Category Sách & Tri thức

Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign

Never mind the lit-bros: Infinite Jest is a true classic at 30

Forget its reputation as a performative read for a certain breed of intense young man, thirty years after its publication, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel still delivers, says the Crying in H Mart author

I’m not what you might consider Infinite Jest’s target demographic. The novel’s reputation precedes it as a book infamously few ever finish, and those who do tend to belong to a particular breed of college-age guys who talk over you, a sect of pedantic, misunderstood young men for whom, over the course of 30 years, Infinite Jest has become a rite of passage, much as Little Women or Pride and Prejudice might function for aspiring literary young women.

Most readers come to the novel in their formative years, but I was a late bloomer. It wasn’t until the winter of 2023 that, at the age of 34, smoking outside a party in Brooklyn, I found myself suddenly motivated to embark on the two-pound tome. A boy I knew from high school brought it up, and as I happened at the time to have developed a casual interest in those works one might attribute to the “lit-bro” canon (Bret Easton Ellis, Hemingway, etc), it seemed the appropriate time to take it on.

Continue reading...

Sales of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights skyrocket ahead of film adaptation

The number of novels sold rose nearly fivefold year on year in the UK in January, Penguin Classics reports, as Emerald Fennell’s hotly anticipated take is set for release next week

Sales of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights have risen by 469% in the UK since last year, as anticipation builds for Emerald Fennell’s bold and highly anticipated film adaptation, figures from Penguin Classics UK show.

In January of this year, 10,670 copies were sold, compared with 1,875 in January 2025, in what Penguin has described as an unusually large boost.

Continue reading...

‘Gruffalo Granny is coming to stay’: new story to be released in September

Macmillan announces latest instalment of popular Julia Donaldson tale featuring illustrations by Axel Scheffler

The Gruffalo family is to expand after the publisher of the popular children’s stories announced a long-awaited third book about the beloved monster.

The new tale, Gruffalo Granny, will be published on 10 September, Macmillan announced.

Continue reading...

Nussaibah Younis: ‘The Bell Jar helped me through my own mental illness’

The author on taking solace in Joan Didion, discovering Donna Tartt and being cheered up by David Sedaris

My earliest reading memory
The first books I became obsessed with were Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories Malory Towers and St Clare’s. When I was eight, I’d hide them under my pillow and read by the hallway light when I was supposed to be asleep.

My favourite book growing up
Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I felt woefully misunderstood by the world and longed to be adopted by a very pretty teacher with only cardboard for furniture. I spent a lot of time trying to make a pen move by concentration alone. Sometimes I still try.

Continue reading...

Jean by Madeleine Dunnigan review – sex and teenage secrets

Queer self-discovery drives this powerful coming-of-age debut set in a bohemian 1970s school

It might sound like a potentially familiar narrative: a queer coming-of-age story, charted across one single heat-crazed summer in the 70s. From its very first paragraphs, however, this debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story’s repeated eruptions of brutality.

We first meet Jean, our eponymous hero, as he is about to take his O-levels. He is sitting them at the unusually late age of 17; later, we will find out that this is because he has a history of violence, and has been excluded from every school he’s ever attended. To the despair of his teachers, Jean seems completely unable to learn. He is also a Jew in a school full of gentiles, the lone child of a single mother, a county-funded scholarship boy whose friendship group is unanimously monied and privileged. This is not, however, the story of a queer outsider battling to find himself in a setting of dreary conformity. Perched high on the Sussex Downs, Jean’s school specialises in colourful nonconformists; known to its pupils as The House of Nutters, its regime mixes high-risk bohemianism with the occasional dash of old-school protocol. Crucially, it is isolated, and its pupils are all male. It is a classic microcosm; a petri dish alive with potentially dangerous experiments in masculinity.

Continue reading...

The Colour of Home by Sajid Javid review – from one hostile environment to another

The ex-Home Secretary’s memoir of childhood racism is intimate and moving but raises difficult political questions

Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him. However, it is an intimate, and sometimes moving, family portrait as well as a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th‑century Britain.

