Category Archives: Books

Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan among 380 writers and groups to call Gaza war ‘genocide’

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Letter also signed by Hanif Kureishi and Russell T Davies urges ceasefire and unrestricted distribution of aid

Three hundred and eighty writers and organisations including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Russell T Davies, Hanif Kureishi, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and George Monbiot have signed a letter stating that the Israeli government’s war in Gaza is genocidal and calling for an immediate ceasefire.

“The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations,” reads the letter, which was also signed by William Dalrymple, Jeanette Winterson, Brian Eno, Kate Mosse, Irvine Welsh and Elif Shafak.

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‘We carry on with the sadness’: new projects honor life and legacy of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira

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Friends and colleagues of Phillips, killed in the Amazon in 2022, completed his book, which coincides with launch of investigative Guardian podcast

Three years after the British journalist Dom Phillips and the Brazilian activist Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Amazon, two major new projects will celebrate their lives and work – and the Indigenous communities and rainforests both men sought to protect.

Friends of Phillips have completed the book he was writing at the time of his death – How to Save the Amazon – which will be published in the UK, the US and Brazil on 27 May.

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Holiday bookings to Japan are down – could a 90s manga comic’s earthquake prediction be to blame?

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The Future I Saw, a Japanese graphic novel by Ryo Tatsuki, declared a major disaster would occur on 5 July 2025

A grim prediction made in a manga first published a quarter of a century ago is being blamed for a dramatic fall in holiday bookings to Japan from several Asian countries.

Flight reservations to Japan from some of its key tourism markets have reportedly plummeted, with some linking the fall to The Future I Saw, a Japanese graphic novel based on the “prophetic” dreams of its author, Ryo Tatsuki.

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Chicago Sun-Times confirms AI was used to create reading list of books that don’t exist

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Outlet calls story, created by freelancer working with one of the newpaper’s content partner, a ‘learning moment’

Illinois’ prominent Chicago Sun-Times newspaper has confirmed that a summer reading list, which included several recommendations for books that don’t exist, was created using artificial intelligence by a freelancer who worked with one of their content partners.

Social media posts began to circulate on Tuesday criticizing the paper for allegedly using the AI software ChatGPT to generate an article with book recommendations for the upcoming summer season called “Summer reading list for 2025”. As such chatbots are known to make up information, a phenomenon often referred to as “AI hallucination”, the article contains several fake titles attached to real authors.

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‘Eerie gem’ of an unearthed Graham Greene story published in Strand Magazine

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A ghost story – unusual subject matter for the late author of political thrillers – features alongside little-known Ian Fleming story

A short ghost story by Graham Greene described by analysts as “an eerie gem” was published for the first time on Wednesday, a rare glimpse into the largely uncelebrated darker side of one of the giants of 20th-century literature.

Reading at Night appears in the 75th issue of Strand Magazine, a New York literary quarterly that has built a reputation for finding and publishing “lost” writings of well-known authors.

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Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha wins Pulitzer prize for commentary

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Renowned poet and author wins prize for series of New Yorker essays on suffering of Palestinians in Gaza

The renowned Palestinian poet and author, Mosab Abu Toha, is among this year’s Pulitzer prize winners.

Abu Toha was awarded for a series of essays in the New Yorker documenting the lives and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, where he has lived nearly all his life.

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‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government

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David A Graham’s latest book considers the vast far-right plan to change US politics – and why its architects are playing the long game

David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.

The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.

The Project is published in the US by Random House

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Francis Ford Coppola unveils Megalopolis graphic novel

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In a statement, the 86-year-old director of the critical and box-office flop said the book confirms his feeling that ‘art can never be constrained’

Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m passion project, was neither a box office nor a critical success on release last year. Largely funded by the sale of Coppola’s own vineyards, the sci-fi epic starring Adam Driver took around $14m at the global box office amid unconvinced reviews and rumours of abnormal on-set behaviour by its director.

A marketing campaign attempted to leverage bad critical notices by flagging that previous works by Coppola now acclaimed as masterpieces – including Apocalypse Now and The Godfather – had been dismissed by critics at the time. But this backfired after it emerged all of the sniffy historical reviews had been fabricated.

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Han Kang Nobel prize lecture book sells 10,000 copies in first day online in South Korea

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Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelist

A book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.

Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October.

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Gender Queer graphic novel reapproved for sale in Australia after federal court fight to ban book

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Complaints about the book focus on cartoon sex scenes, one of which has been described by critics as ‘pornographic’ and ‘paedophilic’

Gender Queer, a graphic novel on gender identity, has been reapproved for sale in Australia following a conservative campaign against the book forcing the Classification Review Board to reconsider its initial decision.

The federal court last year ordered the board to reassess its decision to give the Maia Kobabe memoir an unrestricted M classification, after rightwing activist Bernard Gaynor challenged the ruling.

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US writers at growing risk of crackdown on free speech, says PEN America

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China again biggest jailer of writers in 2024, followed by Iran – with Israel in fifth place, says organisation’s annual report

Writers in the US are at growing risk amid a worldwide crackdown on free speech that has begun to spread to countries previously renowned for unfettered expression and openness, according to a leading writers’ advocacy group.

