Books

It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse. “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid…

In Vienna, every second building looks like it was built for a king, the waiters who serve your coffee wear tuxedos, and public transport is not just efficient and cheap, the council pays musicians to play Mozart in the carriages. But in the stories of Serbian author Barbi Marković, set in the Austrian city and its surroundings, there’s something not quite right about the place.In Minihorror, the 44-year-old’s very strange and very addictive short story collection, horrifying things lurk behind splendid baroque facades. A…

The champion of Arabia never got to write the book, but gave Roland Phillips a title for his, a valuable but flawed study of a man whose actions and fate continue to ripple through British-Irish relations more than a century after his execution in 1916.Casement gazes from a cover that splices two portraits into a discomfiting whole, preparing the reader for immersion in a life that crossed sexual, geographic and ideological boundaries, and a journey that made him a martyr for some, a traitor for others.Just as Casement…

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering…

The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our…

In an early scene from Saltburn, Oxford scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) goes on the defensive when his classmate Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) criticises his essay for the overuse of the adverb “thus.” Oliver counters that it is lazy to pick apart the style instead of the substance of his writing. Farleigh hits back, “It’s not what you argue but how” — which could be read as a pre-emptive notice from writer-director Emerald Fennell to detractors who may pan her new film for being heavy on style and light on…

Ludmila Ulitskaya began her career as a scientist at the Institute of General Genetics in Moscow. In 1970, she was fired for reading and distributing western literature in samizdat (self-published) form. Today, she is one of the most significant writers in Russia. Her works have been translated into 47 languages and have won Russia’s most prestigious literary awards. Ulitskaya has been vocal in her opposition to the Russia-Ukraine war, and, as a result, had to flee Russia for Berlin, Germany, where she currently lives.…

There is a moment at the end of every series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning drag queen reality competition, in which the glamorous host asks the finalists to address their younger selves with words of advice and encouragement. No matter how many times you have seen this happen (since its inception in 2009, there have been 16 US seasons, 20 international editions, eight all-star versions and two celebrity spin-offs), watching the contestants open up about their darkest days remains an astonishingly effective…

“I write about families,” Natalia Ginzburg said, “because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” The French-born writer and musician Alba Arikha clearly agrees, and has set her brilliant third novel firmly within the crucible of two families: the one her narrator is born into and the one she makes herself as an adult. The narrator is Clara, who, at the start, is a 16-year-old living in Paris and shares some biographical details with her author. (But not the fact her godfather was Samuel Beckett and she…

Today, the F-word is routinely used to describe how we feel, how objectionable someone is, what a bad day it is, or simply to wish someone a Happy AF Birthday. We may all frown upon swearing and profanity, but scientist Emma Byrne believes that we wouldn’t have “made it as the world’s most populous primate if we hadn’t learned to swear”. Scientist and author Emma Byrne (Courtesy the subject) The author of Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language, Byrne did her PhD in Expectation Violation…