Books

Books

Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who writes in Russian and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, lives in the same Berlin apartment, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, where EL PAIS visited her four years ago. The author of Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets continues to write by hand.

At Tithe Hall, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt is busy instructing his servants to prepare for the apocalyptic disaster he believes will be triggered by the imminent passage of Halley's comet. The labyrinthine house is a nest of secrets and grudges, harboured by both staff and family members, who include an irascible and splendidly foul-mouthed maiden aunt, Decima. When Lord Conrad is discovered in his sealed study, killed by a crossbow bolt to the eye, she co-opts a new footman to help her find the culprit.

During the pandemic, I provided counseling for several health care providers. These dedicated medical professionals faced overwhelming stress due to: Patients dying at an increasingly higher rate. Longer hours of work, changing work conditions, and schedule changes. Significant risk of getting sick, and/or dying themselves. Risk of spreading the disease to family members at risk. My clients desperately needed stress-reduction tools to help them through a challenging time.

F rom the jump, I should admit that I have been skeptical of comics journalism. The method is too slow for the 24-hour news cycle, and making comics about complex and evolving issues risks simplifying things that should remain nuanced. However, a new, deeply-considered textbook by former editors at The Nib, Shay Mirk and Eleri Harris, has changed my mind.

M olly Dunn had always wanted to join a book club. Until last winter, the twenty-five-year-old had been too busy or distracted to find the right one. The opportunity to start one struck when she began a new job as a sales associate at BMV, a Toronto bookstore. With her manager's permission, she set a date for the inaugural meeting and posted an announcement to the store's Instagram page. The question was: Would anyone come?

If you're looking for a gift for a Harry Potter fan this holiday, the wonderful Interactive Illustrated Editions are steeply discounted and eligible for Amazon's Buy Two, Get One Free Book Sale ahead of Black Friday 2025. The Interactive Illustrated Edition of the Goblet of Fire, the four book in the series, just released last month and is discounted to $39 (was $50). Like the first three books, this hardcover edition has over 150 full-color illustrations and eight papercraft elements scattered throughout the novel.

"I was very into film and particularly TV at that point," he recalls, "and this was the first made-for-TV movie that public television had ever done. When I saw her on set with all these people deferring to her and making a movie out of one of her books, the pennies began to drop for me. I was like, 'Oh. My mother's important.'"

This isn't just a play for people who have an opinion or strong feeling towards Maggie Thatcher, said Young. It's about class, about lives that collide, people trying to understand, asking questions, coming together and bridging that divide. I also think it's a play about what happens when people feel they don't have a voice, and how dangerous it is when they feel they don't have anything to lose.

In an era when we are all talking about AI, the climate crisis, surveillance and privacy, and how technology shapes our choices, we wanted to reframe data not as something cold or distant, but as something deeply personal: a tool we (as human beings) can wield to understand ourselves and the world better. The book explores what we call Data Humanism, an approach that brings context, nuance, narrative, and imperfection back to the center of how we collect, design, and communicate data.

Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; but it was also-at least for Crowley-over poetry. Crowley envied Yeats' literary skill; Yeats could not say the same about Crowley. But while he did not necessarily respect his enemy, Yeats feared him, as did nearly everyone else. As Yeats' biographer wrote a few months after Crowley's death in 1947, "in the old days men and women lived in terror of his evil eye."

This thought-provoking study by palaeobiologists Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz discusses 'technofossils': the vast remnants of modern civilization. The authors itemize plastic bottles, ballpoint pens, concrete dams, credit cards, aluminium cans, teabags, motorways, mobile phones, T-shirts and computers, among numerous items "produced by our species for our comfort and pleasure and then, sooner or later, discarded". How long these items will last is unknown - but for many, it could be millions of years.

It's the greatest entrance in movie history and he doesn't move a muscle. FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter's reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound.

If you're an overachiever, suddenly you're in seminars with grad students. They would sit there and be like, 'I only know the word in German to describe the feeling I get when I read this chapter,' Then it's some 20-syllable-long word that is so specifically a reference to the feeling and I was like, 'God, I'm out of my league here.'

