From a Jacobean traveller’s travails in Sindh to the tangled roots of Nigeria, our pick of new nonfiction books that shine a light on Asia, Africa and South America
• Share your top recommendations for books on the developing world in the comments below
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021
By Alaa Abd El-Fattah
Every Christmas, the actor sends an extreme white chocolate coconut gateaux to close friends – by private jet, it turns out. This year, those friends include me. Twice
Reader, I am here to inform you that dreams do come true. You really can have anything your heart desires, with the proviso that you’re prepared to aggressively and repeatedly abuse your position in order to get it. What I’m trying to say is this: my year-long campaign to get Tom Cruise to send me a cake has ended in success.
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a short piece about Cruise’s habit of sending $50 (£38) white chocolate coconut bundts to his closest friends at Christmas. Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Jimmy Fallon, Graham Norton and scores of other high-profile figures all receive a cake, lovingly made by Doan’s Bakery in California and shipped out by Cruise’s staff. I finished my article by hoping that I would one day be important enough to receive such a wonderful gift.
Continue reading...Guardian readers from Scandinavia, the Philippines, Morocco and beyond explain their fandom, which has helped rejuvenate them, heal racial trauma and understand their identity
K-pop boy band BTS swept the American Music Awards last month, making history as the first Asian act to win artist of the year; they were also nominated for a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance for their single Butter.
The seven-member band has a huge global following and their fans, known as Army, are known for their passion and loyalty. Here Guardian readers, who are BTS fans, speak about why the band means so much to them.
Continue reading...The Sex and the City sequel has just arrived on our screens. But is it a ‘sharp-tongued, hilarious’ return to form or ‘a barrage of forced woke moments’? Here are your verdicts
After almost 20 years away from our screens, Carrie and co are back for a Sex and the City sequel: And Just Like That. But as the fiftysomething women grapple with the modern era of dating apps and teenage children in the long-anticipated reboot, fans are divided.
Warning: these opinions contain spoilers from the first episode of And Just Like That.
Continue reading...In the first edition of our gaming newsletter: why games, like all art, have the power to connect, entertain and cause change
Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian’s brand new gaming newsletter. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox every weeek, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email.
I want to use this first issue to tell you what to expect from this newsletter. The gaming world is fast-moving, and it can be hard to keep up with while also living a busy real life. I want to be a friendly guide to what’s interesting and relevant, and what games are worth your valuable time and attention.
Continue reading...The pop star told Howard Stern that she had the virus in August: ‘I want it to be clear that it is because of the vaccine I’m fine’
Billie Eilish has revealed that she had Covid-19 in August, and said that she felt sure she “would have died” had she not been vaccinated.
Appearing on Howard Stern’s US radio show on Monday, Eilish said: “The vaccine is fucking amazing and it also saved [her brother/musical collaborator] Finneas from getting it; it saved my parents from getting it; it saved my friends from getting it.”
Continue reading...The acclaimed novelist on chemotherapy, growing up gay in Ireland and writing his first poetry collection at the age of 66
In June 2018, Colm Tóibín was four chapters into writing his most recent novel The Magician, an epic fictional biography of Thomas Mann that he had put off for decades, when he was diagnosed with cancer. “It all started with my balls,” he begins a blisteringly witty essay about his months in hospital; cancer of the testicles had spread to his lungs and liver. In bed he amuses himself by identifying the difference between blood clots (a new emergency) and cancer: “Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer.”
He has seen off both Johnson and Merkel. In the month when he hopes he will have a final scan, he has just been awarded the David Cohen prize (dubbed “the UK Nobel”) for a lifetime achievement in literature. The author of 10 novels, two short story collections, three plays, several nonfiction books and countless essays, Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times and won the Costa novel award in 2009 for Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, made into an award-winning film in 2015. He is surely Ireland’s most prolific and prestigious living writer.
Continue reading...In Our Own Image: Photography in Ireland, 1839 to the Present is the first in a series of exhibitions forming the first comprehensive historical and critical survey of photography from across the island of Ireland. Coinciding with the centenary of the establishment of modern Ireland, In Our Own Image draws on material from from archives, private collections and contemporary commissions, charting how the medium has both reflected and shaped Irish cultural identity.
In Our Own Image: photography in Ireland, 1839 to the present curated by Gallery of Photography Ireland in partnership with Dublin Castle / OPW is at The Printworks, Dublin Castle until 6 February
Continue reading...Season three of the hit show has made even more headlines than usual. We ask its British creator if he’s had enough yet, if actor Jeremy Strong is doing OK – and if his character Kendall is actually Jesus
• Warning: contains spoilers
Yesterday, like much of the rest of the world, I watched the finale of the third season of Succession. And, like much of the rest of the world, I found myself buffeted by one astonishing twist after another – and a gasp-inducing climax that outdid even those of series one and two. Unlike my fellow viewers, however, pretty much the first thing I see after the end credits roll is the face of Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, popping up over Zoom and politely attempting to dissuade me from discussing the episode.
