‘Short story stations’ in Canary Wharf print one- three- and five-minute reads on demand
“Every single day,” says Paresh Raichura, “I’m on the lookout for something new to read.” On his hour-long commute to Canary Wharf, where he works for the Financial Ombudsman, he picks up Time Out or a local paper or the freesheet Metro, but says: “I’ve stopped reading all the long novels I used to read.”
Why?
Continue reading...Anti-sorcery post by evangelical Catholic group widely mocked on Facebook
Catholic priests in Poland have burned books that they say promote sorcery, including one of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, in a ceremony they photographed and posted on Facebook.
Three priests in the northern city of Koszalin were pictured carrying the books in a large basket from inside a church to a stone area outside. The books were set alight as prayers were said and a small group of people watched on. A mask, various trinkets and a Hello Kitty umbrella were also visible in the pictures of the makeshift bonfire.
Continue reading...The saga of the Seven Kingdoms may be bowing out, but it has opened the floodgates. Here’s your guide to the next big heroes
Rand al’Thor was found as a baby on the slopes of Dragonmount and taken to Two Rivers, where he grew into a broad-shouldered shepherd boy. But Rand is possessed of immense power, a power as yet untapped, for he is also The Dragon Reborn, destined to be hunted by Darkhounds and Darkfriends as he bids to prove himself a mighty warrior leader. Among other things, Rand’s existence shows that you should always believe ancient prophesies, that even the low-born can save the world – and that characters in TV fantasy series must always have two names.
Rand is just one of the 2,782 characters who appear in Wheel of Time, the bestselling saga of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. We can only hope the forthcoming adaptation on Amazon will hone the cast down a little, as we follow Rand and his forces towards Tarmon Gai’don, or the final battle between good and evil.
Continue reading...Vicky Ward has produced a damning depiction, a lethal amalgam of Page Six-like dish and firsthand investigative reporting
Like Donald Trump, Americans are displeased with Jared Kushner, the president’s squeaky sounding son-in-law. As the reality that Kushner received his White House security clearance the same way he got into Harvard sinks in – “Daddy” pulled some very expensive strings – his popularity will not be rebounding anytime soon.
Related: Revealed: Kushner 'challenged on conflicts of interest by Trump aides'
Continue reading...As he powers into his 80s, the photographer recalls shooting everyone from Kate Moss to Andy Warhol, shares his regrets over voting leave – and reveals how Gordon Brown pulled a fast one on him
‘You look knackered,” says David Bailey, greeting me at his studio. It’s up a small mews and sprawls so casually across two floors that it still feels like the 60s inside. “Look at you,” he says. “Your buttons aren’t even done up right.” I look down at my jacket: that bit is true. But I tell him: “I’m not tired!”
“I was watching you walking along the street,” he says. “I thought, ‘That must be the journalist, she looks knackered.’” The combination of acuity (he must be right: he is, after all, the one who makes a living with his eyes) and demonic overfamiliarity (by this point, we are holding hands; I have no idea who started it) is disarming. If this is his shtick, it’s working on me, totally and overwhelmingly. Or maybe he has a tailored shtick for everyone he meets.
Continue reading...A richly detailed chronicle of Arab language and culture offers thought-provoking parallels between past and present
Outside the window of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s home in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, are reminders of the long sweep of Arab history – child soldiers mourning martyrs of the country’s ongoing war, rocket salvoes, sectarian rivalries, hypnotic slogans and a mosque dating back to the seventh century and the rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula.
The view is simultaneously rich, bleak and thought-provoking: for three millennia, dynasties have come and gone, from the Sabaeans and Himyaris to the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. Later came the al Saud – the family that gave its name to a still powerful kingdom. Interactions between desert (badu) and town (hadar), semi-nomadic tribes and settled peoples, strong men and weak institutions, are a constant theme. Language, faith, and loyalty come together in complex and far-flung combinations.
Continue reading...The author on the builders who inspired his new book, Trump’s appeal and the energising power of young people
Dave Eggers is a writer, publisher and humanitarian campaigner. He has written 14 books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, What Is the What, The Circle and Heroes of the Frontier. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, and their two children. His new novel, The Parade, tells the story of the role played by two visitors in a nation’s fragile peace.
Where did the idea for The Parade come from?
Back in 2006, I was in [what is now] South Sudan with Valentino Achak Deng [the refugee whose life story Eggers told in What Is the What] and we were near Aweil, driving on some pretty rough dirt roads, when we came upon a giant six-lane highway being built, connecting Aweil to Khartoum. We were surprised to see it was being built by a Swedish company. That stuck in my mind a bit, the oddity of this Scandinavian crew building a road in a post-conflict zone – a road that might some day be used to facilitate military incursions. After that, whenever I saw foreign contractors in post-conflict zones, I was fascinated by their role and what kind of awareness or sense of responsibility they might have toward the implications of their projects.
