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The word I’ve most seen associated with Ali Smith’s Costa-award winning novel is ‘dazzling’, and it’s the word I’ve reached for most, each time more aware of how telling it ...
Feature Film: Frances Ha
Blending humour, melancholy and sharp insight into complex relationships, Noam Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s collaboration is a wonderfully uplifting tale that is as beautifully shot as it is acted.
Feature Film: I’m So Excited!
Pedro Almodovar’s latest offering, his “most political film yet”, is a gaudy, farcical satire on modern Spain — but does it sound much cleverer than it actually is? Bella Whittington ...
Novel: Filght Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver
Global warming. Now, there’s a phrase that can divide opinion, stir up controversy and shine a spotlight on apathy It’s nearly impossible to discuss without resorting to well-trodden rhetorical ground ...
Feature Film: Cloud Atlas
It was never going to be easy. A critically acclaimed novel with a complex Russian doll structure that links characters as far ranging as a nineteenth-century abolitionist and a futuristic ...
New Voices: Gavin Extence on his debut novel The Universe Versus Alex Woods
I’m a big fan of teenage narrators – I like what you can do in terms of exploring the large, adult ideas that most of us start to think about ...
The Universe vs. Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
Meet Alex Woods. He’s seventeen years old and sitting at the wheel of Mr Peterson’s car at Dover after a hasty round trip to Zurich. A customs controller has just ...
‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’ by Taiye Selasi
The title of Taiye Selasi’s debut short story is as blunt as it is ironic, proclaiming bold content while quietly mocking Western anthropological theses of old. I first came upon ...
The Architecture of Stories
It’s hard to escape the fact that by opening a book, we are accepting a beginning; and by reading its final words, we are acknowledging an end. Is it ever ...
Novel: Spilt Milk by Chico Buarque
It’s not often I get to the end of a novel and realise I need to reread it straight away. Not just because I liked it—I did—but because I realised ...
Short Stories: Reality, Reality by Jackie Kay
Sometimes, it is the echo of something larger that is at the heart of a Jackie Kay short story: a distillation of sorts, whereby a brief, intense image or feeling ...
Carlos Gamerro on his novel, The Islands, and writing alternative pasts.
A large metropolis like London or Buenos Aires cannot really be known by any of its inhabitants, unless he is forced to visit slum and palace alike in search of ...
Who is the Modern Writer?
So you want to be a writer? Picturing long, quiet days tapping away at a keyboard and sipping endless cups of tea? The odd walk in the park to clear ...
Novel: The Islands by Carlos Gamerro
It is 1992 in Buenos Aires and Felipe Félix, a hacker and coke addict, is invited into the topmost room of a business tycoon’s twin tower. It is a room ...
Novel: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
This novel is a stylish, audacious and self-assured debut that mercilessly exposes the artistic ego and, in doing so, both ridicules and humanises it. Its wandering and plotless prose might ...