literature

The British poet, who also wrote plays, fiction and published poetry in translation, analysed almost 1,000 poems for her much-loved series British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81. Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Explore the…

Tropic Death – 10 blistering, astonishing stories about racist, exploitative outrages in Caribbean ‘paradises’ – won him a Guggenheim award. Why did this star of the Harlem Renaissance die such a sad and lonely death? How does a writer disappear? This year marks six decades since the death of Eric Walrond, a Guyana-born writer who cut his literary teeth amid the Harlem Renaissance, kept company w…

Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary wants to bring the epic poem to the big screen using the power of artificial intelligence. It can’t be any good The thing about unfilmable works of literature is that most of them eventually turn out to be quite filmable after all. The Lord of the Rings was a bit of a mess when shot in rotoscope on a minuscule budget by the guy who filmed Fritz the Cat; it won O…

This year’s winners also include Jill Lepore’s book on the constitution and Brian Goldstone’s on housing insecurity Sign up for the Breaking News US newsletter email Pulitzer prize officials awarded the fiction award to an author with a long history in fantasy, horror and young adult novels: Daniel Kraus, cited for Angel Down, a first world war narrative that unfolds in one long sentence. Liberat…

The Power of Grammar: Inside the Collapse of Language What happens when the very system designed to make meaning begins to erode it? In this second volume of The Miscommunication Trilogy, the reader is drawn into a rigorous and unsettling exploration of language not as a neutral medium, but as a living structure—one that can be shaped, stretched, and ultimately weakened. At the center of this inv…

Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt drama spans 50 years following the bond and rivalry between two brothers who play the rigorously observed female roles in the traditional art form Lee Sang-il’s heartfelt and muscular epic (whose title means “national treasure”) was a box-office smash on its Japanese home turf, winning a host of festival awards and an Oscar nomination. It’s a mighty Cain-and-Abel drama spa…

Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway shine in frothy sequel that smartly comments on struggling media industry This article contains spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada 2 The Devil Wears Prada 2 review – a sequel? For spring? Groundbreaking After a promotional blitz that has run the full gamut from haute ( Meryl Streep on the cover of Vogue with Anna Wintour ) to not (a heinous line of Target sweats), T…

A desperate cabbie joins a service that directs him down a shadowy path in this interesting, less-is-more satirical thriller Canadian film-maker Michael Pierro makes his feature debut with this low-to-no-budget sortie, a modern-day Travis Bickle nightmare which, though flawed and in need of some script development, adds up to a pertinent satirical comment on the gig economy and the Waymo-isation …

_The Garden of Ideas_ 4 (2):5-14. 2025This paper develops a phenomenological account of liminal space aesthetics through an analysis of "The Stanley Parable". Drawing on Mark Fisher’s account of the eerie as a disturbance of presence or absence, I argue that the game’s empty office aesthetics function as paradigmatic liminal spaces that stage a crisis of agency. The player’s navigation of repetit…

Bringing Manchester’s Curry Mile to vibrant life, the #Merky prize-winning author’s cross-genre work focuses on the lives and language of young British men. He discusses identity and inspiration On a stretch of Manchester road known for kebabs, shisha smoke and restless energy, three young men drive towards a night that already feels like it’s slipping out of control. The premise of Wimmy Road Bo…

Can a sentence affect the course of your life? Five authors reveal the interactions that transformed the way they saw themselves – and the world When I was 14, I had to start a new school. I wasn’t great at starting new schools, even though I had done so quite a few times – once for my dad’s work, once because I wasn’t fitting in at my primary school and once because my parents didn’t like the te…

In Immersion: The Experience of Literary Reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 50-64. 2026In this chapter, Anderson draws on the notion of fission-fusion, originally from anthropology and ethology, and develops the concept in relation to literary reading and immersion. The term fission-fusion refers to the shifting capacity of all sorts of phenomena (including people, animals, and c…

_International Journal of Current Research in the Humanities_ 29 (1):268-278. 2025Revolutionary plays in Nigeria have evolved to emphasise the economic conditions of the poor and the available opportunities for addressing these issues. Historically, Marxism was considered a relevant ideology for tackling insurgency. Labour plays a central role in these narratives. Uniquely, revolutionary plays ex…

Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane give the Guardian exclusive extracts as they aim to open eyes to the wonder of Britain’s declining and endangered species When the artist Jackie Morris collaborated with the writer Robert Macfarlane to celebrate the names of plants and animals controversially removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, they never imagined their book, The Lost Words, would become…

Long before engineers build the future, someone has to imagine it; that work often starts in fiction.

From 1980s Cincinnati into the interstellar darkness, the stories of four women interconnect across the centuries in a gentle hymn to found families This is the kind of book you pitch by analogy: JG Ballard meets Gabrielle Zevin; Isaac Asimov meets Stephen Chbosky; Ready Player One meets Love, Simon (replete with ferris wheel). I’ve been describing it to friends as a YA Kazuo Ishiguro set adrift …

Gen X identified with the protagonist 20 years ago. After two bruising decades in the job market, we might see her actions as more foolish than heroic.

The American author on the magic of Yasunari Kawabata, the hidden layers of Henry James and coming late to the genius of Muriel Spark My earliest reading memory I remember reading throughout my childhood, but it’s hard to identify my earliest memory of reading. In a lot of ways, it’s as if my childhood began when I learned to read. I do remember taking a copy of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Dange…

A miserable misogynist is on a quest for redemption in Toltz’s fourth novel, which fizzes with dynamic prose but struggles to engender empathy for its protagonist Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email In his fourth novel, Steve Toltz – best known for the Booker prize-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole – takes on the story of one man’s loneliness to deliver a satirical and surprisingly movi…

Were Exile's Song, The Shadow Matrix, and Traitor's Sun written by Marion Zimmer Bradley alone? I do not see that they are published with a co-author mentioned. Rediscovery was previously ...