Books

Books

Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.

Charles Dickens's novels are often criticised for their idealised passive female characters, but as the Dickens Museum now shows, he was, in life and in death, surrounded by formidable, intelligent and independent women. A new exhibition at the museum shifts attention away from Dickens as a solitary genius and instead places women at the centre of his creative world and cultural afterlife.

Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisele Pelicot's own family namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;

There's a particular energy to novels written from the point of view of small children. Humour, of course, in the things the child misinterprets; pathos in the things they feel they must keep hidden; jeopardy in the dangers we can see, and they cannot. As any relative or babysitter can attest, even the sweetest child can become mind-numbingly dull when they're all the company one has, so there's a skill to charm without boring.

A mentor once told me that, when writing a research statement for a professorship, I had to start with the most ambitious pitch I could imagine - and then go ten times bigger. It's tricky enough to do this as a cosmologist, given that the topic of study is the entire Universe. But there is a quest that is more ambitious still: to find out 'what are we doing here?'

Tropes, as these bullet-point ideas have come to be known, have taken over romance. Those who write, market and read romantic fiction use them to pinpoint exactly what to expect before the first page is turned. On Instagram, Amazon and bookshop posters you'll find covers annotated with arrows and faux-handwritten labels reading slow-burn or home-town boy/new girl in town. Turn over any romance title and they'll be there listed in the blurb.

From Do Ho Suh's ethereal architecture to Kimsooja's irridescent mirrors to Lauren Halsey's fringed tapestry, a new book from Monacelli celebrates a broad spectrum of light and color. Rainbow Dreams features more than 200 installations, sculptures, paintings, photographs, and more that revel in the possibilities of pigment. Bound in a smooth gradient that extends to the pages' edges, this vivid survey is a celebratory, playful object in itself.

Kimmerer proposes kindness as an act of resistance. We need to equip ourselves with a new language, she explains, something that affirms that this is what it means to be human. In a world where kindness breeds distrust or is scorned, kindness, she affirms, is becoming a militant gesture. When you're kind to someone, it's not universally expected that they'll respond with kindness, but if that seed is planted, both people feel better,

And by "Who-dom," I don't mean the Seussian variety but the taxonomy coined by 's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: the vast, sub-stratospheric tier of celebrity occupied by figures whose fame is intensely meaningful to some and virtually nonexistent to everyone else. Whos are defined in opposition to Thems, the indisputable celebrities known to most except those living under a rock or who willingly reject the very notion of pop culture,

Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.

A few years ago, sometime during the harrowing year of 2020 that would change everything, author Herve Le Tellier discovered that someone had written a name on the outer wall of his new house in the village of La Paillette, in southern France. When he later found that the same name appeared on the monument to the town's sons who died for the homeland, Le Tellier realized he had a story in his hands and that he wanted nothing more than to tell it.

I don't read that much these days. I am lucky now if I read one novel a month. I am ashamed to admit that my current book has been open for six weeks. This isn't me. I am a lifelong devoted reader: the kid who hauled home a bicycle basket full of books from the public library every Saturday, and the teenager who found solace in reading myself into other lives.

She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.

Need a French poem to impress your date or S.O.? Love is in the air and here at Frenchly, we've got you covered. The French language has long been considered the language of romance, and French poetry is a beautiful way to say "je t'aime" to your love. Here are seven French love poems that will sweep anyone off their feet. We've included the original French version of each poem, along with their English translation.

The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.

Clara Hsu, a renowned Hong Kong-born poet and executive director of the Clarion Performing Arts Center, began teaching the course in 2019 to residents of the Bethany Center, an affordable senior housing community in the Mission District. To some, the layered meanings found in these poems may seem obscure. Yet for the elders, all of whom are women, they are absorbing. "I don't get many chances to learn new things these days," said one 91-year-old, by way of explanation.

In 2022, Jennette McCurdy released her memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died, a brutally honest portrait of her life as a former child star, her battle with eating disorders, and, as the title would suggest, her rather complicated relationship with her mother.

Pierce launches us into this notion via a chaotic text conversation between the story's anxious antihero Tom Williamson and another senior partner at the equity firm where he works. "Your autocorrect keeps typing 'dead bodies,'" Tom writes, incredulously. But it isn't a typo. The service's slimy founder Auden White is pitching Tom's boss for investment. Wearing a black t-shirt and charcoal washed jeans, Auden spouts empty platitudes, like "spending time alone with a person who's dead is a profound emotional event."

A great demolition is also an act of creation, so long as its execution is bold and impressive enough, so long as it clears out the dead wood and opens up the terrain. It's the ethos that links Pablo Picasso to 1970s punk, Shiva the Destroyer to the anarchist hero of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Rip it up and start again. Or rip it up for the pure thrill of the ripping.

Yes, because I grew up under Mao's rule and fear was ingrained in our hearts. Today I try to overcome it, not feel it and move on with my life, but it's still there.

Near the beginning of " The Way We Live Now," Anthony Trollope's searing satire of high-society London in the eighteen-seventies, Madame Melmotte, the wife of Augustus Melmotte, a crooked parvenu financier who has burst onto the British social scene, hosts a ball at the couple's mansion in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair. Despite Melmotte's checkered past, many members of the London élite accept his invitation to the party, including many aristocrats, a newspaper editor, and Prince George, a member of the British Royal Family.

Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.

MacKenzie Scott helped build one of the most recognizable companies in modern history-all while writing her first novel. As Amazon scaled from a fledging startup to a global force, Scott was simultaneously cultivating a literary life. Long before Amazon, Scott launched her literary career. While studying creative writing at Princeton University, Scott landed herself a highly coveted spot as one of Toni Morrison's advisees, a relationship that would shape her literary pursuits.

On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. "No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety," she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, "No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self."

Remember that Friday night when your friends were heading to the crowded bar downtown, and you chose to stay home with your crossword puzzle instead? I've been there. Actually, I'm there most weekends. While everyone else was posting stories from packed restaurants and noisy clubs, I was curled up with a book about behavioral economics, completely absorbed and perfectly content.

It is the summer of 2019, and Sophie Evans, the reckless protagonist of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's unsettling second novel, has arrived on an idyllic island in the Cyclades with her university friends Helena, Iris and Alessia to celebrate Helena's forthcoming marriage. Helena doesn't want it called her hen Like we're dumpy little featherbrains going cluck, cluck, cluck, but all the same, the men including Sophie's curator boyfriend of six years, Greg will not arrive for another five days.

Each week we cut through the noise to bring you smart, practical recommendations on how to live better from what is worth buying to the tools, habits and ideas that actually last. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. When it comes to Valentine's Day, I'm nostalgic for candy hearts and childhood crushes.

For many Canadians, Scholastic brings about an instant wave of nostalgia. Memories come flooding back of flipping through colourful catalogues, circling must-have books, and browsing tables stacked with trinkets from scented erasers to posters and pencils set up in school auditoriums during book fair week. For generations of elementary school students, Scholastic brought excitement and joy and for many kids today, even in an age dominated by screens, that magic hasn't faded, say educators.