We are now producing and consuming more food than ever, and yet our modern diet is killing us. How can we solve this bittersweet dilemma?
Pick a bunch of green grapes, wash it, and put one in your mouth. Feel the grape with your tongue, observe how cold and refreshing it is: the crisp flesh, and the jellylike interior with its mild, sweet flavour.
Eating grapes can feel like an old pleasure, untouched by change. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to eat them, as well as to drink them in the form of wine. The Odyssey describes “a ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes”. As you pull the next delicious piece of fruit from its stalk, you could easily be plucking it from a Dutch still life of the 17th century, where grapes are tumbled on a metal platter with oysters and half-peeled lemons.
Continue reading...Carrie Gibson has written an exhaustive corrective to historians who seek to whitewash a story of settlement and conflict
The subtitle of Carrie Gibson’s book is The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America. El Norte lives up to it.
Related: These Truths review: Jill Lepore's Lincolnian American history
Continue reading...Fired by the president, the former US attorney has written his first book. He talks about if and when Trump will face justice – and why he fears for his own safety
Preet Bharara is used to dealing with bullies. When he was the US attorney for the southern district of New York, the premier law enforcement body in America, his office prosecuted Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Crips and Bloods gang leaders and mafia bosses. For going after the infamous arms dealer Viktor Bout he was banned from Russia, and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once tried to persuade the then US vice-president, Joe Biden, to sack him (he didn’t). The TV series Billions is loosely based on his legal battles with a hedge-fund billionaire. As he puts it himself: “Neither I nor anyone I know was too afraid to prosecute rich men in suits.”
So when Bharara says that even he is now feeling apprehensive about his personal safety, and that his fears relate not to al-Qaida or the Gambino family, but to the president of the United States, it comes as a jolt. “I used to have great confidence that my government would protect me,” he says. “You understood that if you were an American citizen like me, or resident like Jamal Khashoggi, you weren’t going to be rendered somewhere, you didn’t think that if you travelled to Madrid, say, and a BS red notice was issued for you, you’d be on your own. I’m a citizen of the United States and I served my country for 17 years, yet I don’t have that confidence any more. I don’t know that the government at its highest level thinks of Americans first – it’s whether you are on his side, or not on his side.”
Continue reading...More than 25 years after her groundbreaking Daughters of Africa anthology, Margaret Busby reflects on the next generation of black women writers around the world
Time was when the perception of published writers was that all the women were white and all the blacks were men (to borrow the title of a key 1980s black feminist book). At best, there was a handful of black female writers – Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou – who were acknowledged by the literary establishment. This was the climate in which, more than 25 years ago, I compiled and published Daughters of Africa. It was critically acclaimed, but more significant has been the inspiration that 1992 anthology gave to a fresh generation of writers who form the core of its sequel, New Daughters of Africa.
The critic Juanita Cox told me: “I received Daughters of Africa as a birthday gift from my father. Two things immediately struck me about the book. It was huge and it contained women like me. Even though I’d been brought up in Nigeria, I had had very little exposure to black literature. At school the only black characters I’d ever read about occupied the margins: figures like the Sedleys’ servant Sambo and the mixed-race heiress Miss Swartz in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Daughters of Africa introduced me to a huge number of writers I’d never previously been aware of. And on a more personal level it made me realise that I was somehow valid. The anthology was peopled not just by women of ‘pure’ African descent, but also women of mixed ancestry, and just like the women the book contained, I too could have a voice.”
Continue reading...Streaming giant buys rights to create first ever screen adaptation of Colombian author’s seminal 1967 magical realist novel
Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude to create the first screen adaptation of the author’s 1967 masterpiece.
The streaming company announced on Wednesday that the book will be adapted into a Spanish-language series and filmed largely in the Nobel prize-winning author’s home country of Colombia, with García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, serving as executive producers.
Continue reading...Ninety years ago, a harrowing account of warfare in the first world war was brought to an international audience by German veteran Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier fighting on the western front during the first world war. Bäumer and several of his friends join the army voluntarily after listening to the patriotic speeches of their teacher, but soon become disillusioned after experiencing the horrors of the battlefield.
After being serialised in 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitunghe, Erich Maria Remarque’s book was first published on 31 January 1929, and instantly became a bestseller. In March 1929 it was translated into English and the following year was adapted into an Oscar winning Hollywood film. All Quiet’s sense of empathy for a putative enemy did not find favour with the German Nazi party and in December 1930 filmgoers were attacked at several early showings of the movie in Germany. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the book was banned, along with the rest of Remarque’s works, and it became one of the most common books destroyed in the infamous Nazi book burnings.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Policy adviser claims couple tried to gain grant for Chelsea’s boyfriend
A veteran Democratic foreign policy adviser has accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of nepotism, dishonesty and vindictiveness in an assault on a previously untouched part of the Clinton political legacy – Ireland.
