Category Sách & Tri thức

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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn review – a visceral tale of witchcraft

The author of The Employees goes back to 17th-century Denmark for an intensely poetic portrait of everyday sorcery and female solidarity

On 26 June 1621, in Copenhagen, a woman was beheaded – which was unusual, but only in the manner of her death. According to one historian, during the years 1617 to 1625, in Denmark a “witch” was burned every five days. The first time this happens in Danish author Olga Ravn’s fourth novel, the condemned woman is “tied to the ladder, and the ladder pushed into the bonfire”. Her daughter watches as she falls, her eye “so strangely orange from within. And then in the heat it explodes.”

The child is watched, in turn, by a wax doll who sees everything: everything in this scene, and everything everywhere, through all space and all the time since it was fashioned. It sees the worms burrowing through the soil in which it is buried; the streets of the world in which it was made. It inhabits the bodies that walked those streets: “And I was in the king’s ear, and I was in the king’s mouth, and I was in the king’s loose tooth and in the quicksilver of his liver, and did hear.”

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Memoirs, myths and Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie’s 10 best books – ranked!

As the author publishes a new story collection, we rate the work that made his name – from his dazzling Booker winner to an account of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him

“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become: garrulous, playful, energetic. The tale of an immortal Indian who travels to a mysterious island, it’s messy but charming, and the sense of writing as performance is already here. (Rushdie’s first choice of career was acting, and he honed his skill in snappy lines when working in an advertising agency.) Not a great book, but one that shows a great writer finding his voice, and a fascinating beginning to a stellar career.

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Poem of the week: Now winter nights … by Thomas Campion

A song to the consolations of winter is delivered with the grace and precision typical of this intellectually ambitious poet

Now Winter Nights …

Now winter nights enlarge
The number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Now let the chimneys blaze
And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques and courtly sights,
Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

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Borderline Fiction by Derek Owusu review – life with borderline personality disorder

A student navigates troubled relationships at age 19 and 25, as he comes to terms with mental health difficulties

“The best way to make sense of life,” Derek Owusu believes, “is to write about it.” His semi-autobiographical debut, That Reminds Me, was an attempt to understand how he came to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: a condition marked, among other things, by intense emotions, self-destructive impulses, fear of abandonment, black-and-white thinking, and an unstable sense of self. The novel, written in an elliptical and densely poetic style, offered an illuminating, if harrowing, account of alienation, addiction and self-harm, through the story of K, an alter ego whose early childhood, like Owusu’s, was spent in foster care. It won Owusu the Desmond Elliott prize in 2020, and announced him as an idiosyncratic talent; in 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Owusu now turns again to the subject of BPD, this time exploring the complexities and contradictions of living with the condition. His narrator, Marcus, is 25 when the book opens. An English literature student of Ghanaian heritage, he is at a speed dating event when he meets San. San is strikingly beautiful, and she grabs his attention right away: “So, yes, I was in love again, losing balance, stumbling towards an earlier phase of my life.”

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John Updike: A Life in Letters review – the man incapable of writing a bad sentence

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the author’s remarkable correspondence

John Updike had the mind of a middling middle-class postwar American male, and the prose style of a literary genius. Such a lord of language was he that even the notoriously grudging Vladimir Nabokov afforded him a meed of praise. A reviewer, musing on the disproportion between the style and content of Updike’s fiction, likened him to a lobster with one hugely overgrown claw. It was a comparison Updike was to remember – for all his bland urbanity, on display from start to finish in this mighty volume of his letters, he could be prickly, and did not take slights lightly.

As a novelist he aimed, as he once put it, to “give the mundane its beautiful due”. Apart from a few rare and in some cases ill-advised ventures into the exotic – the court at Elsinore, Africa, the future – his abiding subject was the quotidian life of “ordinary” Americans in the decades between the end of the second world war and the coming of a new technological age in the closing years of the 20th century.

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His research on autism was compassionate – how could Hans Asperger have collaborated with the Nazis?

The Vienna-based ‘father of neurodiversity’ was ahead of his time in his work but was also implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes. My novel set out to explore these contradictions

In 2015, I decided to write a novel about Dr Hans Asperger, who worked at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna during the second world war. My interest was sparked by two nonfiction books: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman and In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.

Reading these stories told about Asperger, you would have thought they were talking about two different people. To Silberman, Asperger was a compassionate and original thinker, whereas Donvan and Zucker depict him as an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. For a historical novelist, widely differing accounts of the same person are gold dust, and I began to dig deeper.

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Is there a dark side to gratitude?

Feeling thankful is increasingly touted as a cure-all, but sometimes there are reasons not to be grateful

The word “gratitude” is everywhere these days. On mental health leaflets and in magazine columns, emblazoned on mugs and motivational posters. All this is the result of more than two decades’ research in positive psychology which has found that having a “gratitude practice” (usually jotting down three to five things you are thankful for most days) brings a host of psychological and physical benefits.

I don’t want to seem, well, ungrateful. I’m a sceptical historian, but even I was persuaded to take up the gratitude habit, and when I remember to do it, I feel better: more cheerful and connected, inclined to see the good already in my life. Counting your blessings, whether that’s noticing a beautiful sunset or remembering how your neighbour went out of their way to help you earlier, is free and attractively simple. But there’s the problem. In our eagerness to embrace gratitude as a cure-all, have we lost sight of its complexity and its edge?

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Don’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm

We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with.

The Industrial Revolution, for example, presented opportunities for certain kinds of business success – it made some people very rich while others were exploited. If you’d known that was the name of your era, it would have given you a clue about what kinds of events to prepare for. So I’m suggesting a name for the era we’re living through: the Information Crisis.

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The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery; The Confessions by Paul Bradley Carr; The Good Nazi by Samir Machado de Machado; Bluff by Francine Toon; The Token by Sharon Bolton

The Murder at World’s End by Ross Montgomery (Viking, £16.99)
The first novel for adults by award-winning children’s author Montgomery is a locked-room mystery set in 1910 on a remote tidal island off the Cornish coast. At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley’s comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit. With plenty of twists, red herrings and a blundering police officer, this is a terrific start to a series that promises to be a lot of fun.

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