Number 3 chiller
All my fiction until now has been an attempt to set a bonfire to my family’s past, to burn away all my family’s shame and tragedy and failure. Goat Mountain is the end of that. David Vann on his new novel, out 25 September.
‘Christchurch forgot what they sat on, and, in the same way but for different reasons, I realised that there was wilful forgetting in my family to the extent that I never once heard my father speak of his parents and only fleetingly and indirectly did my mother speak of hers,’
Just possibly, the enigmatically titled “Childhood of Jesus” isn’t a dystopian fiction at all. Joyce Carol Oates reviews J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus in the New York Times.
‘Don’t take any sh*t if you can possibly help it,’ and more Read more
‘How to describe the short stories that make up The Double, Australian poet and academic Maria Takolander’s first volume?’ asks the Read more
Clever illustrations of words from other languages that, alas, do not have English equivalents.
Ruby Wax loves ‘a-whoring’, and other authors' favourite words.
Let the Games Begin reads like an intellectual’s beach-read: romantic, full of plot and characters, but also teeming with ideas, symbols, dense metaphors, and complex satire. Vol. 1 Brooklyn reviews Niccolò Ammaniti’s latest novel.
The bibliotherapists behind The Novel Cure—a medical handbook of literary remedies—offer cures for such common bookseller ailments as ‘going under, fear of’ and ‘misanthropy’.
Bookshelfies: photos of readers and their bookshelves.
I used to tear off and eat the bottom of book pages. Until I was basically 13. I would roll them into little joint-looking things and then eat them idly while I read. Weird reading habits.
Van Booy’s new novel, The Illusion of Separateness, reprises this brilliance, with crackerjack storytelling (readers will feel crazy-hungry to know what happens) in language so clean and clear it seems to vibrate.