Unlike other big TV showrunners – who will happily explain, and sometimes over-explain, every single second – Armstrong prefers to remain hands off. He tries not to read the acres of theorising that Succession inspires. Such post-match analyses, he says, can often feel like a tightrope walk. “There’s a bit of me that just wants to find out what the fuck everyone is saying about the show,” he says from his book-lined study in London. “But you can’t. It wouldn’t be good for me psychologically – and it wouldn’t be good for the creative process of doing the show.”
Continue reading...Family, friends and fellow musicians pay their final respects to the man known as ‘El Rey’ (the King) following his death at age 81
Mexicans are in mourning for Vicente Fernández, the elaborately mustachioed icon of ranchera music, whose ballads of love and loss, golden baritones and singular stage presence captured the raw emotions of a nation.
Fans flocked to his ranch in western Jalisco state, where family, friends and fellow crooners paid their final respects to the man known as “El Rey” (the King) – and often just by the diminutive “Chente.”
Continue reading...After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress
• Full list of 2020 nominations
The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.
At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Continue reading...8 July 1934 – 16 June 2021
The US journalist on his aunt, whose exacting vision – from her writing to her elegant dinner parties – was an expression of love and generosity
“Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”
Those are the words, unmistakable for their wit and moral clarity, of Janet Malcolm, from her most famous book, The Journalist and the Murderer. They’re not words she lived by personally, however. She was uncompromising in her own response to fallibilities large and small, cheerfully sending back wine at restaurants, rejecting all offers to bring contributions to dinner parties, and chiding anyone who read a certain dire translation of Anna Karenina. I remember on more than one occasion giving her a holiday present, and then watching her unwrap it, look it over, and hand it back to me, explaining that she thought I would enjoy it more than she would.
Continue reading...Netflix’s continued obsession with the pandemic hit has brought a follow-up special, a second season and now a spin-off but enough is enough
To think of Tiger King is to immediately transport yourself to the heady days of lockdown 2020. Remember it? Remember how filled with artificial purpose we all were? We did Zoom quizzes with all our friends! We made banana bread! We clapped for frontline workers!
Looking back, it seems relatively clear that all those things were stupid. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to. Nobody likes banana bread. The clapping didn’t change anything. And as for Tiger King? With the benefit of hindsight, Christ, we chose the wrong show to obsess over. Looking back, Tiger King was grubby and exploitative. Once you’d crossed the “Are these people for real?” hurdle, you found yourself sitting through a carnival of monstrous behaviour. Tiger King was the documentary equivalent of that old Black Mirror episode: as fun as it sounds to watch someone have sex with a pig, at the end of the day you actually have to watch someone have sex with a pig.
Continue reading...‘Philip turned up to meet my parents fully made up, with red lipstick and high heels. My dad locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out’
I had intended to recruit just one female backing singer but when I walked into the Crazy Daisy nightclub in Sheffield, the first thing I saw was Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing. They somehow looked like a unit while being clearly different individuals. I knew they were right.
Continue reading...After politics in Vice and finance in The Big Short, director McKay is taking on the climate crisis in his star-studded ‘freakout’ satire Don’t Look Up
Adam McKay calls it his “freakout trilogy”. Having tackled the 2008 financial crash and warmongering US vice president Dick Cheney in his previous two movies, The Big Short and Vice, McKay goes even bigger and bleaker with his latest, Don’t Look Up, in which two astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a giant comet headed for Earth, but struggle to get anyone to listen. It is an absurd but depressingly plausible disaster satire, somewhere between Dr Strangelove, Network, Deep Impact and Idiocracy, with an unbelievably stellar cast; also on board are Meryl Streep (as the US president), Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Ariana Grande. It has been quite the career trajectory for McKay, who started out in live improv and writing for Saturday Night Live, followed by a run of hit Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. “The goal was to capture this moment,” says McKay of Don’t Look Up. “And this moment is a lot.”
Was there a particular event that inspired Don’t Look Up?
