Literary fiction Fiction Audition Katie Kitamura The opening pages of Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel establish a nervy, fraught physicality. The narrator is meeting a man at a restaurant. She is anxious, hyper-vigilant. Waiting at the table is a young man, Xavier, self-assured and faintly discomfiting. The meeting is edgy and awkward, rendered in a tapestry…
Dystopian sci-fi adventure Pragmata starts like an ‘80s horror movie. You find yourself in control of astro-engineer Hugh as he cautiously makes his way through an eerily quiet lunar research station called The Cradle, trying to uncover why the base’s communications with Earth have been shut off. Just as the rest of his team realise…
If you like grand designs, you should see the Cosmic House. Beginning in 1978, the postmodernist theorist Charles Jencks and garden designer Maggie Keswick transformed their family home into a vision of the cosmic order at the scale of a Victorian townhouse. A “solar stair” with 52 steps, to give you a flavour, spirals from…
By Emma De Ruiter & Yulia Schneider Published on 22/04/2026 – 17:07 GMT+2 Russian publishing house Eksmo has confirmed that its CEO Yevgeny Kapiev and three other employees are being questioned as part of a “criminal case on extremism” over the publication of books “dealing with LGBT themes.” ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT In a statement, Eksmo said the probe was…
National Library Week is a moment to pause and reflect on what libraries truly are and what they make possible. They are, of course, places of books. But they are also places of access, of memory, of connection, and of discovery. They bridge books, media, community, and culture. They are where people come to connect,…
Andrew Hacker, a scholar of political science who wrote a host of provocative books on education, race relations and what he called a growing chasm between women and men, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 96. His wife, Claudia Dreifus, said the cause was complications of stomach cancer. To say that…
Acclaimed US novelists Susan Choi and Lily King are among the writers shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, in a lineup dominated by debut authors and independent publishers. The six titles contending for the £30,000 award range from a US campus love story to a coming of age tale set in 1960s Bradford,…
When Howie Pyro, the bassist and co-founding member of D Generation died in 2022, it shook his former D Gen bandmate Jesse Malin to the core. Last week, the New York songwriter released a tribute song to Pyro, “Hollywood Forever,” with a B-side of the Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail.” Malin takes the Pyro homage a…
Dave Mason, the English singer, songwriter and guitarist who wrote mainstays of the classic-rock canon like “Feelin’ Alright?” and “Only You Know and I Know,” and who was a founding member of the seminal band Traffic before starting a successful solo career, died on Sunday at his home in Gardnerville, Nev. He was 79. His…
Kenneth Tynan’s widow Kathleen, in her introduction to his letters, states, Writers hate to write, almost all of them. She goes on to describe, in loving remembrance, her husband, blocked as a writer, turning to his journals, where he might deliver himself of a self-punishing complaint about his own indolent and hateful character. Writers do…
