literature

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 13 June 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07355-0 Performative authorship: engaging with the problem of authorial identity in Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers

Our favourite music, clothes and books used to be markers of individuality – but the algorithm has made us all sheep. Meet the style rebels fighting back What are you into? What floats your boat? What music, films, clothes, art, books – anything, really – do you actually like? Do you find these questions more difficult to answer than you would have done 10 years ago? How about 20? You do? You’re …

Pride Month often brings with it reading lists filled with memoirs, novels, and histories, but some of the… The post 7 Art Books to Read This Pride Month appeared first on Arts To Hearts Project .

Leading authors including Sarah Waters, William Dalrymple, Bernardine Evaristo and Anne Enright reveal their perfect holiday reading • Read our selection of 70 brilliant books for the summer Zadie Smith Margaret Busby’s Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century is the record of one woman’s lifelong passion for the literature and life of Africa and its diaspora, wherever she finds it. A beau…

David Hockney, whose paintings of pools shimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine became icons of 20th-century art, has died at the age of 88. Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif. Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of York…

Artists and cultural figures celebrate the great Yorkshire painter who could ‘make teabags and toothpaste glamorous’ – with a poem from a fellow Yorkshireman ‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’ David Hockney, revolutionary British artist, dies aged 88 My earliest memories of modern artists were of David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Bridget Riley. I remember seeing a TV programme about…

Writers do not only document the horror of conflict; they speak to a future that must exist beyond it Last week, thousands of readers gathered for a literary festival in Kyiv, risking air raids to hear from writers. Four brutal years of war have not destroyed the appetite for writing, but fuelled it. Russia’s extensive and systematic attempts to destroy Ukrainian culture, and therefore identity, …

'I think it’s a really interesting environment to delve into. Ultimately, it's a culture of survival.'

The US author, film-maker and Zen Buddhist priest on smart young girls, the difference between irony and cynicism, and working her way through 13 volumes of Chekhov My earliest reading memory I was reading – or pretending to read – before my brain could encode memories, so probably around three or four? I “read” Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, but that was mostly pictures.…

Citizens theatre, Glasgow The novel is adapted with equal parts wit and horror to capture the depravity of a notorious crime in Glasgow On the bare brick wall backing Jen McGinley’s set – half courtroom, half saloon – there is a faded poster of The Searchers, John Ford’s 1956 western . The whisky-swilling hard men who haunt the clubs and dives of The Long Drop may well see themselves as cowboys. …

Featured in Magazine Issue 12: This Is Me, Ivana Babic creates portraits that feel less like representations of people and more like explorations of identity itself. Through fragmented faces, geometric structures, and surreal architectural spaces, her paintings question the idea of a fixed self, revealing the many layers that exist beneath appearance. Rather than painting what a person looks like…

I met Harris before his crimes came to light. Even then I sensed his public image was a facade I’m not convinced by the old adage that we should never meet our idols because they are bound to disappoint us. I’ve never wanted to approach human exceptionalism quite so cynically. Yes, I’m acutely, painfully conscious that the world is replete with terrible events and bad people. But I’m counting mys…

As she nears her 72nd birthday, we honour the actor whose ‘smoked honey’ vocals added to her vampy persona on screen, whether bringing Jessica Rabbit to life or crushing Michael Douglas between her thighs Turner goes full-on drill sergeant for one scene as a dog-trainer, her forearms covered with scratches. Marley the irrepressible yellow labrador retriever knocks her to the ground and gives her …

A reclusive artist is the reluctant subject of a journalist’s attention in a rich world of scents, scenery and secrets When a British journalist named Joseph Adelaide tracks down a reclusive artist to his remote farmhouse in the south of France, his plan is to interview him for a magazine profile. Edouard Tartuffe is a revered painter who was taught by Cézanne and is known on the Parisian art sce…

New York’s 29-point comeback in Game 4 was the largest in NBA finals history. For a team forged by disappointment, it felt strangely inevitable What does a team of destiny look like? You know it when you see it. The evidence has been mounting for weeks – months, even – that this year, despite decades of precedent to the contrary, that team is the New York Knicks. On Wednesday night, the proof ove…

Ten years ago, the Ghostbusters reboot was released into a firestorm of rage and revulsion. What did the onslaught show us about film, fandom – and does it stand up today? Criticism of Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot began more than two years before its release. Specifically, it started the moment that the director of Bridesmaids and The Heat announced, in 2014, that he and writer Katie Dippold w…

What happens when contemporary artists revisit some of history’s most iconic paintings? From Vitruvian Man and The Scream to The Kiss and The Birth of Venus, seven artists from our community shared how they would reinterpret these timeless masterpieces through the lens of modern life. Their responses explore technology, identity, connection, representation, and the realities of contemporary exist…

Follow the folklore and you will discover a landscape full of wonder and powerful women – from a fearsome Scottish warrioress to the first queen of a united England It’s just past midday and I appear to be inside a rain cloud. Soaked to the skin, my walking boots squelching through tufts of grass and black bog mud, I can hear hundreds of streams rolling off this wide mid-Wales peak, each vying to…

This impressive and charismatic debut novel revisits an actor and a director over various collaborations The central characters of Frida Slattery As Herself, Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, are the eponymous Frida, 23 when the novel opens, and John Reddan, five years older. Both live in Dublin. Frida loves acting but has never had a significant role, and didn’t even get into drama school. John is a w…

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Last Evolution, by John Wood Campbell This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Last Evolution Author: John Wood Campbell Illustrator: Leo Morey Re…