Somewhere in between The Big Short and Vice, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel and a bunch of other studies came out that just were so stark and so terrifying that I realised: “I have to do something addressing this.” So I wrote five different premises for movies, trying to find the best one. I had one that was a big, epic, kind of dystopian drama. I had another one that was a Twilight Zone/M Night [Shyamalan] sort of twisty thriller. I had a small character piece. And I was just trying to find a way into: how do we communicate how insane this moment is? So finally, I was having a conversation with my friend [journalist and Bernie Sanders adviser] David Sirota, and he offhandedly said something to the effect of: “It’s like the comet’s coming and no one cares.” And I thought: “Oh. I think that’s it.” I loved how simple it was. It’s not some layered, tricky Gordian knot of a premise. It’s a nice, big, wide open door we can all relate to.
The Italian director’s new, semi-autobiographical film reveals a charming and rarely seen side of his home city
‘This, for me, is the most beautiful place on Earth,” Paolo Sorrentino told Filippo Scotti, the actor playing the director’s younger self in his latest film, as their 1980s Riva speedboat chopped the waves of the Bay of Naples. Their view stretched from the precipitous peninsula of Sorrento all the way west towards Posillipo. The two promontories flank the sprawling port city, offering a warm embrace to all those who disembark there. Sorrentino’s new film, the Hand of God, opens with that same view: the sun-mottled bay, whose peace is disturbed by the sound of four Rivas as they speed towards the shore. The film is both a love letter to, and a portal into, Paolo Sorrentino’s Naples.
In cinemas now and on Netflix this week, The Hand of God sees the Academy award-winning director return to his home city for the first time since One Man Up, his 2001 debut. Sorrentino tells the story of his own coming of age, up to the moment when his life is shattered by the death of his parents in a tragic accident. Sorrentino’s story is a tale of great grief, loss and perseverance, set in a middle-class part of Naples, a far cry from the impoverished neighbourhoods shown in the city’s other recent portraits: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or the mafia-focused Gomorrah series.
Continue reading...I get to wear a natty white jacket, insectoid mask and hold an épée like a pistol – my inner child could not be happier. En garde!
Ever since childhood, I have wanted to be trained in the sword. But I have always believed one had to be born a musketeer for this to happen, or have a death to avenge, plus access to castle steps. But here I am at the London Fencing Club in Old Street, which is easier.
It’s a few weeks before omicron takes off, and the government is pooh-poohing any talk of tightening Covid restrictions. I’m learning épée, the thin, pointy blade that most resembles a classic swashbuckling sword. My Russian-born coach, Anna Anstal, loves fencing épée. The opponent’s entire body is a target, and there are no “right of way” rules governing who can score at a given moment. “You must think about the zombie apocalypse,” she says. “Rules are no use with a zombie. The ability to strike first is all that matters.” It’s unexpected advice, her heavy accent giving it even more edge. I’m quite scared.
Continue reading...Horror writers pay tribute after bestselling gothic novelist dies of complications from stroke
Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, has died at the age of 80.
The gothic novelist’s son Christopher Rice said in a statement on Sunday morning that Rice had “passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke”, adding: “The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated.”
Continue reading...5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021
The actor, who worked with the Notting Hill director on 2019’s Blackbird, recalls a warm and egoless man who always knew how to get the best out of his cast
Being a director was so secondary to who Roger was as a man in the world. He was just such a grounding, warm, extraordinary presence. I say this with affection, but some directors make it known that they’ve just walked into the room. Roger wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to be needed. He didn’t have an ego. He just wanted to be part of a team – creating little families, little families of people working together.
I had known Roger for a long time before we worked together on a film – Blackbird, in 2019. We’d worked together once before, in 2005, on an American Express commercial. A few years prior to that, The Mother [his 2003 film with Daniel Craig and Anne Reid] had completely taken my breath away. It was so natural, so crushingly real. It felt like the first time in a long time that any of us had seen actors in a film appearing not be “acting” at all. That was one of Roger’s most impressive skills: his capacity to get actors to just be. To just be and not act.
Continue reading...Adam McKay’s star-studded climate change satire with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence et al lands its gags with all the aplomb of a giant comet
A comet is on a collision course with Earth. The targets in this shrill, desperately unfunny climate change satire directed by Adam McKay are more scattershot. According to stoner PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor, Dr Randall Mindy (a self-consciously tic-y Leonardo DiCaprio), the asteroid is the size of Mount Everest and due to hit in six months.
The pair try to warn Meryl Streep’s President Orlean about the impending “extinction-level event”, only to find her preoccupied by the midterm elections. They attempt to raise awareness on breakfast TV, but anchors Jack and Brie (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) can’t help but give their bad news a positive spin. The only person with enough money to intervene is tech entrepreneur Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet for its “$140tn worth of assets”. Party politics, celebrity gossip and social media memes are swiped at too. It feels cynical, then, when Timothée Chalamet shows up with no real narrative purpose other than to snog Lawrence.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from 24 December
Continue reading...