The 1952 work by the Streetcar Named Desire playwright was found in Yale University’s archivesAs soon as he crossed the border into Italy, Tennessee Williams found his health was “magically restored”. “There was the sun and there were the smiling Itali…
Floppy mohicans and pre-race cider: Gary Devine, the punk fell runner
The Leeds punk rocker lived a double life, interspersing band rehearsals and punk gigs with twice-daily runs, despite the occasional arrest and moshpit injury. A new book tells his storyWhen Gary Devine was picked to run for England, the manager took o…
Top 10 books about lies and liars | Aja Raden
The untruths we believe in all to easily drive books by authors from Shakespeare to F Scott Fitzgerald and Neil GaimanWhy do you believe what you believe? Do you know? Do you wonder? We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered …
Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan review – a delightfully readable A to Z
Can a good index be compiled by computer software, or is there an art to this overlooked endeavour?It may be a sign of the joylessness of contemporary academia, or simply of inattentiveness to detail, but I have never paid much attention to the indexes…
With sales momentum, Bookshop.org looks to future in its fight with Amazon
If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be a very busy angel investor. With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati […]
So Sally Rooney’s racist? Only if you choose to confuse fiction with fact | Nick Cohen
The author is the latest to suffer an attempted ‘cancelling’, one born of malice and stupiditySocial media did not create informers and liars. The malicious have always manufactured denunciations and the literal-minded have always confused nuance with …
Lauren Groff: ‘I often get very lonely because my job is very lonely’
The author of Fates and Furies on being endorsed by Barack Obama, the climate crisis and discovering medieval humour for a new novel about 12th-century poet Marie de FranceLauren Groff, 43, grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a place she fictionalised as…
Rita Keegan: the return of black British art’s forgotten pioneer
She was a crucial part of a cultural movement in the 1980s. Now a first solo exhibition in 15 years will allow her work to shineFrom the 1980s to the early 2000s, artist and archivist Rita Keegan fervently collected and preserved newsletters, leaflets,…
Malorie Blackman: ‘Hope is the spark’
Malorie Blackman, the former children’s laureate, talks to Sian Cain about finishing her Noughts & Crosses series after 20 years, being namechecked by Stormzy and what inspired her to keep going through years of rejectionMalorie Blackman is used to…
On the Cusp: Days of ’62 by David Kynaston review – dizzyingly varied
Kynaston’s impressive history of Britain comes to the year 1962, when Harold Macmillan pulled out the long knives and the Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’In Whitehall, prime minister Harold Macmillan unexpectedly sacked a third of his cabinet; in a North …