PEN America said it was concerned about an emerging threat from the Trump administration as it published its annual Freedom to Write index report, which showed that the number of writers jailed worldwide had jumped for the sixth year running to 375 in 2024, compared with 339 the year before.

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‘Their pursuits are the cigar and the siesta’: how two centuries of British writers helped forge our view of Spain

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Laurie Lee and Robert Graves among ‘English-speaking Quixotes’ in new book celebrating literary love for all things Spanish

Almost 200 years ago, the pioneering British travel writer Richard Ford offered an observation that has been happily ignored by the legions of authors who have traipsed in his dusty footsteps across Spain, toting notebooks, the odd violin or Bible, and, of course, their own particular prejudices.

“Nothing causes more pain to Spaniards”, Ford noted in his 1845 Handbook for Travellers in Spain, “than to see volume after volume written by foreigners about their country.”

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‘Book brigade’: US town forms human chain to move 9,100 books one-by-one

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A small Michigan community banded together to help a beloved local bookstore move its stock to a new storefront

Residents of all ages in a small Michigan community formed a human chain and helped a local bookshop move each of its 9,100 books – one by one – to a new storefront about a block away.

The “book brigade” of about 300 people stood in two lines running along a sidewalk in downtown Chelsea on Sunday, passing each title from Serendipity Books’ former location directly to the correct shelves in the new building, down the block and around the corner on Main Street.

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Rare letter offers glimpse into Bram Stoker’s early thoughts on Dracula

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‘Lord forgive me. I am quite shameless’, author playfully wrote in note weeks after horror novel published in 1897

He had just unleashed one of the most famed gothic horror books on the world, a blood-curdling classic that chilled readers and has inspired countless authors, film-makers and video game developers ever since.

But a rare note that Bram Stoker wrote only weeks after Dracula was published in 1897 gives a glimpse into the playful fun he must have had with the novel.

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Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s and Wake in Fright, dies aged 94

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Prolific Canadian director also made one of the country’s first internationally successful films, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss

Ted Kotcheff, the prolific Canadian director of films including First Blood, Weekend at Bernie’s, Wake in Fright and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, has died aged 94. His daughter Kate Kotcheff told the Canadian Press that he had died of heart failure on Thursday in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he lived. His son Thomas said: “He died of old age, peacefully, and surrounded by loved ones.”

In an amazingly varied career, Kotcheff’s work ranged from hardhitting TV plays and low-budget features in the UK, to hit Hollywood comedies and prestige-laden award-winners and cult films. Kate Kotcheff said: “He was an amazing storyteller. He was an incredible, larger than life character [and] he was a director who could turn his hand to anything.”

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Mississippi orders deletion of race and gender databases in state libraries

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Library commission says state ‘in dire shape’ and has ‘had a reconsideration of everything with regard to’ Doge

The Mississippi library commission, which offers services such as specialized research assistance to libraries in the state, has ordered the deletion of two research collections: the race relations database and the gender studies database. The collections were stored in what’s called the Magnolia database, which is used by publicly funded schools, libraries, universities and state agencies in Mississippi.

The commission’s executive director, Hulen Bivins, confirmed the deletion to the Guardian, and said: “We may lose a lot of materials.”

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Stella prize 2025: shortlist entirely women of colour for the first time in award’s history

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Michelle de Kretser and journalist Amy McQuire among six authors in contention for $60,000 prize for women and non-binary writers

The Stella prize, Australia’s award for women and non-binary authors, has made history this year with a shortlist featuring only works by women of colour, for the first time since the award was established in 2013.

Announced on Tuesday morning, this year’s shortlist includes Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire’s essay collection, Black Witness (winner of the 2025 Victorian premier’s award for Indigenous writing), about the failures of mainstream media and power of Indigenous journalism; two-time Miles Franklin-winner Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice, a reckoning with fiction, memoir and colonialism; and playwright, poet and author Samah Sabawi’s family memoir, Cactus Pear For My Beloved, tracing her roots from British-occupied Palestine through to contemporary Queensland.

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US authors’ copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft combined in New York with newspaper actions

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California cases over AI trainers’ use of work by writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Chabon transferred to consolidate with New York suits from John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen and more

Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.

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Rightwing groups across US push new bans to limit ‘obscene’ books in libraries

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Critics say bans would hinder rights as proponents would impose their beliefs on others who don’t share their views

Rightwing groups around the US are pushing legislation that would place new limits on what books are allowed in school libraries in a move that critics decry as censorship often focused on LGBTQ+ issues or race or imposing conservative social values.

Caught up in the attempts at suppressing books are classics like The Color Purple and Slaughterhouse Five.

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French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal sentenced to five years in prison

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French president Emmanuel Macron has called for authorities to free the novelist who was convicted in Algeria for allegedly undermining the country’s territorial integrity

French president Emmanuel Macron has called on Algeria to free Boualem Sansal, after the French-Algerian novelist was on Thursday sentenced to five years in prison and fined for allegedly undermining Algeria’s territorial integrity.

Sansal was arrested on 16 November at Algiers airport on arrival from Paris, after saying in an interview with a far-right French media outlet Frontières that France unfairly ceded Moroccan territory to Algeria during the colonial era.

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