In 1921, a white mob attacked Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, killing an estimated 300 people, but it wasn’t talked about until recently
There was no memorial to it in town. Teachers made no mention of it, not even during a half-semester devoted to local history. The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.
Related: The Ground Breaking review: indispensable history of the Tulsa Race Massacre
Continue reading...Dixie Lewis, 19, was in a car that was travelling on State Route 89 in California when it crossed into the path of an oncoming truck
Dixie Lewis, the 19-year-old daughter of the writer Michael Lewis and former MTV correspondent Tabitha Soren, has been killed in a highway crash in northern California.
Lewis was a passenger in a car driven by her friend and former Berkeley High School classmate, Ross Schultz, 20, who also died in accident on Tuesday afternoon, according to her family and authorities.
Continue reading...The Hideous Kinky author on her childhood dyslexia, the frenzy around being a perfect mother, and why there are so few great female artists
Esther Freud is the author of nine novels, including Hideous Kinky, her semi-autobiographical debut, which tells of her unconventional childhood in Morocco. The daughter of Lucien Freud and Bernardine Coverley, she trained as an actor before becoming a novelist. Freud has three children with the actor David Morrissey, from whom she recently separated. I Couldn’t Love You More is the story of three generations of Irish women: Rosaleen, a heroic, headstrong teenager in the early 1960s who begins an affair with an older man; Aoife, her mother, who recounts her life to her dying husband and wonders what became of her flighty daughter; and Kate, in London, married to the useless Matt, trying to make it as an artist while looking after their daughter, Freya. The three lives intertwine and overlap over the course of the novel.
You say in the acknowledgments that I Couldn’t Love You More was inspired by your own mother, bringing up children unmarried and without the support of her family.
I didn’t start the book with the intention of telling that story. I was thinking how much I’d like to write a book where love was the main theme. So I started with a real rush of energy, writing about it from different points of view, three women from different generations. I began really playfully and freely, writing these short chapters. After a while I realised I needed a story and some kind of plot, and it was then that it occurred to me to think more about my mother and how extraordinary it was that she managed to have two children without her parents knowing, and what it was like to be in such an unsupported world.
Roberto Saviano says that a court has shown that the crime clans – whose threats forced him to live with a bodyguard – are not invincible
The internationally renowned anti-mafia writer Roberto Saviano has declared that “journalism has been vindicated; words are vindicated – and so am I”, after a landmark judgment in Rome over threats to his life.
Judges ruled on Monday that a courtroom manoeuvre 13 years ago by a Camorra mafia boss and his lawyer constituted a threat to Saviano’s life, and that of a colleague – Rosaria Capacchione, then of the Naples daily Il Mattino – condemning the journalists to live ever since in the shadows, under bodyguard.
Continue reading...Pulitzer-winner Carol Leonnig anatomises an agency that has never truly lived up to its steely professional image
At times, the US Secret Service has resembled a bunch of pistol-toting frat boys on a taxpayer-funded spring break. In the words of a drunken supervisor speaking to his men in the run-up to a 2012 summit in Cartagena, Colombia: “You don’t know how lucky you are … You are going to fuck your way across the globe.”
Related: Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims
Continue reading...Trees communicate with each other, store memories and respond to attacks. They have a profoundly positive effect on our emotions … but can we know how they feel about us?
Why can’t we communicate with trees the same way we communicate with, say, elephants? Both live in social groups and look after not only their young but also their elders. That famous elephant memory is also found in trees, and both communicate in languages that we didn’t even recognise at first. Trees communicate through their interconnected root systems, and elephants communicate using low-frequency rumbling below the range at which we can hear. We get a feeling of wellbeing when we run our fingers over the rough skin of both creatures, and what we would love above all is to get a reaction from them.
Is such communication possible between people and trees? First we have to take a closer look at what we mean by “communicate”. It is not enough that we consciously or subconsciously eavesdrop, so to speak, on the scents trees use to communicate among themselves. We have a physical reaction when we breathe them in, but for communication to happen, the trees also need to react to our signals.
Continue reading...Authors from Julia Donaldson to Cressida Cowell pay tribute to the beloved author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, who has died aged 91
The late Eric Carle has been hailed by fellow children’s writers for creating generations of readers as voracious as his best-loved creation, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Carle, who died on Sunday at the age of 91, left behind titles including his worldwide bestselling board book – about a caterpillar who eats his way through a week’s worth of food before turning into a butterfly – as well as The Very Busy Spider, The Mixed-Up Chameleon and Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me.
Continue reading...He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie
Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.
His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.
Continue reading...The row over a new biography of Philip Roth has exposed the way agents and estates restrict access and manage archives to maintain a writer’s posthumous good name
Writers and critics are raising questions over the role that agents and estates play in managing archives and limiting access to biographical material.
