Category Archives: Books

Race shapes travel: backpacking as a black woman

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In an extract from her new book, the Kenyan writer reflects on how guidebooks to Africa, with their warnings of danger, instilled fear in her – until a solo trip to Burkina Faso

The pitch-black night of the Sahara does not yield to the sunlight until it is good and ready, and when it does, it flees so fast you would think the place is constantly bathed in blinding light. Stark sunrises turn the giant dunes dull brown for a scant few seconds; for a handful of minutes, as the sun is creeping up the sky, the sand glows.

Then the sky cracks open and turns brilliant blue, and everything around you will shimmer in response. Until that moment when the blue scares off the dark, the dusty roads leading from Gorom-Gorom to Oursi, a small town outside a small town in northern Burkina Faso, are shrouded in the desert’s secrecy, blanketed by inscrutable darkness and breathtaking silence. Six nights a week, that is.

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Dalliance, affair, love, intimacy: how should we approach sex as we age?

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As sex lives ebb, the wider world can get more interesting. Robert Dessaix asks, does it really matter if we’re out of the sexual running, even in a society as sex-obsessed as ours?

If the Roman poet Lucretius is to be believed, the whole universe is “a dance with Venus” – a sexual performance. “Love” just provides some of the footwork for amicable copulation. Or something to that effect. In his day, of course, with high child mortality and a ripe old age far from assured, reproduction must have been at the top of everyone’s list.

Nowadays, in the west, average life expectancy is much longer than it was in Rome at the beginning of the first millennium – indeed, a quarter of the population where I live can hardly walk in a straight line without assistance, let alone cavort around Venus’s dancefloor – yet we are still fixated as a society on arousal and performance. What is the point of living on into old age in such a society? Why soldier on? Even if you could still dance, who would dance with you?

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Caught in time’s current: Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years

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In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world

Read Dearly by Margaret Atwood

I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

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‘This is revolutionary’: new online bookshop unites indies to rival Amazon

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Bookshop.org, which launched in the US earlier this year, has accelerated UK plans and goes online this week in partnership with more than 130 shops

It is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from today.

Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days.

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Cate Blanchett: ‘Covid-19 has ravaged the whole idea of small government’

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In this extract from her essay collection Upturn, the actor considers the disruptions of the pandemic and the renewed fervour for social and economic justice

The other day I had to go into town for a dental appointment. I put on all sorts of lovely clothes as if I were going out to dinner and an opening night. The prospect of being out and about was both exhilarating and daunting. I so desperately wanted to be among people and in the city, but I’d also completely forgotten what an event was. The dentist did not seem surprised by my sartorial over-commitment – but then, I was not the first patient he had seen since lockdown.

As a person working in the arts sector, the lockdown was strangely familiar on one level – a lot of actors get stuck in a kind of limbo waiting for someone else to give them permission to do what they are good at. It was as if we were all waiting by the phone for our agent to call. It was also strangely unfamiliar because the community that holds us together, the audiences, as well as the changing of the shows and the new releases, were all put on hold too. The flow between us all was severely affected, and I was both heartened and horrified when it began to surface online. Heartened because the urge to express ourselves and the desire to communicate seems undaunted by anything. Horrified because the worst place to rehearse and perform is alone in the mirror, and sometimes the phone is just a mirror.

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Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

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Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth will be released this year, with the 86-year-old author also planning fresh theatre work after ‘continuous writing’ in lockdown

Wole Soyinka has used his time in lockdown to write his first novel in almost 50 years.

The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973.

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Historic Book of Lismore returning to Ireland after centuries in British hands

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Manuscript including lives of the Irish saints and a translation of Marco Polo was captured during a siege of Kilbrittain Castle in the 1640s

A 15th-century medieval manuscript, one of the “great books of Ireland”, is returning home almost 400 years after it was captured in a siege.

The Book of Lismore, which has been donated to University College Cork by the trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, was compiled for Fínghin Mac Carthaigh, the Lord of Carbery from 1478 to 1505. It consists of 198 large vellum folios containing some of medieval Irish literature’s greatest masterpieces, including the lives of Irish saints, the only surviving Irish translation of the travels of Marco Polo, and the adventures of the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, or Finn MacCool.

