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Everything We Do Is Music by Elizabeth Alker review – how the classics shaped pop

From Stravinsky to Donna Summer, the story of connections that enriched music – in both directions

One of many things I did not expect to learn in this book is that the BBC benefited from Nazi technology. Its standard tape recorder, in use till the 1970s, was called the BTR-2: EMI’s original model, the BTR-1, had been copied from a captured example of the German “magnetophon”, as used by Hitler to record a radio broadcast.

Musicians who liked fiddling with machines, too, benefited from this legacy. Delia Derbyshire, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer who produced the original Doctor Who theme tune and otherwise particularly enjoyed playing an enamel green lampshade, influenced Paul McCartney’s experiments with tape loops, while Steve Reich hit upon his compositional technique of “phasing” phrases in and out of sync with one another on tape recorders, before training live musicians to do the same.

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Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin review – grasping the essence of horror

The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries

Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?

Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.

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The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano; Hunter by Shuang Xuetao; Blurred by Iris Wolff; Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
Ambivalence towards working life is the subject of this tremendously entertaining debut novel. “I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill,” says 32-year-old Marisa. She’s “head of creative strategy” in a Madrid ad agency. “That’s a big deal,” says a friend. “No,” Marisa replies, “it just sounds like one.” She kills time between projects by posting trolling comments on dismal YouTube videos. Eventually she faces the worst horror of all: a team-building retreat, which she ends up dealing with in a masterfully perverse way. There’s pain underlying her quips (“No one knows who I really am”), but her story is peppered with pithy insights into the modern workplace, and plenty of vivid characters, such as the friend who’s “had work done”. “I’m filled with plastic,” she tells Marisa. “I’m the Atlantic Ocean.”

Hunter by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang (Granta, £12.99)
Set largely in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shenyang, these diverse stories share a blend of urban grittiness and surreal strangeness. In one, a man accompanies his father in an ambulance to hospital, but finds everyone else – including the driver – is asleep. In another, a man goes from stalking women to shooting squirrels; elsewhere, we encounter a remake of The Tempest, and a man who claims to be the last survivor from another planet. Motifs recur – actors, parents, people needing urgently to pee – bringing a sense of unity, however warped. The frequent surprises in these stories, which are darkly charming and hard to shake off, suggest Xuetao may have followed the advice of one of his own characters on writing: “Just sit there, smack your head and let the words flow out.”

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Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz review – the truth about relationships

In a series of revelatory case studies, a psychoanalyst lays bare the messy reality of romantic love

A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is “OK, acceptable”, more is evidence that she has been “having it off”, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy. A high-flying Fulbright scholar becomes a sex worker to avenge the father she hates. An ex-nun discovers that her decades of religious seclusion were driven by an unconscious fear of pregnancy. A troubled young woman, seeking redress for her psychological losses, steals large sums of money that she will never spend.

In Love’s Labour, the London-based, American-born psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz offers an antidote to the pat, sanitised love stories we absorb through romcoms, reality TV shows and other popular culture. Often, he writes, “easy stories obscure the hard ones”, and the hard ones are most true. “I like older guys”, the kleptomaniac tells him, an explanation that conceals: “I want a man to be the mother I never had.” In Grosz’s telling, psychoanalysis resembles a painstaking, collaborative act of excavation, removing layers of self-deception and motivated reasoning to discover the conflicting fears and desires that lie beneath.

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Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower

Some people spend their lives feeling out of place in groups – but it comes with unique opportunities

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started having social  difficulties.

He wasn’t being bullied or left out at school. He wasn’t depressed, moody or anxious. In fact, he was popular, well liked and constantly being invited to parties, to basketball games, and to hang out with groups of young people. The problem was, he turned all these invitations down, and N couldn’t understand why.

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Plot Twist: I am related to the real-life Oliver

Oliver Twist is one of the author’s best known creations. But for Nicholas Blincoe, the story is much closer to home. He reveals an astonishing family history

For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.

I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.

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Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read

From Instagram poetry to Greek classics, the works of fiction that have caused uproar through history – and into the present

The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.

Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.

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The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus review – growing up between two worlds

The poet’s moving exploration of deafness, difference and identity

Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother’s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds – lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he’s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as “missing sound” in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, “suspicious” as “spacious” – words with problematically different meanings.

If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of “audism” can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for what his ears do not pick up.

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Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea review – a love song to Italy

A sculptor and his unlikely soulmate navigate the political turmoil of the 20th century in a prize-winning blockbuster

In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.

Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.

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