Category Sách & Tri thức

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The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie – a haunting coda to a groundbreaking career

From an afterlife fantasy to a tale of loss in Mumbai, death is a recurring theme in this story collection – an echo of the novelist at his peak

Towards the end of Knife, his 2024 book about the assault at a public event in upstate New York that blinded him in his right eye, Salman Rushdie offers a thought experiment:

Imagine that you knew nothing about me, that you had arrived from another planet, perhaps, and had been given my books to read, and you had never heard my name or been told anything about my life or about the attack on The Satanic Verses in 1989. Then, if you read my books in chronological order, I don’t believe you would find yourself thinking, Something calamitous happened to this writer’s life in 1989. The books are their own journey.

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From White Teeth to Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s best books – ranked!

Twenty-five years on from her dazzling debut, and as a new collection of essays comes out, we assess the British author’s best books

How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and poster girl for multi­culturalism at 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking Chinese‑Jewish autograph hunter, the dangers of fame and the shallowness of pop culture, of course.

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WH Auden formed ‘intense friendship’ with sex worker who burgled him, unseen letters reveal

Exclusive: the newly released correspondence reveals how a strong bond developed between the Funeral Blues poet and the sex worker who broke into his home

A “once in a century” discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial.

York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called “Hugerl” in the posthumously published poem Glad.

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‘They disappeared when the wall came down’: German author Jenny Erpenbeck on the objects that contain vast histories

From the drip catchers of coffee pots to the typewriter she used for her first works, the International Booker prize-winning writer reflects on the hidden significance of everyday items

Drip catcher
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced – when the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, when the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.

The shop where I used to take my tights to get them mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a little girl – a shop called “Run Express” – disappeared when the Wall came down and the west was able to sell its cheap tights in the east.

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‘It’s insanely sinister’: horror writers on the scariest stories they’ve ever read

Bloodthirsty ghosts, sadistic supercomputers, creepy childhood games ... Mariana Enríquez, Paul Tremblay, Daisy Johnson and others on the tales that kept them up at night

The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
I read this years ago and it’s a story that’s truly haunted me ever since. The titular “summer people” are the Allisons from New York, who rent the same off-grid country cottage each year. This time, instead of heading back to the city, they decide to extend their holiday for a month longer – something that seems to unsettle everyone in the nearby town. All pass on the same veiled caution that nobody has ever stayed at the lake beyond Labor Day. Nonetheless, the Allisons are determined to remain, and that’s when things start to get increasingly weird. The man who delivers the kerosene won’t sell to them. No one will deliver groceries to the cottage, and when the Allisons attempt to drive into town, the car won’t start. A storm gathers, the batteries in the radio fade, and as darkness falls, “the two old people huddled together in their summer cottage and waited”. What are the Allisons waiting for? What do the locals know? Every time I read Jackson’s unnerving and inspiring story, I’m reminded that the best horror comes from what’s left undisclosed.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray.

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A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke review – a brilliant, blunt and beautiful memoir

The actor on being called ugly, telling Johnny Rotten to F-off, and striking gold at Cannes

Kathy Burke’s mother, Bridget, died of stomach cancer when she was 18 months old; she writes that it made her “feel dead famous” in her community. She was raised by her older brothers, John and Barry, who were 10 and eight when it happened, and sometimes by their father Pat, an alcoholic for many years, violent with it, who struggled to care for his family. Pat and Bridget had moved to London from Ireland, and the Burkes lived on an estate in Islington, where the other families played a vital role in raising and feeding the children. On his deathbed, in 1994, Pat asked Kathy to do two things: to give up smoking, and to write more. It has only taken her 30 years, she says, but she’s finally done the latter.

The entertainment industry is top-heavy with people from middle-and upper-class backgrounds who have a limited understanding of lives that don’t resemble their own. In my experience, one of the misconceptions they have about working-class life is that it is all grey skies and kitchen‑sink misery. Burke’s memoir has its painful moments, but the joy radiating from it is palpable and invigorating.

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Booker prize launches £50,000 children’s award

Children will help judge the new prize along with children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce

• ‘The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter’: Frank Cottrell-Boyce

The Booker prize foundation has launched a major new literary award, the Children’s Booker prize, offering £50,000 for the best fiction written for readers aged eight to 12.

The new award will launch in 2026, with the first winner announced in early 2027. It will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges, a first for a Booker award. The inaugural chair of judges will be Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the children’s author and current children’s laureate. He will be joined by two other adult judges, who will help select a shortlist of eight books before three child judges are recruited to help decide the winner.

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The Children’s Booker prize will tell kids that they matter

As the number of children reading for pleasure hits a record low, the new award highlights its importance for wellbeing, and will give away thousands of books

At the end of the movie Ratatouille, the food reviewer Anton Ego, voiced by Peter O’Toole, makes this beautiful defence of the art of the critic: “There are times when a critic truly risks something. That is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” The Booker prize has been a friend to the new – new voices, new names, new ways of telling a story – for 56 years. It has made household names of writers whose work might otherwise only have been enjoyed by a few. More importantly – especially since the launch of the International Booker in 2005 – it has helped broaden the horizons of readers.

Now there’s going to be a Booker prize for children’s books aimed at readers aged eight to 12, and I am going to be the first chair of judges. Despite my vast vocabulary, I can’t begin to tell you how hopeful this makes me. Because if the Children’s Booker brings the same energy and boldness to the world of children’s books, it’s going to make a real difference to the lives of thousands of children. It comes at a crucial moment. Everyone knows that children who read for pleasure do better educationally and emotionally. Yet – as we approach the government’s Year of Reading – we find ourselves in a situation where the number of children who read daily has dropped to a 20-year low. We risk losing a whole generation.

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