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Harry Potter publisher says Covid has weaved magic over book sales

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After shaky start in lockdown, Bloomsbury sales soar as people pick books over box sets

The Harry Potter publisher, Bloomsbury, has reported its most profitable first half in more than a decade, after a nation tiring of box sets fuelled a lockdown boom in book sales.

The company furloughed staff as the coronavirus crisis forced the publishing industry to shut down, but has seen a remarkable change in fortune as the pandemic has persisted.

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Zen and the art of torso maintenance: Matthew McConaughey’s guide to life

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In a new book, Hollywood’s ‘easy-livin’ superstar bares all about his route to the top. Here are some choice nuggets of McConna-sense

The biggest question in the universe, writes Matthew McConaughey in his new autobiography (of sorts) is “WHOWHATWHEREWHENHOW?? – and that’s the truth. WHY? is even bigger.” With Greenlights, his love letter to livin, McConaughey attempts to answer these questions and others, such as why he never puts a “g” on the end of “living” – “because life’s a verb”.

Greenlights is not a memoir, though it tells true stories from his life in chronological order. Nor is it “an advice book”. It is “an approach book”, bringing together McConaughey’s insights from 35 years of writing journals, and more of collecting bumper stickers. These “philosophies can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted”. A few are shared here.

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‘She left a strong legacy’: children’s book tells story of Daphne Caruana Galizia

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Friend of Maltese journalist recounts her battles against corruption for young readers

Her death brought thousands of people on to the streets of Malta and led to the resignation of a prime minister. Now the life of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has inspired a book for children.

Written and illustrated by her friend Gattaldo, the designer, Fearless: The Story of Daphne Caruana Galizia is being released by a UK publisher this month to mark three years since the Maltese writer was killed by a car bomb in October 2017.

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‘We cannot survive’: New York’s Strand bookstore appeals for help

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Proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden appeals to customers as literary landmark suffers the effects of the pandemic

The Strand Bookstore, a landmark of literary New York, is in serious trouble, appealing for customers to help it stave off closure amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Related: New York's Strand bookstore fights back over landmark status

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Thirty books to help us understand the world in 2020

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The climate crisis, gender, populism, big tech, pandemics, race… our experts recommend titles to illuminate the issues of the day

A distinguished climatologist and geophysicist, Michael Mann is director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications tagias well as four books, including 2012’s The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars and his forthcoming The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, due out in January 2021 (Public Affairs Books).

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Black Lives Matter’s Alicia Garza: ‘Leadership today doesn’t look like Martin Luther King’

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In seven years, BLM has gone from hashtag to global rallying cry. So why has the co-founder stepped away from the movement she helped create?

Alicia Garza is not synonymous with Black Lives Matter, the movement she helped create, and that’s very deliberate. The 39-year-old organiser is not interested in being the face of things; she’s interested in change. “We are often taught that, like a stork, some leader swoops from the sky to save us,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Oakland, California. That sort of mythologising, she says, “obscures the average person’s role in creating change”.

Garza is also scornful of fame for fame’s sake and of celebrity activists. The number of people who want to be online influencers rather than do the work of offline organising – knocking on doors, finding common ground, building alliances – depresses her. “Our aspiration should not be to have a million followers on Twitter,” she says. “We shouldn’t be focused on building a brand but building a base, and building the kind of movement that can succeed.”

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Mafia Inc review – old-school gangster pic based on real Canadian milieu

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Montreal’s underworld is the focus for this meaty flick about a crime boss aiming to set up a money-spinning project in the old country

This unexpectedly absorbing gangster movie is based on a non-fiction book of the same name by André Cédilot and André Noël that delved into Montreal’s organised crime world. Set in the 1990s but with flashbacks to the 80s, the film revolves around Francesco “Frank” Paterno (a silky Sergio Castellitto), an affable local godfather whose great ambition is to build a bridge back in the old country between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and thoroughly skim off all the money such a massive project will produce. To bankroll it, he has all sorts of funds squirrelled away in offshore accounts, but slippery accountants are skimming off the top, and there’s major trouble brewing between his son and chosen successor Giaco (Donny Falsetti) and upcoming capo Vince Gamache (Marc-André Grondin). The son of a tailor (Gilbert Sicotte) who has served the Paterno family for years, Vince tries to raise his stature in the organisation by importing drugs from Venezuela via a most horrific method. Meanwhile, Giaco’s brother Pat (Michael Ricci) gets engaged to Vince’s savvy sister Sofie (Mylène Mackay), a steel-nerved character in her own right underneath all that blow-dried hair and huge gold hoop earrings.

