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The last days of Roger Federer and other artists
Geoff Dyer’s new book is a sustained meditation on the later careers of artists and athletes, as well as his own circumstances.
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'The Candy House' and other novels that go back and forth in time
New fiction by Emily St. John Mandel, Jennifer Egan and Sequoia Nagamatsu connects the past, present and future to explore what it’s like to be a human being today.
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Language isn’t an instinct, it’s a game
In their new book, scientists Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater put forward the intriguing argument that origins of language lie in cultural improvisation and human imagination.
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A crime novel that’s much more than a crime novel
Claudia Piñeiro’s ‘Elena Knows’, shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize, takes a searching look at some social problems in Argentina today.
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P.G. Wodehouse: A threat to the State
A decidedly unserious re-reading of the English humourist shows how his work contains several subversive messages.
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A historian’s debut novel about the dark side of globalisation
Yasmin Cordery Khan’s 'Edgware Road' deals with a quest for identity and shady goings-on at the erstwhile Bank of Commerce and Credit International.
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Using and misusing the language of war
How militant metaphors shape the way we think about politics, business, the pandemic and much else.
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The Godfather: Bad book, great film
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released 50 years ago. How did the director make such a spectacular adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel?
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Inside the mind of Margaret Atwood
A new collection of essays, speeches and articles throws light on the issues that concern the author of 'The Handmaid’s Tale'.
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The art and craft of Julie Otsuka
In her latest novel, 'The Swimmers', Japanese-American writer Julie Otsuka makes efficient use of literary devices to convey the plight of both a community and a single individual.
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Ukrainian shades of grey
Andrey Kurkov’s novel is largely set in the disputed Donbas region of Ukraine and deals with ordinary folk trying to get by in the midst of conflict.
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Should wordplay play a part in literature?
It’s common for people to groan at puns, but many writers have used double meanings in a variety of ingenious ways.
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Bride and Prejudice: Monica Ali’s 'Love Marriage'
The author’s first novel in ten years takes a revealing and entertaining look at a section of multicultural British society today.
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Will Wordle last as long as the Crossword?
It remains to be seen if the word puzzle’s popularity will rise or decline after its recent acquisition by the New York Times. Crosswords, however, seem set to endure.
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100 years of 'Ulysses': How to read James Joyce's experimental novel
The Irish writer’s modernist masterpiece was published 100 years ago. Since then, many print, digital and audio guides have tried to make it more accessible.
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A playful exploration of parallel universes
Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug’s new novel dwells on how the misreading of a single word creates an alternative world that separates a woman and her child.
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Handrails for poets and writers
A compilation of writing advice by Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska is wry, insightful and always entertaining.
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For Meta or for Worse
The company behind Facebook is now known as Meta. Where do the words meta and metaverse come from, and what do they mean?
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New year, new you
Many works of fiction feature New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. As Juli Zeh’s new novel shows, this can be a time of both despair and hope.
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Tribute: The sources of Joan Didion’s signature style
“To write with style is to fight lying all the way,” Joan Didion once wrote. What were the origins of her cool, unsentimental sentences on the page?
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All ‘Books of the Year’ lists sound the same
Do different year-end book lists contain different titles, or are they just the same ones cunningly disguised?
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Reading fast and slow
Does it make sense to read more quickly to cope with the deluge of books out there?
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Days after the night of broken glass
There are lessons for the present in a rediscovered novel about the fate of a Jewish businessman in Berlin trying to escape the Nazi dragnet.
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Is the apostrophe facing a catastrophe?
A new study by Lancaster University shows that there’s a significant drop in the use of apostrophes. That’s dismaying.