The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and “Run, Paki, run” taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.

Continue reading...

Leaving Home by Mark Haddon review – blistering memoir of a loveless childhood

The Curious Incident author describes the upbringing that shaped him – and for which he can’t help feeling nostalgia

Attempting a psychological analysis of a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess the inside of the writer’s head from the inside of your own, using the inherently treacherous medium of make-believe. And the aim on their part, of course, is always to beguile, and often to deceive.

And yet the temptation is sometimes too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home. A more recent novel, The Porpoise, opens with a fatal air crash before morphing into a reworking of Pericles; in Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also learn that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture for his story The Pier Falls, a merciless, documentary-style narration of a cataclysmic seaside disaster.

Continue reading...

Crux by Gabriel Tallent review – a passionate portrait of teenage climbers

The follow-up to My Absolute Darling, this tale of best friends who dream of a better life features exquisite sports writing and a lovable heroine – but the plotting is unconvincing

Tamma and Dan are 17-year-old best friends growing up in a California desert town blighted by the strip-mall nihilism of late capitalism. They’re poor. They’re unpopular. Their families are a wasteland. But they have each other and their great shared passion: trad rock climbing. Whenever they can, they head to a climbing route – sometimes a boulder at the edge of a disused parking lot, sometimes a cliff an hour’s hike into a national park – and climb, often with no gear but their bloodied bare hands and tattered shoes.

This is the premise of Crux, the second novel from Gabriel Tallent, the author of the critically acclaimed My Absolute Darling. At its heart, it’s a sports novel, and Tallent’s prose here is precise and often exquisite, inching through a few seconds of movement in a way that reflects the unforgiving nature of climbing. We get a lot of closeups of granite and faint half-moons in rock that suddenly become “the world’s numinous edge”. The language of climbing – a dialect of brainy dirtbags – is a gift to the writer. Tallent’s characters talk about “flashing bouldering problems” and “sending Fingerbang Princess”; a list of routes with “Poodle” in the title includes Poodle Smasher, Astropoodle, Poodle-Oids from the Deep, A Farewell to Poodles, and For Whom the Poodle Tolls. Tallent also has an extraordinary gift for descriptions of landscape; a road is “overhung with stooping desert lilies, tarantulas braving the tarmac in paces, running full out upon their knuckly shadows, the headlights smoking with windblown sand”.

Continue reading...

Marwan Barghouti, ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, to publish book from prison

Unbroken: In Pursuit of Freedom for Palestine is a collection of writings by the Palestinian political leader, who has been held in Israeli prisons since 2002

A collection of writings by the imprisoned Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouti will be published in November, bringing together prison letters, interviews, personal material and documents from the last three decades of Barghouti’s political life and incarceration.

As deadly attacks on Gaza continue despite a nominal ceasefire, the 66-year-old is seen by many as the best hope for a leader of any future Palestinian state.

Continue reading...

The Good Society by Kate Pickett review – the Spirit Level author takes stock

Is equality at the heart of our social problems? A whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive policy

If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued that inequality was the ultimate cause of almost all our social problems, from obesity and teenage pregnancy to violent crime; more equal societies, they claimed, had better outcomes across the board. While criticised – as most “big idea” books are – for overstating the case and cherrypicking evidence, they struck a chord, and some aspects of their thesis are now mainstream.

However, when it comes to the UK, there is an awkward problem, both for Pickett and for economists like me who, while not entirely convinced by The Spirit Level, would still like to see a more equal society. In the first chapter of Pickett’s new book, inequality is once again the root of all (social) evils: “if you know a country’s level of inequality, you can do a pretty good job of predicting its infant mortality rate, or prevalence of mental illness, or levels of homicide or imprisonment”. By contrast, she argues that GDP or GDP growth are very poor measures of overall welfare. Pickett then goes on to list the ways in which the UK has become a worse place to live since 2010 – higher child poverty, flattening life expectancy and child mortality, more people in prison.

Continue reading...