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Cleaning up: the social media stars making housework cool

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Donning the Marigolds need not be a chore, according to a new breed of influencers who say cleaning is fun and aspirational

There were fears that this autumn’s bumper crop of books would see some titles overlooked – but one volume definitely didn’t get brushed under the carpet. This Is Me by Sophie Hinchliffe, better known as the Instagram cleaning sensation Mrs Hinch, was the runaway hit of Super Thursday on 1 October, fighting stiff competition from almost 800 other hardbacks published that day to top the UK charts and shift more than 90,000 copies in its first week.

It’s no surprise: Mrs Hinch’s three previous books have been bestsellers, and the 30-year-old comes with a readymade audience thanks to her “Hinch Army” of 3.8 million Instagram followers.

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La Pasionaria and the International Brigades | Letter

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Charlie Nurse from the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Latin American Studies sets the historical record straight on Dolores Ibárruri and artists’ support for the Spanish Republic

I enjoyed your review of Giles Tremlett’s latest book on the International Brigades (3 October) and look forward to reading it. However, probably in common with other readers, I was mystified by the review’s reference to Dolores Ibárruri – without doubt the most famous figure in the Spanish Communist party during the civil war – as an opera singer. Ibárruri, known as La Pasionaria, was not an opera singer, although her speeches were, by contemporary accounts, undoubtedly dramatic performances.

It is also somewhat misleading to cite Orwell, Hemingway, Spender and Auden as examples of artists who were drawn to the International Brigades. They were, it is true, supporters of the Spanish Republic, but that is a different matter. None of them joined the brigades, though Spender declined an invitation from the British Communist party leader, Harry Pollitt, to volunteer. Orwell, famously, was in the militia of the POUM, which was targeted as a “Trotskyist” organisation and suppressed in 1937.
Charlie Nurse
Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge

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Stephen King, Margaret Atwood and Roxane Gay champion trans rights in open letter

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With more than 1,200 co-signatories in North America including Neil Gaiman and NK Jemisin, message follows row over comments by JK Rowling

Stephen King and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to an open letter offering support to the trans and non-binary communities of the US and Canada, as a bitter divide over trans rights continues to split the literary world.

The message from writers and members of the US literary community follows a similar letter from authors in the UK and Ireland. Both letters come in the wake of a fierce row over JK Rowling’s comments on trans rights, including her comment that “if sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased”.

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Sayaka Murata: ‘I acted how I thought a cute woman should act – it was horrible’

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The author of Convenience Store Woman talks about working behind the counter, rejecting marriage and children, and her dark new tale of murder and cannibalism

Until recently, Sayaka Murata, who won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, worked in a convenience store. She had toiled in them for half her life, writing most of her 11 novels and two nonfiction books in her time off. Even after becoming a bestselling author (Konbini Ningen, or Convenience Store Woman, sold 1.4m copies and has been translated into 30 languages), she continued to work behind the counter until the attentions of an obsessive fan forced her to stop. “I was so used to the rhythm of working that I found it hard to hang around all day writing,” she explains.

The novel’s oddball title character, Keiko Furukura, also relishes the predictable rhythms of her workplace. Japan’s 55,000 nearly identical convenience stores are considered stop-gap employers for job-hoppers, students, housewives and immigrants, “all losers”, says one of the characters in her book contemptuously. But Keiko, who is 36, a virgin and uninterested in the bourgeois lives of her married peers, excels at the pliant, robotic service demanded by the industry’s manuals. So unsettled is she by invasive questions about her lack of a husband and children that she takes in a lazy, abusive lodger just to deflect them.

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