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The author on the allure of Truman Capote, rereading Susan Hill and having her life changed by Kafka The book I am currently reading I’m not usually a slow reader but I have been savouring each luxurious line of Swan Son g, Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s novel about Truman Capote, set in the 1970s . It’s long, but I am fully immersed in the glamour of his society. The book that changed my life Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis troubled me at first because it broke all the rules. There was no explanation, no sympathy only absurdity and suffering. This is the book that made me realise I could write through a distorted lens and still convey truth. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Si4eqU

Parisian sewers, old gold mines and the Mole Man of Hackney in a thrilling celebration of the subterranean When I was a child, around the corner from my home in east London lived a man named William Lyttle. For decades Lyttle had been digging a series of tunnels underneath his house. His activities had made him something of a local celebrity, nicknamed “the Mole Man of Hackney”, but when one of his tunnels collapsed, causing a huge crater to form in the street outside his house, the council evicted him and filled in his excavations with concrete. He lived out the last few years of his life far above the ground in a high-rise block. The Mole Man of Hackney, Will Hunt argues in his winningly obsessive history of our relationship with underground places, might best be understood as an evolutionary throwback. As a species, he says, humankind has always been fascinated with what lies beneath the surface of the world. This obsession had practical origins – we descended underground to mine ...

The Nobel prize winner on how she would rewrite Beloved, and who gets to decide what’s in the canon “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity,” says Toni Morrison in “Peril”, the brief, remarkable introduction to her newest book. In this collection by the Nobel prize winning author – widely, ardently considered to be one of the world’s best writers – there are 40 years of her essays, speeches and meditations, including her thoughts and arguments about politics, art and writing. The book contains exhortations and transcribed question-and-answer sessions, reflections and analyses, exegeses and commencement talks. In other words, it’s a large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah. Organised into three parts titled “The Foreigner’s Home”, “Black Matter(s)”, and “God’s Language”, each section begins with a moving address to the dead: respectively, to those who died on September 11, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin. “The Foreigner’s Home” is centred...

A Parisian book fair’s promotion of Globish may have sparked outrage among critics, but it’s not the first time the French have promoted simplified English French writers were up in arms this week after the Salon du Livre book fair in Paris announced a celebration of young adult books that would feature a “Bookroom”, a “Photobooth”, and even a “Bookquizz”, a prospect so exciting it needs two zs. Such anglicisms, critics wrote, were an “unconscionable act of cultural vandalism”, employing the “sub-English known as Globish”. The literary Parisians see Globish simply as yet more Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DoPN9Y

Revelations that the author of The Woman in the Window lied repeatedly about having cancer have not dissuaded HarperCollins from publishing a followup Dan Mallory’s publisher HarperCollins has said that it intends publish a second novel by him, despite revelations that he had lied about having cancer . Mallory, who wrote the bestselling thriller The Woman in the Window under the pseudonym AJ Finn, admitted in a statement this week in response to an extensive New Yorker investigation that “on numerous occasions in the past, I have stated, implied, or allowed others to believe that I was afflicted with a physical malady instead of a psychological one: cancer, specifically”. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DiwPC5

After discovering most novels of ‘literary value’ are written by dead white men, Emily Maguire asks, who gets to decide? And what’s the criteria? I dropped out of high school early, so when I eventually got to university I was a “mature-age student”. What a ridiculous label. I was 24, and I didn’t feel mature – I felt ancient. After almost a decade working minimum wage jobs with shitty pay and shittier treatment, I felt exhausted beyond words. And as someone who hadn’t picked up a textbook or written an essay for that same amount of time, I felt generations older than my classmates. Out of touch doesn’t begin to cover it. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DYpYiM

A clinical neuropsychologist charts his own disturbing thoughts in this original, provocative study Have you ever embarked on a relationship with someone you instantly found attractive, knowing from the start it would end badly? The same exhilarating but doomed sentiment is evoked on encountering the authorial voice of Let Me Not Be Mad , a debut non-fiction work by clinical neuropsychologist AK Benjamin (not his real name). He is erudite, funny and quite possibly (but not definitely) crazy. That is Benjamin’s own assessment and fear, hence his title. Much of the book takes the form of a handful of neurological case studies, a form now reassuringly familiar thanks to books by writer-medics from Oliver Sacks to Suzanne O’Sullivan . “Michael” is the survivor of a skydiving accident that sliced “two cubed inches” off the front of his brain, as a result of which the “super normal, unimaginative” financier became “a compulsive surrealist”. “Jane” pleads for surgery to remove the offendin...

