literature

After living in the Argentina idol’s shadow, the 39-year-old star of Qatar is still capable of a final glorious chapter Lionel Messi in Qatar felt like the perfect story. It was the great finale. He is doomed always to be compared with Diego Maradona and, placed alongside a life of operatic ups and downs, of injury and addiction, drugs bans and organised crime, the highest highs and the lowest lo…

After critics and authors picked their top 100, we asked readers to choose their favourite novels. Thousands of votes came in from around the world ... which overlooked masterpieces made the cut – and what has pushed George Eliot off the top spot? • See the top 100 here The hobbits have it: topping the chart of what Guardian readers declare the 100 greatest novels published in English is a work o…

I read a fantasy book decades ago and I'm trying to find it again. Any ideas what it could have been based on the scarce information I can still remember? I read this book before year 2000 I think, ...

The graphic novelist had a remarkable gift for visual storytelling, in the phenomenon that was Persepolis and beyond. Many of us owe our careers to the space she created, says Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani • News: Marjane Satrapi, creator of Persepolis and acclaimed French-Iranian artist, dies aged 56 On the morning of 4 June, when I heard the news of Marjane Satrapi’s death, I was stunned. I…

Gaming, like AI, is far from what fascinates me most about technology and creative development. Still, that's what many fellow developers talk about these days, and what makes for good, controversial topics for further nerdy small talk. This post continues the ideas from my earlier article, Learning Lessons from Gaming . As an experiment, some of the concepts below were developed in conversation …

Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph; Selected Poems by Leontia Flynn; Sparrow on the Rooftop by Rachel Long; You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, edited by Jorie Graham; Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai; Somebody Should Have Pressed Record by Galia Admoni Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £12.9 9) Joseph’s follow-up to the TS Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert sees hi…

The movie adaptation of Gary Owen’s acclaimed play Iphigenia in Splott, Effi o Blaenau, is released this month. Here, its director and crew explain why they relocated the film to a post-industrial mining town – and refused to make it in English The one-woman play Iphigenia in Splott was first performed in 2015. Eleven years on, Gary Owen’s reworking of Greek tragedy, transplanted to working-class…

In her sharp and intellectual first novel, the author finds tragic comedy in socialism, inequality and the flawed ways we connect as the world burns In her fiction debut, The Ruiners, Ellena Savage probes the awkward realities of white privilege, social mobility and a lack of ancestral connection. At first it seems that Savage has turned away from the experimental ambition of her successful memoi…

The Iranian-French artist's graphic memoir became an international sensation and the animated film earned an Academy Award nomination.

The violence of male entitlement is embodied in the charismatic son of a Mississippi pastor, in a sharp portrait of cruelty and inheritance ‘To woman he gave a womb, and to man he gave dominion’, that’s what I teach my boys,” the Rev Sabre Winfrey Jr tells his wife, Priscilla, midway through Addie E Citchens’s formidable Women’s prize-shortlisted debut novel, Dominion. In Citchens’s hands, that d…

Nissim Ezekiel's poem Fruit (found on JStor) reads, in its entirety: Fruit The sour grapes were just as firm And round as those I loved, smooth skin Reflecting light, flesh soft within. But victims ...

Storyhouse, Chester Kit Green takes on all the characters in an imaginative interpretation of the 1925 day-in-the-life novel As Clarissa Dalloway wafts about the stage, welcoming her audience indiscriminately before instigating party games, the essence of Virginia Woolf’s scrupulous socialite appears to be missing. But this stage adaptation – co-written by Jen Heyes, who directs, and Kit Green, w…

IntroductionReconnecting disciplinary knowledge with authentic classroom practice remains a persistent challenge in teacher education, particularly in literature instruction. In China's secondary education system, the 2022 Chinese Language Curriculum Standards emphasize sustained engagement with classical literature; however, both high school students and pre-service teachers often demonstrate li…

Written in breathless multilingual prose, this coming-of-age meets state-of-the-nation novel is an incredible literary performance Three twentysomethings “drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street. moving as a massive through mad sticky traffic, destination: where else? manchester, wilmslow road, the curry mile, yo!” Thus opens Sufiyaan Salam’s high-octane debut novel, written l…

She’s the author of Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes and Look Again: Fashion. Educated at the University of Cambridge and Cornell, her interests are in the intersection of literature, art and philosophy. She was the winner of The Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize 2016 and has been a judge for the Forward Poetry Prizes, the Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction Prize and the Booker Prize. Sh…

Written by: Samantha Everton, Innovation & Research Communications Contributor University of Utah faculty members Jane Hatter, Elizabeth Craft, and Catherine Mayes have all authored books focusing on fine arts research. Each author has worked tirelessly to compile their work and concentrate it into text, and the U celebrates every researcher’s effort to share their studies […]

Readers strike an encouraging note for those sceptical of the joys of Proust, saying it has plenty to make it worth perservering I read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time over a nine-month period. In answer to Mike Bromberg ( Letters, 26 May ), a great deal happens besides the famous madeleine incident: the advent of electric lighting, motorcars and aeroplanes, not to men…

Madeleine Thien, Sufiyaan Salam and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments Lately I have loved Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water , translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce. It is an unclassifiable, sharp, ingenious, passionate novel in which the city that is dissolving is also one’s only home. I have been telling everyone to read…

Susanna Kaysen’s cult memoir sparked a wave of 90s novels about young women in crisis. After 10 years in the making, stars Juliana Canfield and King Princess are bringing it to the stage Girl, Interrupted may seem like unlikely material for a musical. Based on a 1993 best-selling memoir by Susanna Kaysen, the slim volume chronicles the author’s approximately two-year stay inside a psychiatric fac…

Romantasy and cross-genre romance is all the literary rage right now. So what better time to talk about how you can add some STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math)…