Fresh worries have been fuelled by the continuing fiasco over the publication of Philip Roth: The Biography, with accusations that access to the famed US author’s archival material is being unfairly constrained.
Continue reading...The writer – and grandson of Gabriel García Márquez – on Mexican folklore, his early love of horror and learning to live with the family’s literary legacy
Mateo García Elizondo, a 34-year-old writer from Mexico, may come from literary stock – his paternal grandfather is Colombian heavyweight Gabriel García Márquez and his maternal grandfather is Mexican literary giant Salvador Elizondo – but he is carving his own path at the forefront of a burgeoning scene in Spanish language literature. He has published a novel as well as written scripts for films and graphic novels. His writing is also included in Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2, which was published last month. He was born in Mexico City, where he still lives.
How do you see the overall health of literature in Spanish?
I wouldn’t try to compare it with anything before, but Spanish-language literature is doing so well, with so many people doing interesting things, especially here in Mexico but also in South America, Spain, and even in Africa, as we are learning from the Granta selection. I love the literary horror of Mariana Enríquez, I am also a big fan of Fernanda Melchor and the way she uses “dirty” Mexican language and depicts the darker side of Mexico. I’m a big reader of Juan Pablo Villalobos as well and love his use of humour.
Rejected and hidden away since 1930, an early murder mystery by the Nobel-winning author is ‘an incredible find’
Years before becoming one of America’s most celebrated authors, John Steinbeck wrote at least three novels which were never published. Two of them were destroyed by the young writer as he struggled to make his name, but a third – a full-length mystery werewolf story entitled Murder at Full Moon – has survived unseen in an archive ever since being rejected for publication in 1930.
Now a British academic is calling for the Steinbeck estate to finally allow the publication of the work, written almost a decade before masterpieces such as The Grapes of Wrath, his epic about the Great Depression and the struggles of migrant farm workers.
Continue reading...From Disney’s blond teenager to Tim Burton’s surreal reimagining and an all-black Pirelli calendar, Lewis Carroll’s character has had many lives and looks. A new V&A exhibition charts them all
A blue dress trimmed with white, plus long hair swept back from the forehead by a ribbon, always means Alice. When Gwen Stefani wears a black satin headband and a blue-sky corset edged with snowy lace in the video for What You Waiting For, she is Alice. No surname required. When the supermodel Natalia Vodianova balances on a marble mantelpiece in Balenciaga ankle boots and a sky-blue mini dress, with a bunny’s tail fashioned from a whisper of Fortuny-pleated white silk plissé on the pages of Vogue, she is Alice. Alice’s look, now 150 years old, is as recognisable as a Batman or Superman costume. She is an icon, a fashion fairytale. Should you so wish – for about £20 – you can be Alice.
But does the 20th century really need another skinny, posh, blond pin-up? Because that – to phrase it as bluntly as our heroine might have – is how we now see Alice. Never mind that the original 1865 illustrations show a scruffy little girl in a boxy pinafore that looks like a Victorian version of dungarees. Disney’s Alice, with her vanilla curls and waist cinched to a handspan by a frilled white apron, broke out of Lewis Carroll’s quirky story and became a star in her own right. Since 1951, Disney’s slender, fair-haired movie-screen Alice has all but obliterated other Alices.
What’s more, the origin story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the 33-year-old author’s choice of a seven-year-old girl as his literary muse – has long been flagged as inappropriate to modern sensibilities. Perhaps, then, it is time to cancel Alice?
Novel, which weaves together the stories of Mexican migrants with those of a US family on a road trip south, was picked for the prize by a Barcelona library
Earlier this year, a library in Barcelona submitted a nomination for its favourite book of the year: Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. On Thursday, thanks to Biblioteca Vila De Gràcia, Luiselli was named winner of the world’s richest prize for a novel published in English, the €100,000 (£86,000) Dublin literary award.
“It’s a beautiful, relatively small library in Barcelona who nominated me,” said Luiselli. “I’m going to kiss its rocks one day, because I probably won’t be able to kiss its librarians because of Covid.”
Continue reading...Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy attack Penguin Random House India for putting out book by a prime minister they say has mishandled Covid and persecuted writers
Leading Indian authors Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy have spoken out against Penguin Random House India’s decision to publish and promote a book by Narendra Modi during the country’s coronavirus crisis, with Mishra accusing PRH India of “enlist[ing] in a flailing politician’s propaganda campaign”.
In a letter published in the London Review of Books blog, Mishra wrote to the chief executive of PRH India, Gaurav Shrinagesh, after the publisher announced it would be reissuing Modi’s book Exam Warriors while, in Mishra’s words, “smoke from mass funeral pyres rose across India”. India suffered a world record one-day death toll from Covid-19 on Wednesday – 4,529 – with the overall figure believed to be much higher than the official death toll of 283,248.
Continue reading...The Democratic ex-president was candid in remarks to donors and advisers, according to Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere
For much of Donald Trump’s presidency, Barack Obama largely abided by the convention that former presidents do not publicly criticize or attack their successors.
