Category Sách & Tri thức

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From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen review – Turkey in the age of Erdoğan

This portrait of everyday life in an Istanbul neighbourhood buffeted by change has far wider relevance

Thankfully, the attack left only black eyes and bloodied faces. It was in Karagümrük, a tough neighbourhood in Istanbul’s old city, once known for mafia types and Turks on the hard right. But, as Suzy Hansen explains, it had been transformed by an influx of Syrian refugees – until the locals apparently decided they’d had enough, and came for them with sticks, baseball bats and knives for carving doner kebab.

So begins From Life Itself, in which Hansen traces a story that illuminates a politics of mass migration and nationalist backlash that has resonances far beyond Turkey. It is a more ambitious book than that, too. An American who lived in Istanbul and visited Karagümrük for more than a decade – during which Turkey’s enfeebled democracy came under ever more sustained assault – she hoped to convey “how ordinary people experience authoritarianism in the 21st century – how our era feels”.

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Devotions by Lucy Caldwell review – short stories that are frightening, passionate and comforting too

The Northern Irish writer explores music and family, memory and duty in this stunning collection of sharply observed tales

The stories in Northern Irish writer Lucy Caldwell’s fourth collection are often devoted to family life, or a professional life in the arts: or both. They’re almost always about memory and how to manage it. They offer a certain continuity with her earlier collections, Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings, though it’s subtle and organic rather than directly narrative.

In All Grown Up, Luke returns to his childhood home, only to be steadily reabsorbed by it. He applies himself to clearing the house, putting it on the market; he thinks about all the possibilities he’ll have once he’s sold up. But the longer he stays the less impulse there is to leave, and the more he remembers, not just about his life here, but his life generally. Meanwhile he’s a 40-year-old divorcee with a bad back, incipient alcoholism and a child at boarding school, attempting to come to terms with divorce, the death of his mother and his sense of entrapment. A one-night stand with his ex-wife’s sister doesn’t help. As you read, that title cycles between bleak irony and an equally bleak optimism.

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‘Relentless’ focus on literacy undermines reading for pleasure, says report

New HarperCollins study finds that daily reading for pleasure among five- to 17-year-olds fell from 39% in 2012 to 25% in 2025

The “relentless” focus on measuring literacy progress in schools has “pushed reading for pleasure to the margins”, according to a new report.

“Parents and schools both recognise that reading for pleasure matters, but their understandable focus on literacy skills is actively undermining it,” found the study, which analysed survey data on reading trends among UK children, drawing on data from HarperCollins, NielsenIQ and The Reading Agency.

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This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz review – an illuminating window on Emily Brontë’s world

Vivid, tactile details make Lutz’s biography a beautifully textured and convincing read

Both Emily Brontë and her only novel Wuthering Heights have been called “deranged”, “crazed” or (especially online, in the wake of the recent film) “unhinged”. So it’s a relief to read a biography where she comes across, instead, as more grounded, steady, sane. Deborah Lutz, whose 2015 book The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects made such an impression, anchors her narrative in solid things: the too-short bed Emily squeezed herself into; the pockets she stuffed with paper, pencils and moorland treasures; the laundry she looked after, including stockings with “AB5” sewn into them to indicate they were her sister Anne’s fifth pair. Lutz’s Emily is an eminently practical woman who wrote “while baking, in front of a peat fire perched on a little stool, or while walking” and who “used the tactile keeping of order as a prop and prompt to lose herself in the sublimity of art-making and moor-haunting”.

For Lutz, Emily’s writing is also “tactile”. She counts the sampler Emily made at 10 as one of her “earliest extant writings”, and while other scholars have dismissed it as a collection of copied platitudes, Lutz notices that one line Emily stitched, from Proverbs – “Who hath gathered the wind in his fists?” – suggests that maybe she was already thinking about wuthering. She lovingly describes the little books the Brontë children made as “delightful, tiny objects to match their toys and still-small selves, texts holding secretive and insular qualities”. She calls the one-page diaries Emily made with Anne “a new writing practice, one that feels distinctly modern, even avant garde”, as they crammed in descriptions of their cooking, their chatter, their animals, their made-up heroines; stream of consciousness nearly a century before Virginia Woolf.

