Category Archives: Books

‘Loving ourselves is an act of defiance’: tender and heartbreaking letters to fathers and sons

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The historical oppression of Indigenous men has shaped perceptions of First Nations masculinity. A lovingly curated book of letters challenges stereotypes

When Wiradjuri woman and Miles Franklin-winning novelist Tara June Winch met Torres Strait Islander author and activist Thomas Mayor at last year’s Perth writers’ festival, she implored the dad of five to write about fatherhood.

With three adult children from his first marriage and two, aged seven and 10, from his ongoing relationship, 44-year-old Mayor, while “thinking about all my flaws as a father and as a man”, was a reluctant starter.

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Damon Galgut: ‘The Booker pulls a nasty little trick on you’

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The South African novelist on making a pilgrimage to Cormac McCarthy’s home, his youth in apartheid-era Pretoria and being shortlisted twice for the Booker prize

Novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, 57, grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. He wrote his first novel aged 17 and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker prize. His latest, The Promise, spans four tumultuous decades as it traces the afterlife of a white matriarch’s dying wish to bequeath property to her black servant. The novel is heavily tipped to land him a place on this year’s shortlist when it’s announced on 14 September. He lives in Cape Town.

How did The Promise originate?
Books tend to build up out of clusters of ideas or themes that you carry around for a while and worry at. The specific form of this book crystallised around a series of anecdotes that a friend told me when we had a semi-drunken lunch, about four family funerals he’d attended. It occurred to me that would be quite an interesting way to tell the story of one particular family. The promise itself also arrived from a friend, who was telling me how his mother had asked the family to give a certain piece of land to the black woman who had looked after her through her last illness, as it happens in the book.

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Angelina Jolie: ‘I just want my family to heal’

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The actor opens up about why her divorce from Brad Pitt is a human rights issue, escaping Harvey Weinstein and what young activists have taught her

• ‘People try to stop us speaking up’ – Jolie meets inspirational young campaigners

Angelina Jolie sits at a desk, back straight as a rule and rather regal. Her features are cartoonishly beautiful – straight black hair, vertiginous cheekbones, huge blue eyes and lips like a plumped red sofa. She is talking on Zoom to four young activists. It is a horribly apt day to be discussing human rights – the Taliban has just captured Ghazni city on its approach to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

If this were a movie, you might suspect Jolie was playing a divine leader addressing the fortunate few. Yet it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t quite as they seem. The actor and film director is the one in awe, not the activists. The young people talk about the work they have done raising awareness of the carnage in Syria, the environmental crisis, trans rights and food poverty. Jolie hangs on their every word. She tells them they have inspired her children who follow their work, warns them against burnout, apologises for the failings of her generation and says how honoured she is to meet them.

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Legends of the fall: the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

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From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for

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Cuba review: American history of island neighbor is telling and timely

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As Ada Ferrer writes, ‘Cuba – its sugar, its slavery, its slave trade – is part of the history of American capitalism’

In July, the eruption of unexpected protests in Cuba, sparked by food shortages and growing frustration with the government, unsurprisingly met with a corresponding flood of commentary from its opinionated neighbour.

Related: Forget the Alamo review: dark truths of the US south and its ‘secular Mecca’

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Hilary Mantel: I am ashamed to live in nation that elected this government

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Double Booker prize winner tells La Repubblica she may take Irish citizenship to feel European again

Hilary Mantel has said she feels “ashamed” by the UK government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and is intending to become an Irish citizen to “become a European again”.

In a wide-ranging interview with La Repubblica, the twice Booker prize-winning novelist also gave her view on the monarchy, told how endometriosis has “devastated my life”, and how Boris Johnson “should not be in public life”. She also addresses the criticism of JK Rowling and her stance on transgender rights.

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Dune review – blockbuster cinema at its dizzying, dazzling best

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Denis Villeneuve’s slow-burn space opera fuses the arthouse and the multiplex to create an epic of otherworldly brilliance

Dune reminds us what a Hollywood blockbuster can be. Implicitly, its message written again and again in the sand, Denis Villeneuve’s fantasy epic tells us that big-budget spectaculars don’t have to be dumb or hyperactive, that it’s possible to allow the odd quiet passage amid the explosions. Adapted from Frank Herbert’s 60s opus, Dune is dense, moody and quite often sublime – the missing link bridging the multiplex and the arthouse. Encountering it here was like stumbling across some fabulous lost tribe, or a breakaway branch of America’s founding fathers who laid out the template for a different and better New World.

Related: Spencer review – Princess Diana’s disastrous marriage makes a magnificent farce

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‘I guess I’m having a go at killing it’: Salman Rushdie to bypass print and publish next book on Substack

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The author on why he’s chosen to release his next book on the online platform – and why he hopes digital won’t see off the medium he loves most

Out of the gloom Salman Rushdie floats into view, his familiar face with short beard and glasses hovering on screen in front of a library that should win any competition for the most impressive Zoom bookshelf backdrop.