When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another and those become the stories we're reading. As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights Shahrazad's feat of creativity refuses the present emergency the contrived drama of a powerful man.

The grand marble entrance on Fifth Avenue is a stunner that only hints at the beauty inside. With its stately lions (Patience and Fortitude) guarding the steps, the library looms as a temple of knowledge. Inside, mesmerizing architecture and finishings can be found around every corner, celebrating the art, history and literature within. The NYPL system was founded in 1895, but its main branch opened in 1911 after nearly a decade of construction.

One of the this year's biggest fiction releases is now available in a gorgeous new collectible hardcover edition. Sunrise on the Reaping, the fifth novel in Suzanne Collins' best-selling dystopian series The Hunger Games, received a Collector's Gift Edition on November 4. Now, less than a week later, the Sunrise on the Reaping Collector's Gift Edition is on sale for $24.74 (was $33) at Amazon.

I know a few big words, and sometimes I use them where they make sense. I am a professional writer, after all. It's fun to use a big word in certain spots, and not even for the cheap ego boost. I just like it when there's a specific word that sounds exactly right for the thought I'm trying to convey.

Their twosome ruptures when Tara, who has travelled to Paris for an auction, wakes up on what should be the morning of November 19th to shimmers of déjà vu: the headlines in the newspaper look familiar; at breakfast, the same hotel guest drops the same slice of bread. A horrified Tara soon realizes that she is living in a repeating November 18th, while Thomas and the rest of the world go on without her.

Big themes swirled in thoughtful, even intimate, conversations Saturday at the sold-out Portland Book Festival. Headliner Rebecca Yarros talked about how her work centers on themes of inclusion, representation, and authoritarianism, as well as about what it's been like to ride a huge wave of book sales that has altered the publishing industry in some ways. Nicholas Boggs and Mitchell S. Jackson mused about love and the creative process.

In 2020, a prize-winning English poet and teacher who worked as a writer-in-residence with young refugees published a book about her experiences. Reviews were warm. Sales were strong. It won awards. A year later, Kate Clanchy's book suddenly came on the radar of a small number of other writers, who criticised her for some supp­posedly racist or otherwise belittling depictions of her students.

We were all neighbors in one of the many settlements that had sprouted up in the city, and we had been waiting there for everything to be rebuilt. Or that was what the officials kept telling us-to stay where we were so that they could begin restoring the city. But no one seemed convinced that the city would ever be restored, and this was a big reason people came and went, looking for someplace better.

I always loved spending time at Midtown Scholar. It is one of my favorite bookstores in the world. It's a converted old theater with cozy wooden walls, several floors of books, a stage, a balcony filled with little tables and a coffee shop. Midtown Scholar is also one of poet Kate Baer's favorite bookstores. So on a rainy day last week, we met there to talk.

At the turn of the 20th century, a young Sicilian woman who will soon marry a "rich American" presents two postcards, supposedly from the United States, to a village elder. The first depicts a man holding a wheelbarrow that contains a massive onion, so large that it dwarfs both the wheelbarrow and the man. The second postcard displays a tree that is bursting with coins, as if money is sprouting from the branches.

Viewed through one end of the lens, the two new autobiographies from the sporting legends Boris Becker and Bradley Wiggins might seem like classic tales of the downfalls of two deeply flawed heroes who then claw their way back to redemption. But viewed through the other end of the lens, we see troubling portrayals of an extremely inhumane and, at times, unsafe world of sport where talent is no saving grace, in fact it's more of a liability.

2 In what combat sport are competitors divided into east and west? 3 Which force is based in Aubagne, Bouches-du-Rhone? 4 In hospitals, the Bristol scale is used to classify what? 5 Which English rugby player has been immortalised as a Barbie doll? 6 What begins at Theresienwiese on the first Saturday after 15 September? 7 The River Irwell separates which two cities? 8 Which band played with red flowerpots on their heads?