Trina Vargo, who was a behind-the-scenes Washington player in Northern Ireland’s peace process, claims the couple tried to obtain a scholarship to Ireland for a boyfriend of their daughter, Chelsea, and later cut funding for the scholarship to punish Vargo for backing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race.
Continue reading...In this extract from Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, one boy’s family tell Louise Milligan the cataclysmic effect abuse had on him
This is the story of two teenage boys sent on scholarships from what were then Melbourne’s inner suburbs to a Catholic boys’ school – St Kevin’s College. St Kevin’s is in Toorak, Melbourne’s most exclusive precinct.
The school is wedged between the Kooyong Tennis Club and the Yarra River, and closed behind grand iron gates with gilded lettering. The boys wear boater hats and navy blazers, candy-striped with emerald and gold. While the area the boys came from has now gentrified, in the 1990s it might as well have been a different planet.
Continue reading...I’m going to talk about something that, until now, I have largely kept to myself. It’s odd, as I consider myself a writer of extreme honesty, and I try to carry that over into real life. And yet, even now, I’m hesitating, and I realise to some degree I have procrastinated even more than usual about the thinking, and writing, of this. The committing of a hidden life event to the written word. That’s always a scary act.
I used to wonder if my reluctance was driven by shame, or simply my incredulity at what took place all those years ago. Now, I think that it is those things mostly, but also a hell of a lot more. Over the last few years, particularly in the recent crosswinds of our racial and cultural political climate, this life event bubbled to the surface of my memory, never quite boiling over. I’ve talked about it to a few of my close male friends, but that’s it. I almost never mention it to women.
Continue reading...Filmmaker was born to French-Algerian parents and made his home, and his name, in multicultural London. But he never felt a sense of belonging. Then Hollywood called …
Where are you from? It’s a question I’ve always had a hard time with. And since moving to the US four years ago, I’m asked it on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the combination of a brownish face, London accent and French names that throws people off. Who knows? But this question, hearing it asked over and over these past few years, has forced me to confront unresolved questions I have about identity: how I grew up and how those experiences led me to being a director.
People tend to like things compartmentalised and simple, but it’s never been that simple for me. I’ve never had any sense of a “national identity” or, for that matter, a sense of belonging to any one tribe. I’m mixed race: French white mother, Algerian father. So “I’m a Londoner” is my standard go-to short response when the question comes up. That’s the simplest answer I feel comfortable giving without getting into it.
Continue reading...In 2015, James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker. His new novel is a hotly anticipated African fantasy epic and here he talks about loving the X-Men, coming out and writing about violence
It’s two days before the US release of Marlon James’s much-hyped fourth novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the prizewinning Jamaican author has an air of baffled, exhausted ebullience about him. He’s no stranger to critical success: he won the 2015 Man Booker prize for his violent, multi-voiced epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings. But it feels like this new book will propel James into a new galaxy of literary stardom.
We’ve arranged to have lunch – on a balmy Sunday in early February – at the Commodore, a carefully shabby Williamsburg diner near his Brooklyn apartment. Brawnily broad-shouldered, his dreadlocked hair tied back in a ponytail, James has arrived before me. We’re shown to seats at the bar where low winter sun slants through the blinds on to the bar top. James tells me it feels like summer to him – he spends much of his time teaching creative writing at Macalester College in Minnesota – and as if to prove it asks the waiter for an Aperol spritz.
Continue reading...Collection of writings just released includes references to rape of then-wife Jackie Sturm, herself an acclaimed poet and author
A new collection of letters from one of New Zealand’s most significant poets, James K Baxter, that includes a blunt admission of marital rape is causing shockwaves through the literary community.
Baxter died in Auckland in 1972 but remains one of New Zealand’s literary giants. He achieved international attention in the late 1950s after Oxford University Press published his poetry collection, In Fires Of No Return.
Continue reading...The Elon Musk-backed nonprofit company OpenAI declines to release research publicly for fear of misuse
The creators of a revolutionary AI system that can write news stories and works of fiction – dubbed “deepfakes for text” – have taken the unusual step of not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse.
OpenAI, an nonprofit research company backed by Elon Musk, says its new AI model, called GPT2 is so good and the risk of malicious use so high that it is breaking from its normal practice of releasing the full research to the public in order to allow more time to discuss the ramifications of the technological breakthrough.
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