What We're Reading - Lockdown Bank Holiday Edition

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 ]

Other news stories related to: "What We're Reading - Lockdown Bank Holiday Edition"


Banks' first novel in a decade to No Exit Press

No Exit Press will publish Russell Banks’ new novel Foregone as a lead fiction title in June 2021. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-13 01:47:40 UTC ]
More news stories like this


FX Taps Chefs to Redefine the American Pie for Fargo Season 4

When Season 4 of FX's Fargo was slated to premiere in April, the network planned to promote the anthology crime series with a pop-up pie shop in Los Angeles. The Covid-19 pandemic not only postponed production and the premiere date, but FX's initial experiential plans as well. While Fargo... Continue reading at AdWeek

[ AdWeek | 2020-10-09 14:07:55 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Loud Black Girls panel to feature at first Streatham Literature Festival

The inaugural Streatham Arts Festival is to be headlined by a panel event, featuring contributors to 2020 anthology Slay in Your Lane Presents: Loud Black Girls in conversation with Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené.  Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-06 17:13:34 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Festival Five with NSK Juror Janet Wong, by The Editors of WLT

Interviews   Janet Wong is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former lawyer who switched careers to become a children’s author. Her dramatic career change has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN’s Paula Zahn Show, and Radical Sabbatical. She... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-05 14:35:32 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Ethan Hawke's new novel on art, love and fame to William Heinemann

William Heinemann is publishing the first novel in almost 20 years from actor, writer and director Ethan Hawke: A Bright Ray of Darkness. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-05 04:15:41 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Are Frats and Sororities Really Just Cults?

What lengths will we go to in order to belong? To be part of something exclusive? To be part of a sisterhood or brotherhood? That’s the searing question that authors Benjamin Nugent and Genevieve Sly Crane try to answer in their books about college Greek life. Nugent’s Fraternity, a collection... Continue reading at Electric Literature

[ Electric Literature | 2020-10-02 11:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Scribner scoops 'Covid-Age' Decameron

Scribner is to publish The Decameron Project, an anthology of 29 stories about a modern plague, written by authors including Margaret Atwood, Andrew O’Hagan, Colm Tóibín, Kamila Shamsie, Rachel Kushner and David Mitchell.  Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-02 08:28:47 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Here’s the shortlist for the Center for Fiction’s 2020 First Novel Prize.

Today the Center for Fiction announced the shortlist for its 2020 First Novel Prize. The prize, first awarded in 2006, recognizes the best debut fiction of the year, and it comes with $15,000; each finalist receives $1,000. Previous winners include De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Tommy Orange, and... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-10-01 15:05:06 UTC ]
More news stories like this


The LARB Banned Books Reader

IN HONOR of Banned Books Week, LARB’s editors have compiled a brief anthology of essays on works of literature that were — and, in some cases, still are — officially unavailable to large groups of readers around the world, as well as interviews with authors who have faced censorship. In this... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-27 12:30:06 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Chris Rock on Joining Fargo and Avoiding ‘the Eddie Murphy Handbook’ for Black Comics

For Chris Rock, who has spent his career trying to avoid what he calls "the Eddie Murphy handbook" that Hollywood has for breakout Black comedians, Fargo was the perfect opportunity. Season 4 of FX's anthology crime series, inspired by the 1996 film, is set in 1950 Kansas City, where the head of... Continue reading at AdWeek

[ AdWeek | 2020-09-24 12:00:46 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Mueller revisionism, and the culpability of the press

Under a presidency that, perhaps more than any in recent memory, tends to be rendered in starkly moralistic terms, there is perhaps no better case study of the rise-and-fall character arc than Robert Mueller. Where the right always hated Mueller’s probe into Trump, Russia, and the 2016 campaign,... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review

[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-09-23 12:32:09 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Native American poetry anthology vibrates with powerful voices

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor

[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2020-09-16 19:52:14 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Native American poetry anthology vibrates with powerful voices

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor

[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2020-09-16 19:52:14 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Native American poetry anthology vibrates with powerful voices

U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo serves as lead editor of this new collection, which showcases a range of poems as vast as the continent. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor

[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2020-09-16 19:52:14 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Sigrid Nunez’s ‘What Are You Going Through’ is an ambitious novel about the meaning of life and death

Nunez’s first novel since winning the National Book Award follows a woman and her terminally ill friend. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2020-09-16 16:32:08 UTC ]
More news stories like this


The Beatles announce Get Back, first official book in 20 years

Hanif Kureishi writes introduction to book edited from 120 hours of conversations from the Let It Be sessions, in tandem with Peter Jackson documentaryThe first official Beatles book since seminal Anthology in 2000 is to be published in August 2021.The Beatles: Get Back will tell the story of... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2020-09-16 13:00:23 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Bloomsbury wins auction for Lockwood's 'miraculous' debut novel

Bloomsbury is to publish Patricia Lockwood's first novel No One Is Talking About This, after winning a 10-way auction.  Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-09-16 02:57:52 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Most diverse Booker prize shortlist ever is also almost all American

With no room for Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debutsHilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.With four... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2020-09-15 12:21:07 UTC ]
More news stories like this


The Booker Prize announcement

Even for a prize that thrives on controversy, the omission of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light from the Booker shortlist today is a big shock. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-09-15 07:24:12 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Susanna Clarke’s First Novel in 16 Years Is a Wonder

The new book from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell takes place in one house, but in it, she finds infinite space. Continue reading at Slate

[ Slate | 2020-09-10 18:15:39 UTC ]
More news stories like this