From his New York apartment he is here to share three things: he has made a deal to publish his next work of fiction as a serialised novella on Substack; he intends to fulfil a long held, once thwarted desire to be a film critic; and he still doesn’t have the courage to write poetry.

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Being a Human review – two go mad in the stone age

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Charles Foster’s search for the meaning of human life leads him and his son to become hedgehog-eating hunter-gatherers in a Derbyshire wood

Charles Foster’s previous book, Being a Beast, is one of the oddest things I’ve read. In it, the author, a barrister, professor of law, part-time judge and former vet, attempts to live as a series of animals, often in the company of his charming and heavily dyslexic eight-year-old son, Tom. We see Foster eating worms and burrowing into the earth as a badger, swimming naked as an otter, foraging in bins as a fox. Now Foster is back with a follow-up, Being a Human, which acknowledges the charges of eccentricity and even insanity that were levelled at the last book.

Foster’s new work continues the project of its predecessor, although this time, rather than seeking to understand the brains and bodies of animals, his question is closer to home: what does it mean to be human? He begins with a contentious argument: far from being a story of progress, the history of humanity is one of disenchantment and loss, one where we have severed our links with other species and the natural world more broadly and in which we live meagre, circumscribed lives. “Few of us have any idea what sort of creatures we are,” he says and embarks on a quest to find out.

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Forget the Alamo review: dark truths of the US south and its ‘secular Mecca’

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Three Texas authors expose the myth that the 1836 battle at a San Antonio mission was about freedom. It was about slavery

As the ancient American struggle over how much truth to tell about the traditional oppression of minorities bubbles over, with arguments over everything from the teaching of Critical Race Theory to the mention of anything gay in the presence of anyone under 18, this engaging new book about the history of the Alamo arrives at the perfect moment.

Related: Our Own Worst Enemy review: a caustic diagnosis of America after Trump

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Beyond normal: new novel brings Sally Rooney mania to bookshops across UK

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Many shops plan to open early for the arrival of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You next month

When they were children they lined the streets in their witch hats and capes, keen to pick up the latest Harry Potter title as bookshops opened their doors at midnight. Now they are a little older, the prospect of a tussle with some millennial emotions could see them queuing around the block again on 7 September, as dozens of bookshops plan to open early for the arrival of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

In a nationwide promotional push, prompted by signs of big public demand, freshly printed copies of the Irish author’s third novel are to be served to customers with special commemorative merchandise as they enjoy a coffee and pastry.

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Passing the ‘chimp test’: how Neanderthals and women helped create language

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How did humans learn to talk and why haven’t chimpanzees followed suit? Linguistics expert Sverker Johansson busts some chauvinist myths

How and when did human language evolve? Did a “grammar module” just pop into our ancestors’ brains one day thanks to a random change in our DNA? Or did language come from grooming, or tool use, or cooking meat with fire? These and other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to rationally choose between them. It was all so very long ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation.

Or must it? This is the question presented as an elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk. Its author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60-year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University.

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Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people disagree with me, so what?’

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With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison

Fran Lebowitz is a famous writer who famously doesn’t write. “I’m really lazy and writing is really hard and I don’t like to do hard things,” she says, and it’s the rare writer who would not have some sympathy with that. Yet, as all writers also know, writer’s block, which the 70-year-old has suffered from for four decades now, is never really about laziness. Lebowitz’s editor Erroll McDonald (“the man with the easiest job in New York”) has said she suffers from “excessive reverence for the written word”.

Given that Lebowitz has, at last count, more than 11,000 of them in her apartment, there is no question that she loves books. “I would never throw away a book – there are human beings I would rather throw out of the window,” she says. So is this talk of “excessive reverence” a euphemistic way of saying that she has low self-esteem and doesn’t think she can write anything good enough to commit to print?

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Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114

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The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library

Tsitsi Dangarembga made the Booker shortlist for her most recent novel, This Mournable Body, the story of a girl trying to make a life in post-colonial Zimbabwe which was praised as “magnificent” and “sublime”. Her next work, however, is likely to receive fewer accolades: it will not be revealed to the world until 2114.

The Zimbabwean writer is the eighth author selected for the Future Library project, an organic artwork dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson. It began in 2014 with the planting of 1,000 Norwegian spruces in a patch of forest outside Oslo. Paterson is asking one writer a year to contribute a manuscript to the project – “the length of the piece is entirely for the author to decide” – with Margaret Atwood, Ocean Vuong and Karl Ove Knausgård already signed up. The works, unseen by anyone but the writers themselves, will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, in 2114, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time.

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Paul McCartney to reveal unseen Beatles lyrics in new book

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The Lyrics will feature a ‘self-portrait’ in 154 songs, including the unrecorded Tell Me Who He Is

Paul McCartney will include the previously unseen lyrics to an unrecorded Beatles song in his forthcoming book The Lyrics.

