Whether delving into chunky historical narratives or listening to short story podcasts, we’ve all been approaching reading differently during lockdown. Our reading habits can take us back in time, allow us to examine our present, or give us hope for the future. In time for the May bank holiday weekend, the Literature team shares what they’ve been reading lately. You People by Nikita LalwaniNikita Lalwani's You People follows Nia, a 19-year-old British-Indian girl, and Shan, a Tamil refugee, who work at a London pizzeria and are both in thrall – in different ways – to the restaurant's enigmatic manager Tuli. Initially, Nia and Shan don't have much in common, and their differing views of Tuli reflect this. Nia wants to escape her troubled family, while Shan longs to bring his wife and child to the UK; Nia, having been sent down from Oxford, wants to escape the bonds of the establishment, while Shan longs for Britain's elite to grant him indefinite leave to remain. To Nia, Tuli is mercurial and charming, glimpsed offering deals and generous loans; from Shan's perspective, he's to be courted and obeyed, able to use his influence and wealth to bring Shan's family to safety.Things change when Nia voluntarily enters a world that Shan can’t escape, and You People uses a gripping, thriller-like structure to reflect this. But even as the jaws of the trap close around them, and the protagonists rely on quick thinking and deduction to survive, the novel creates a larger tension from... Continue reading at 'British Council global'
[ British Council global | 2020-05-07 13:58:54 UTC ]
‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories written by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Subtitled ‘A Parable’, the story originally appeared in a gift book titled The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1836, before being collected in Hawthorne’s... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2021-02-27 15:00:46 UTC ]
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The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in NovemberThe magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-26 15:00:18 UTC ]
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I also love the way that surreality and exaggeration can work in short stories in ways that they don’t often in novels. The wilder the conceit, the harder it is to sustain, like it’s rocket fuel. The post Resisting the Easy Impulse: Te-Ping Chen in Conversation with Brenda Peynado appeared first... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2021-02-26 10:59:07 UTC ]
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Charles Dickens (1812-70) is best-known for his fifteen novels and for shorter books like A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens’s was a restless talent, and during his publishing career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he also wrote countless articles, essays, and short stories. Although... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2021-02-25 15:00:13 UTC ]
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Harper Design is to release The Collected Works of Jim Morrison, a 600-page anthology of his writings, nearly half of which have never been published before. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 19:28:03 UTC ]
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Faber is to publish Lucy Caldwell's first novel in nearly a decade, These Days. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 01:30:10 UTC ]
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What stands out in Ernest Hemingway’s short stories is their humanity, their feeling for human fragility. Continue reading at New Yorker
[ New Yorker | 2021-02-20 11:00:00 UTC ]
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READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
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The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-16 15:21:36 UTC ]
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21 Black Futures, a new stage anthology by CBC and Toronto's Obisidan Theatre Company, brings together 63 Black artists from across the country to answer the question "What is the future of Blackness?" Its creation also directly addresses, and... Continue reading at CBC
[ CBC | 2021-02-16 09:00:00 UTC ]
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It is hard to talk about sex and literature without making some sort of Fifty Shades of Grey reference. But where Fifty Shades shows a caricature of S&M, the new anthology Kink is a celebration of the range of human desires. From the power of control and the titillation of voyeurism, this... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-02-12 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Marlon James and Téa Obreht are among the authors penning erotic tales for Anonymous Sex, an anthology pre-empted by The Borough Press where the author of each story is kept a secret. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-12 03:48:22 UTC ]
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In short stories like “The Immortals” and novels like “The Listeners,” Mr. Gunn helped prepare readers for the future. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-02-11 17:10:44 UTC ]
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Macmillan Children’s Books has landed a new poetry anthology from bestselling curator and writer Allie Esiri. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-11 11:42:50 UTC ]
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On October 5, this timeline will be blessed/cursed by Jonathan Franzen’s first novel since 2015: Crossroads, or, if you’re not abbreviating, Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1. It’s the first novel of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, which, yes, nods to the doomed... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-10 17:59:29 UTC ]
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HarperNorth has snared its first fiction acquisition, a gritty gangland thriller by Karen Woods. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-08 01:06:27 UTC ]
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There’s so much contemporary fiction released every day, it’s hard to keep track—and it’s hard to know which works will still be remembered in a year and which will slip into obscurity. Luckily, we have George Saunders to guide us. In an interview with Los Angeles Review of Books, Saunders was... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-05 16:37:34 UTC ]
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At the Southern Review of Books, Justin Evans reflects on Breece D’J Pancake‘s celebrated collection of short stories from 1984, published five years after his death. “The stories of Breece D’J Pancake, by their own merit, are remarkably tied to the rural home of their author,” Evans writes.... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2021-01-29 21:30:19 UTC ]
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Exploring the diversity of The Atlantic’s original fiction: Your weekly guide to the best in books Continue reading at The Atlantic
[ The Atlantic | 2021-01-29 15:30:00 UTC ]
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THEATER SYMPTOMS: Plays and Writings on Drama is the mother lode for Robert Musil aficionados, a vital piece of the author’s canon. Containing the major play The Utopians, other dramatic material and fragments, and Musil’s theater criticism, much of it translated into English for the first time,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-28 18:00:17 UTC ]
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