Writing

Excerpts from a previously unpublished sequence of poems named The Year of the Pin-Up Calendar.Februarythere is a white pigeon opened like a book on the...

This month sees the first major UK retrospective of Georgian-Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli’s work, whose work will be on display at the Saatchi Gallery.Born in...

A new exhibition by the Syrian-Armenian artist Kevork Mourad is being staged at The Ismaili Centre, in partnership with the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto,...

 This Sunday, the Art Car Boot Fair Pulls Back In To VauxhallBack to its roots in the heart of South London, this year’s Vauxhall...

Laurane MarchiveAre There More People Alive Than Dead? The phone rings. 5am. It’s your boyfriend. He is in New York so with the time difference,...

Jonathan Franzen likes big books. Each one of his critically acclaimed works are weighty door-stoppers but their tangible size in no way matches the...

The Chameleon is a book narrated by the soul of a book, which can shape shift between any book that it pleases. Stretching across a time frame that goes from the Black Death of the 13th century to the aftermath of the Cold War in the late twentieth century, it is one of the most unusual love stories that you are likely to read.

Set in Ireland in 1858, seven years after the potato famine, The Wonder tells the story of an English nurse who is hired to spend two weeks observing an eleven-year old girl, who, her parents claim, has not eaten for months. Based on the almost fifty cases of ‘fasting girls’ - of women who claimed to be surviving without food for months on end in Europe and North America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries - Donoghue’s novel anticipates the invention of anorexia [...]

I’m wondering what you think of London’s cultural significance in 2013.If you make this interview just about London, it will be like a love...

The art world is awash with self-taught painters these days, but the emergence of artist hana (styled in lower case) has taken many by surprise, not only because of her talent but because she has re-invented oil paint. Her paint is made from coconut shells, algae, seaweed, dried fruits and vegetables. All this has caught the eye of Noel Fielding, among others, who is endorsing her ground-breaking innovations. This week sees the opening of her first solo show [...]

If for some reason you ever find yourself playing 'Tube Bingo' there a few things that you are guaranteed to be able to cross...

"When she finds a worm buried in the heart of a plum, an apple, she looks at it, shows it, then eats it. She...

Fifty years ago in March 1969, a rather odd book of verse hit Britain’s bookshelves. Its jacket contained no description of what lay inside...

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her . . . This line from Bluebeard’s narrator remarks on another kind of humor, the black humor Vonnegut is best known for. Its source is helplessness and despair. He explains: Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do [...]

Scotland herself is the main character in this blood-soaked reimagining of Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. So enamoured is director Justin Kurzel of his Highland landscape...

A new exhibition at Saatchi Gallery sees a major survey by the acclaimed British artist Johnnie Cooper. Spanning two galleries, throe on throe comprises over 50...

Andrés Barba’s ghostly novella Such Small Hands met with resounding critical success in its native Spain, as well as in the UK and US with English translations by Lisa Dillman, in 2017. Darkly compelling, it was lauded for its unsettling plot and baroque descriptions, blending conventions from Greek tragedy and Gothic literature [...]

Hag is an anthology of stories responding to classic folk tales from the British Isles, penned by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today. Originally conceived as an Audible podcast, the book version from Virago Press also has two new stories as well as copies of the original tales on which they are based. Daisy Johnson starts Hag off with a story that poses the question at the heart of any retelling: Is it mine to tell? [...]

Lee Krasner’s work was central in the proliferation of abstract expressionism in the United States. A new show at the Barbican, Lee Krasner: Living...

 ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ Said Nietzsche, so instead of looking to religion for comfort we laugh at...

To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth Shakespeare has commissioned a series of novels from high-profile authors. The series was inaugurated by...

Circa, written by Tom Ratcliffe and directed by Andy Twyman is meant to be a story about modern gay life. I say meant to,...

'The discomfort of boredom is never something human beings have liked, but reality and nature and the lack of technology, and the rudimentary qualities of technology, pushed back on us. The friction that we want to eradicate is defined by boredom and old age and sickness and death, and we need these things to be human, and we need these things to have interesting, vital arts and letters as well.'

A grungy rock musical about the Brontës and their challenging lives, battling against addiction, disease and poverty, promises to be an exhilarating take on this famous family. Bleak, poverty-stricken Yorkshire becomes a stark, wooden platform that stages a series of powerful rock ballads. With music by Christopher Ash and book and lyrics by Carl Miller, Wasted’s undeniably talented cast have the potential to create something really exciting, but sadly, the production’s [...]