On Monday, the former Beatle revealed the 154 songs to feature in the book, which will be based on conversations McCartney had with the poet Paul Muldoon. Described as a “self-portrait in 154 songs”, The Lyrics will feature songs from throughout McCartney’s career, including Blackbird, Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, Band on the Run and Yesterday.

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Police officer who shot Breonna Taylor has pulled out of book deal

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Jonathan Mattingly is seeking a new publisher for his account of the shooting after Simon & Schuster refused to distribute it for Post Hill Press

One of the police officers involved in the shooting of Breonna Taylor has pulled out of his book deal with a conservative press four months after Simon & Schuster refused to distribute the title.

Jonathan Mattingly is one of the Louisville, Kentucky officers who shot Taylor in the raid in her home in March 2020, and was shot in the leg by Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker. A grand jury brought no charges against Louisville police last September for the killing.

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‘An artist in search of good material’: My time at an Auckland massage parlour | Megan Dunn

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In this extract from her new book, New Zealand writer Megan Dunn describes her time answering the phone at Belle de Jour

I got a job at Belle de Jour in 1998. I was 24 years old and had just graduated from art school. What did I need next? Life experience.

The neon sign hung in the window of the ranch slider. The massage parlour logo was of a vintage femme fatale: a raven-haired Betty Page-ish beauty with bright red lips who wore a cheetah V-neck and elbow-length black gloves and toked a cigarette in a cigarette holder. Like Lauren Bacall. One of those classic screen sirens, a quip at the ready. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Slim? You just put your lips together and…

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The Handmaid’s Tale: will the TV hit break its cycle of cruelty?

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Season four of the drama based on Margaret Atwood’s novel has seen Elisabeth Moss’s June in near-constant peril. However, it seems her latent rage could be the thing that sets her free

I find myself wondering why I am still so invested in The Handmaid’s Tale on a weekly basis, as the camera slowly closes in on Elisabeth Moss’s face, her character June pained and broken by cruelty after cruelty. The apocalyptic drama is coming to the end of its fourth run, and when this season began, it found itself boxed into an inevitable corner. How could it sustain the story far beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel, without keeping its characters in a cage, and becoming an unrewarding display of relentless misery?

It had begun to go around in circles. June would defy the rules, escape the authorities, get captured, undergo torture, and then begin the whole cycle again. It made it hard for viewers to feel satisfaction in her victories. What was the point in rooting for her, if she would inevitably end up back at the start?

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Neuroscientist Anil Seth: ‘We risk not understanding the central mystery of life’

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The professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience discusses his work to develop a scientific explanation for how the brain conjures consciousness

For centuries, philosophers have theorised about the mind-body question, debating the relationship between the physical matter of the brain and the conscious mental activity it somehow creates. Even with advances in neuroscience and brain imaging techniques, large parts of that fundamental relationship remain stubbornly mysterious. It was with good reason that, in 1995, the cognitive scientist David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem” to describe the question of exactly how our brains conjure subjective conscious experience. Some philosophers continue to insist that mind is inherently distinct from matter. Advances in understanding how the brain functions undermine those ideas of dualism, however.

Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is at the leading edge of that latter research. His Ted talk on consciousness has been viewed more than 11m times. His new book, Being You, proposes an idea of the human mind as a “highly evolved prediction machine”, rooted in the functions of the body and “constantly hallucinating the world and the self” to create reality.

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Dear Diary: how keeping a journal can bring you daily peace

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Writing a diary is a great way to offload – and, if memory fails, it’s a wonderful window on the past

I still get funny looks from people when I mention that I keep a diary. Maybe the practice strikes them as shifty or weirdly old-fashioned. It’s true that I never feel more furtive than when my wife finds me writing it at our kitchen table – it’s like being spotted entering a confessional box in church. What exactly have I got to tell this black book about a life that we share all day, every day? What secrets can I possibly be keeping?

The answer: nothing of any great note, and yet so much of my life is in it. I started writing a journal (as I used to call it) when I went on holiday. Twenty years ago I decided to go full-time and since then I’ve kept it more or less every day. Why? I suppose it began as an experiment – and became an obligation. You can’t hold back time, but you can try to save the past from being completely erased. It often feels trivial to record things as they happen (a stray remark, hearing a song, fleeting moments of doom or delight), but later they may prove useful, or instructive, or amusing. It also maintains the illusion of diligence – that you’re not just pissing away the days. A diary is good exercise for the writing muscle, the way a pianist practises scales or a footballer does keepy-uppies. During lockdown, like everyone else, I got into routines that felt numbing in their repetition and diary-wise left me short of material. I took recourse to discussing the books and box sets I was involved with – not exactly Pepysian, but it got me through.

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