Popular and prolific novelist best known for The Shell Seekers and Coming Home whose work was particularly admired in Germany In 1988 the 14th novel by a little-known 63-year-old British author was published in New York. The Shell Seekers, the 500-page story of a woman, Penelope Keeling, looking back on her life and loves during the second world war, took the US by storm. The New York Times reviewer wrote: “Rosamunde Pilcher, where have you been all my life?” It sat in the bestseller list for 49 weeks in hardback and then tipped Tom Wolfe off the No 1 spot in paperback. The Shell Seekers was translated into more than 40 languages, selling around 10m copies. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2tcKu9c

When Rutger Bregman and Winnie Byanyima spoke out about taxes at Davos they went viral. They talk with Winners Take All author Anand Giridharadas about why change is coming Rutger : Winnie, why did the comments you and I made about billionaires and taxes at Davos go viral? Why do things seem to be changing right now? Winnie: Why did we go viral? I think we said things that people have wanted to hear, especially on a big stage where powerful politicians and companies are represented. And they are rarely said. People go there and speak in coded words and praise themselves and spin out the stats that suit them, but for once we spoke plainly about the challenges that people face. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2ScZGlo

The British author, who produced numerous bestsellers after her 1987 breakthrough, died after having a stroke Rosamunde Pilcher, author of the sweeping, bestselling family saga The Shell Seekers, has died at the age of 94. Her son, author Robin Pilcher, confirmed the news to the Guardian on Thursday. “She had been in great form up until Christmas, then suffered from bronchitis in the new year, but was always expected to bounce back as before. However, she suffered a stroke on Sunday night and never regained consciousness,” said Robin. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2DZGA9T

The author was commissioned to write about British food for an overseas audience in 1946, but piece was spiked amid anxiety about postwar austerity More than 70 years after the event, the British Council has apologised to George Orwell for commissioning and then rejecting an essay about British food. The author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm was, the body has revealed, commissioned to write British Cookery in 1946, as part of the organisation’s efforts to promote British culture overseas. But a discovery in the British Council’s archives has revealed that after commissioning the essay, it declined to publish it, telling Orwell that it was problematic to write about food in a time of strict rationing. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Dcnify

List also includes Fiona Wright’s The World Was Whole, Jenny Ackland’s Little Gods and Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge “Women’s writing swaggers into the limelight again,” said the judging panel chair, Louise Swinn, in announcing the 12 longlisted books for this year’s Stella prize. This year’s longlist includes Bri Lee’s debut work of non-fiction, Eggshell Skull; literary stalwart and acclaimed novelist Gail Jones’s “novel of ideas”, The Death of Noah Glass; Chloe Hooper’s investigation into Black Saturday, The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire; and Fiona Wright’s most recent collection of essays, The World Was Whole. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2tbluPC

Uncomfortable corners of the male psyche are explored in a tale of a sexual assault accusation, and visions of adultery In the afterword to his four-story collection Different Seasons , Stephen King describes the heart-sinking moment when you realise that what you’ve written is a novella. He compares the form to “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic” where no one in their right mind would want to end up. Fiction between 20,000 and 40,000 words long does seem to be the least appetising prospect of all for publishers. That’s a pity, of course. Give me great bantamweight work any day – think of Heart of Darkness , The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Animal Farm – with its extraordinary power-to-size ratio, rather than the grandiose bloat of an interminable saga. James Lasdun’s new book is actually two novellas, Feathered Glory and Afternoon of a Faun , and the headline act is clearly the second tale. Of the two novellas, Feathered Glory and Afternoon of a Faun , in James Lasdun’s n...

The novelist explains his experimental approach to the noir detective, focusing on characters traditionally forgotten, even in their down time between jobs Alan Trotter has a charmingly evasive attitude to biography: “Was born, grew taller and is yet to die,” he once wrote of himself . His website simply reads: “ Hello. My name is Alan . I write fiction .” In conversation, everything leads back to writing. Wanting to be a writer, he says, predates his memory of anything else. When reading The BFG as a young child, he realised someone must have written it. And that was it. Trotter has worked in publishing, as a copywriter and completed a PhD. But he sums all this up as having “done everything else” but write a book. An early draft of his debut novel, Muscle, was even part of his doctoral dissertation. He’s been working on Muscle for more than 10 years. It won the the Sceptre prize for a novel-in-progress . And this week it is published at last. Continue reading... from Books | Th...