Related: Trump family members got ‘inappropriately close’ to Secret Service agents, book claims
Continue reading...The books world was growing worryingly well-mannered, but Ozick’s response – in verse – to a bad review by Shriver has revived the fine art of feuding
Whether it is Henry Fielding mocking Samuel Richardson’s painfully virtuous Pamela with his spoof, Shamela; Lillian Hellman suing Mary McCarthy for millions of dollars over her quip that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”; or Norman Mailer knocking Gore Vidal to the floor at a party (“Once again words fail Norman Mailer,” remarked Vidal), there is little more cheering than a good literary feud.
But it’s been a while since a proper throwdown. Richard Ford famously shot an Alice Hoffman book and posted it to her after she wrote a bad review of his book (“It’s not like I shot her,” he told the Guardian in 2003), and spat at The Underground Railway author Colson Whitehead over a similar offence, but Ford has lately refrained from such behaviour. Tom Wolfe’s death in 2018 put paid to his long-running and gloriously vituperative beef with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. (Irving is now the only survivor from that contretemps: does that mean he wins?)
Continue reading...Fundraiser running until 21 May also includes chances to consult with star agent Jonny Geller and have a character named after you in a Sarah Pinborough novel
A literary auction raising money to help vaccinate the world against coronavirus has made more than £23,000 so far, as book lovers bid to win signed novels by authors including Hilary Mantel, as well as mentoring sessions from star publishers and agents.
Bidding at Books for Vaccines for a personal consultation with literary agent Jonny Geller has reached £1,000, while a signed box set of the Wolf Hall trilogy, with handwritten first sentences from Mantel, has topped £600. The auction is running until 21 May, with other lots including the chance to have a character named after you in the next novel by Sarah Pinborough, author of the Netflix hit Behind Her Eyes, a signed copy of Marian Keyes’s novel Grown Ups, and the chance to write the dedication at the front of Jill Mansell’s new novel.
Continue reading...The Nobel-winning psychologist on applying his ideas to organisations, why we’re not equipped to grasp the spread of a virus, and the massive disruption that’s just round the corner
Daniel Kahneman, 87, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. His first book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a worldwide bestseller, set out his revolutionary ideas about human error and bias and how those traits might be recognised and mitigated. A new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, applies those ideas to organisations. This interview took place last week by Zoom with Kahneman at his home in New York.
I guess the pandemic is quite a good place to start. In one way it has been the biggest ever hour-by-hour experiment in global political decision-making. Do you think it’s a watershed moment in the understanding that we need to “listen to science”?
Yes and no, because clearly, not listening to science is bad. On the other hand, it took science quite a while to get its act together.
Ruth Gilligan’s thriller about eight men who cull cattle in rural Ireland wins £10,000 for books that ‘best evoke the spirit of a place’
Ruth Gilligan’s literary thriller The Butchers, set in the Irish borderlands during the BSE crisis, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for books that “best evoke the spirit of a place”.
Gilligan’s novel beat titles including James Rebanks’ memoir of his family farm, English Pastoral, and Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia, 木蘭 to the £10,000 prize. The Butchers opens with an ancient curse that decrees that eight men must touch every cow in Ireland as it dies, and follows a group of eight men as they roam rural Ireland in the 1990s, slaughtering the cows of those who still believe in the old ways. The novel unpicks the mysterious death of one of the Butchers, whose corpse is found suspended from a meat hook.
Continue reading...The Moonlight director on how making his epic TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning The Underground Railroad compelled him to fully confront the history of slavery, as well as his own damaged childhood
Barry Jenkins first heard the history of the Underground Railroad from a teacher when he was six or seven years old. The school lesson described the loose network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people in the American south escape to free states in the north in the 19th century. Jenkins as a wide-eyed kid imagined an actual railroad, though, secret steam trains thundering under America, built by black superheroes in the dead of night. It was an image, he recalls, that made “anything feel possible”. “My grandfather was a longshoreman,” he says. “He came home every day, in his hard hat and his tool belt, and his thick boots. And I thought, ‘Oh, yes, people like my granddad, they built this underground railroad!’”
That childhood image returned to Jenkins, now 41, when he read an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel about that history, which builds on that same seductive idea. That was in 2016. Both Jenkins and Whitehead were on the edge of career-defining breakthroughs: Jenkins’s film Moonlight was about to be released (and would go on to win the Oscar for best picture) and Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad was about to be published (going on to receive the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize). All this was to come, though, when the pair met. “I was familiar with Colson as an author,” Jenkins told me last week on a screen from his home in Los Angeles. “And once I read his book, I knew for sure I absolutely want this. And I’m not that guy. Usually I’ll read something and I go, well, that might make a great film, and then I’ll just leave it. But this one, it’s all hands on deck, we have to get this.”
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