Fiction

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Credit: Marvel StudiosWhether you need a new villain or an old Spider-Man, your sci-fi movie will sound more scientifically credible if you use the word multiverse. The Marvel multiverse puts multiple different versions of our universe “out there,” somewhere. In these films, with the right blend of technology, magic, and imagination, travel between these universes is possible.For example (spoilers!), in Spider-Man: No Way Home, we discover there are other universes and other…

It is a bold author who heads off potential criticisms of their work with a self-aware allusion, but in Emily St John Mandel’s ambitious new novel, the character of the writer Olive Llewellyn is confronted by an unimpressed reader in a book-signing queue. Her interlocutor impatiently claims “there were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t ultimately”.Some may agree with this as a description of Sea of Tranquility, but it also…

The year 2019 didn’t want for sparky essay collections that interrogated the female experience, with Rebecca Solnit, Jia Tolentino and Rachel Cusk all publishing new work. Even so, Emilie Pine’s bestselling Notes to Self stood out. Initially released by a small, independent Irish press before being scooped up by Hamish Hamilton, the Dublin academic’s mainstream debut brought unusual clarity and compassion to bear on sources of resonant personal pain including miscarriage, rape and life as the daughter of an alcoholic…

At the beginning of Joanne Greenberg’s striking 1964 autobiographical novel, now reissued by Penguin Modern Classics, is a one-way journey. Deborah Blau, 16, is with her parents, who try to normalise the trip: stopping at a diner, catching a movie. But there’s no getting away from it – her parents look upon her as a “familiar face that they were trying to convince themselves they could estrange”. Deborah has schizophrenia, with episodes of psychosis that they can no longer manage, and they are taking her to a psychiatric…

Last week, Jamie Lee Curtis sparked “internet feud” headlines when she gleefully declared on social media that her new film “out marvels any Marvel movie”. The multiverse-themed Everything Everywhere All At Once has indeed been giving Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (which cost eight times as much) a run for its money, both financially and artistically. Punching way above its weight, this inventive indie pic boasts spectacular ambitions that belie its limited budget. Yet for all its madcap invention and frenzied…

William Brewer, 33, is the author of I Know Your Kind (2017), a collection of poems about poverty and drug addiction in West Virginia, where he was born and grew up. Selected for the prestigious National Poetry Series in the US, and cited as an inspiration by Ocean Vuong, he has been described by New York magazine as “America’s poet laureate of the opioid crisis”. Psychiatry, debt and quantum gravity are among the themes of his first novel, The Red Arrow, narrated by a troubled ghostwriter urgently in search of a vanished…

In recent years, much of the most innovative work in the anglophone short story has come from Ireland, from writers such as Colin Barrett, Wendy Erskine and Nicole Flattery. New debut collections by gifted British authors Saba Sams and Gurnaik Johal have shown the unmistakable influence of their Irish peers. The publication of Reward System by Cambridge-born Jem Calder provides further evidence that the medium is attracting some of the most talented young writers of fiction at work today, on both sides of the Irish…

Sectoral Employment in the U.S., 1939-2015: Deindustrialization is often understood as the relative decline in importance of industrial production compared with other sectors - a development reflected in the changing sectoral employment structure. Credit: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, MPI for the Study of Societies The declining importance of manufacturing in rich societies is associated with deep concerns, but also with…

Appliance by JO Morgan (Vintage, £16.99)The first work of prose fiction by the award-winning poet whose previous book, The Martian’s Regress, revelled in science fictional tropes, this is a collection of thematically linked short stories about the development of a matter transmitter from a cabinet resembling a refrigerator into a vast network of stations transporting not only goods but people all over the world. The approach is almost primitive, focusing on a single idea which is seldom dramatised, only discussed. But the…

The actors who Quentin Tarantino originally wanted for the main roles in Pulp Fiction have been revealed.Tarantino’s crime film is one of the most acclaimed films of the 1990s, but if the director went with his first options, it would have looked very different.John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson star in the film as Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, but according to the rough cast list (originally shared on Twitter by author Don Winslow and others), both actors were second choices for their respective roles.When it came to…