novels

I mean it as a compliment when I say that Sammy Harkham’s Blood of the Virgin is a very nerdy kind of comic; if you’re a fan of cartoonists such as Joe Matt or Seth, and their intense feeling for lonely, hapless men, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. Like some of their work, superficially it’s a nostalgic beast, one set mostly in the Los Angeles film industry. It’s 1971, the year of Dirty Harry, Diamonds Are Forever and The French Connection, though you’d never know it: in Harkham’s universe, the Hollywood sign is far,…

Calling all aspiring cartoonists and graphic novelists: it’s time to get behind your drawing boards once again as we open entries for the Faber/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize, now in its 16th year. As ever, the winner will receive a cheque for £1,000 and their work will appear in the Observer New Review in print and online (the award for the runner-up is £250 and their story will also be published online). But even better, whoever takes home the prize will know that their work was read and loved by our two…

Dear Reader, PREMIUM Black River by Nilanjana S. Roy(Courtesy: The Author) My daughter is ill. Her roommate phones me on Saturday to say her temperature has touched 104 degrees. Don’t worry, we’ve sponged her and given her paracetamol, her fever’s already coming down, she says. I toss a few clothes and books into a bag and take a taxi to Mumbai airport. All through the flight, sandwiched in seat 5B, I read A Suspension of Mercy. A Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith I’m in a two storeyed cottage on…

Say the words “alien invasion” and the stories most people think of are those told in movies like Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), in which the battle lines between good and evil are cleanly divided. HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds. Half a century later, John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) envisaged the melting of the ice caps not as the by-product of human negligence but as the result of a hostile intervention by alien…

As the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is gaining ground, AI-powered chatbots are becoming more efficient. One such example is Claude, a chatbot by Anthropic, an AI startup backed by Google. The startup, which was founded by former engineers of OpenAI, claimed that their chatbot can now read around 75,000 words in seconds. In an announcement about the increased capability of Claude, Anthropic claimed that they have raised the context window from 9K to 100K tokens, which corresponds to around…

What surprised me most when I became a mother was how unfeasibly demanding the job was. This work was 24/7, three six five, and nobody even acknowledged that it was work, nor that mothers were doing it, that they were doing all of it, all of the time. You’re welcome, human race.How had I not seen this coming? Why hadn’t I read about it? Granted, there was a big baby-shaped hole in my reading life, but still. There are mothers in literary fiction, yes, but they are generally assessed as good mothers or bad ones. Where are…

It may be easy to forget, but Matt Groening’s Disenchantment still exists as one of Netflix’s big adult animated series. While not as big a hit as The Simpsons or Futurama, it seems to have found its own niche over the years and managed to survive Netflix’s multiple cancellation sprees to compete its 40-episode order. And like those two shows (and other hit Netflix series like Stranger Things and Voltron: Legendary Defender), it sounds like it’s starting to grow beyond TV and into the realm of comics.Misha Collins on What…

Three debut novels will compete against books by two former winners for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, on a shortlist described as “ambitious and hard-hitting” by the chair of judges Louise Minchin.Quick GuideThe Women's prize for fiction 2023 shortlistShowThank you for your feedback.The first-time novelists shortlisted for the prize are Jacqueline Crooks for Fire Rush, Louise Kennedy for Trespasses and Priscilla Morris for Black Butterflies.They are joined by Barbara Kingsolver, who won the prize in 2010 for The…

The three main characters in Work-Life Balance, Aisha Franz’s mordantly funny new graphic novel, are connected by one woman: a therapist called Dr Sharifi, whose eyes, in time-long comic book fashion, can never be seen behind her round, outsize spectacles. Dr Sharifi dresses a bit like the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (AKA the princess of polka dots), and wears her black hair in an outre top-knot, both of which suggest from the off that she might be more interested in the pose than in really listening to anyone’s problems…

Hilary Mantel, the celebrated author of the Wolf Hall trilogy, was working on a “mashup” of Jane Austen novels when she died suddenly, her literary agent told a packed memorial service at Southwark cathedral on Thursday.“She was having the greatest fun dissecting a literary icon,” said Bill Hamilton before a “fragment” of the unfinished novel, Provocation, was read by the actor Aurora Dawson-Hunte.Mantel was working on the book when she had a stroke at her home in Devon last September. The double Booker prize winner was…