Mysore who has grown his fingernails so long that they reach across the room and oblige his family to attend to his every physical need. They do not mind, the clerk tells Sunny when he interviews him over the phone, because they understand his determination to do something that nobody else has done: “The point is not about having longer fingernails than anyone; what is important is that I am firing up the younger generation to be ambitious. If I can do it, I tell them, I who used to have no discipline, then you can also reach your dream of fame.”