After #Metoo, it’s no surprise a new generation of female authors is exploring sexual abuse and dominance Recently I have found myself wondering about the prevalence of rough sex in new fiction written by women. It’s viscerally present in You Know You Want This , the new short-story collection by Kristen Roupenian (who shot to fame last year with Cat Person , published in the New Yorker): I found some of the scenes so unpalatable that I had to keep putting it down. They (spoiler alert) include a woman strangled to death as part of a sex game; a man who imagines his penis is a knife when he has sex; and a woman who says to the guy she is sleeping with: “I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. After you’ve punched me, when I’ve fallen down, I want you to kick me in the stomach. And then we can have sex.” Related: Cat Person going viral shows how rare it is to explore women’s sex lives | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.l...

An important investor explains how his enthusiasm has turned to shame As the so-called Techlash gains pace and polemics on the downsides of the internet flood the book market, one omission seems to recur time and again. Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest are too often written about as if their arrival in our lives started a new phase of history, rather than as corporations that have prospered thanks to an economic and cultural environment established in the days when platforms were things used by trains. To truly understand the revolutions in politics, culture and human behaviour these giants have accelerated, you need to start not some time in the last 15 or so years, but in the 1980s. Early in that decade, the first arrival of digital technology in everyday life was marked by the brief microcomputer boom, which was followed by the marketing of more powerful personal computers. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were embedding the idea that government should keep its...

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s author was also a campaigning journalist and amassed a huge archive researching the 1986 murder of Olof Palme Unseen research by the late Stieg Larsson into the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme is set to be revealed in a new true crime book. Larsson is most famous for his bestselling Millennium series of thrillers that explored the dark underbelly of Swedish society and politics. A journalist for his much of his life, he died suddenly in 2004, just months after selling his first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He left behind completed manuscripts for the two sequels, which have together sold 80m copies around the world. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2TBDEp1

In tune with calls to study fewer dead white males, university announces new module focused on ‘hyper-contemporary’ International Dylan Thomas prize Swansea University has responded to calls for the English literature curriculum to be “decolonised” by launching a new module focusing on “hyper-contemporary” works of fiction. The module, which will focus on books longlisted each year for the International Dylan Thomas prize for writers under the age of 39, is the UK’s first course based on a contemporary book award. It follows demands from students at universities including Cambridge for courses to be “decolonised”, and more black and ethnic writers to be included in the canon instead of more white, male authors. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2SCz112

The exposure of a novelist’s ‘dissembling’ could spell trouble for unreliable narrators everywhere There’s a new work that has the publishing world gripped, with editors in both London and New York confessing themselves hooked. It races along like a thriller, with several dizzying twists and turns and a compelling central character. What’s more, this sensational story is not fiction but a detailed, well-sourced work of journalism. I’m referring to the New Yorker’s 12,000 word profile of Dan Mallory, whose debut novel, The Woman in the Window , published under the pseudonym AJ Finn, has been a monster hit. The report makes an unsettling read, charting what the magazine calls the “trail of deceptions” left by Mallory , including claims that he has endured and survived cancer in various forms – with tumours in both his brain and spine – that his parents were dead, and that his brother took his own life. Continue reading... from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2BphiA2

This tale of family violence and forgiveness uses elements of farce, caper, whodunnit and political satire, with a few horror tropes thrown in Monica Ludd, a schoolteacher who at 6ft and 17 stone can pack a punch, resorts to disguise at one stage in the novel she narrates, donning a cape and sunglasses in a bid to foil the police. She has come across the battered and blood-soaked body of her despised dentist father and promptly gone on the run. She is the prime suspect, after all, having bought an axe with the intention of finishing off the horrible Albert. But did she do it? Maggie Gee’s new novel is rather more successful at concealing its shape than Monica is. It has elements of ribald farce, criminal caper, whodunnit and political satire, with a few horror tropes thrown in, and at its core is the theme of emotional abuse in childhood. Monica has four living siblings, each as odd as she is, and all have been marked in youth by the bullying, narcissistic dentist whose zest in the s...