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Zadie Smith: ‘I don’t know when I read men any more’

At a talk on her latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, Smith said she ‘sometimes’ reads male novelists, but more often seeks the wisdom of older female writers like Helen Garner

“I don’t know when I read men any more”, the writer Zadie Smith told a literary festival audience on Sunday.

“It does happen sometimes, but it’s completely flipped compared to the reading I did when I was young,” she continued.

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The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout review – readers will delight in these new characters

The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by trauma

The American author Elizabeth Strout famously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women’s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th book.

Strout, who grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, writes mainly about small-town America and the mostly white, working-class people who inhabit it. She’s interested in the small details of ordinary lives: people’s joys and disappointments, marriages and infidelities, and the lasting effects of trauma. The fictional world of a Strout novel often extends into subsequent companion works: Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, was followed by Olive, Again in 2019; the characters first seen in her 2016 novel My Name Is Lucy Barton reappeared in Oh William! in 2021 and Lucy by the Sea in 2022. In 2024, Strout took this world‑building to another level when Lucy, Olive and other recurring characters were brought together in Tell Me Everything. She has charted her fictional worlds so extensively across interlinked novels and stories that readers often think of her characters as their personal friends.

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‘It’s still a no-go area’: German author Matthias Jügler on the trauma surrounding the GDR’s ‘stolen children’

The reaction among officials in Germany to his bestselling novel has been hostile. As Mayfly Season is published in the UK, its author explains why

A few weeks after the German publication of his debut novel in 2024, author Matthias Jügler received a call from an employee at the German government agency tasked with investigating the human rights abuses of the socialist east.

The call wasn’t overtly threatening; Jügler was asked to explain what historical source material he had consulted for Mayfly Season and which period he was planning to tackle in his next book. But it came after another government official had accused him of traumatising some of his readership, and after the organiser of a reading had asked him to bring along documents proving the plausibility of his book’s plot.

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Do stronger borders ever work?

Leaders have thrown up walls and barriers throughout history – but their effects are unpredictable

Four millennia ago, a Sumerian king, his frontier beset by nomadic tribes fleeing prolonged drought in their own lands, ordered the construction of the world’s first border wall: a 177km-long boundary laid in stone between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Since humanity’s earliest city-states and kingdoms arose in ancient Mesopotamia, walls, ditches and fences have defended territory, marked the edges of empires and projected political power across the void. But the world’s first border wall failed. It now lies buried beneath Iraq’s desert sands. Rome’s legions abandoned Hadrian’s Wall long ago, and the iron curtain’s razor-wire fences fell with the eastern bloc’s collapse in the late 1980s.

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‘I saw the backlash coming’: civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw on America and race

She coined the term ‘intersectionality’ and helped to develop critical race theory, now her life’s work is under attack by Washington’s war on ‘woke’. As her memoir is published, the legal scholar explains why she’ll never stop speaking truth to power

When Donald Trump returned to office in January last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order intended to cut federal funding for any school teaching what the administration defined as “critical race theory”. A raft of other orders mandated the termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) personnel, offices and training across the federal government. Federal agencies began flagging hundreds of words to avoid or eliminate, including “intersectional” and “intersectionality”. All of which has amounted to 40 years of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work being literally and deliberately erased.

For decades, the 66-year-old legal scholar has been naming things that powerful people would prefer remain unnamed. In 1989, she coined the term intersectionality to describe the way race and gender overlap to shape lived experience, often in ways the law fails to recognise. Around the same time, she was one of a group of African American scholars who created the framework that came to be known as “critical race theory”, which sought to examine how racism is embedded in legal systems rather than simply enacted through individual prejudice. Now, Crenshaw’s ideas are being contested like never before.

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Joe Dunthorne: ‘Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas’

The author on feeling Thomas Hardy’s pain, being duped by Donna Tartt and how reading his sister’s copy of Trainspotting made him want to write

My earliest reading memory
I only realised how well I knew the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes when I started reading them to my own children. Every time we read one now, I’m suddenly back in my attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages.

My favourite book growing up
At 10 years old, I read only Terry Pratchett. As far as I was concerned, there were no other authors. I loved everything he wrote but my favourite was Mort, where the eponymous protagonist is Death’s young apprentice. He learns the skills of the trade: traipsing between appointments, meeting the soon-to-die and reaping their souls. I liked how it made the afterlife seem ordinary, even bureaucratic, with the Grim Reaper more like a taxman – unwelcome wherever he goes.

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