Interesting Ideas

Forsyth did away with the conventions of thriller-writing and still kept readers enthralled. He reset the whole genre, the author of the Jack Reacher novels writes
• Frederick Forsyth, Day of the Jackal author and former MI6 agent, dies aged 86

I remember two things about the first full week of January 1972. I passed my driving test on the Monday, and on the Friday I made my weekly trip to the library and borrowed The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. I had no idea I would one day be a writer myself – at that point I was merely an insatiable reader – but in retrospect that Friday marked an important way station on the journey from one to the other.

I gobbled up the book and thought it was fantastic – fast, pacy, exciting, suspenseful and laced with detail and intrigue. Then I thought, wait, what? How was this book working? It was a twin-track thriller – an assassin hunts his target while law enforcement hunts the assassin. But the intended victim was Charles de Gaulle, a real person, the president of France, who had been in the news almost daily until his death in 1970, from an aneurysm. Therefore we all knew the assassin had failed. How did that not short-circuit the will-he-won’t-he suspense that thrillers seemed to require?

Safety concerns demand more space and consideration in this otherwise excellent work of popular science

There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the same instant, at 3.25pm on 2 December 1942, when the Manhattan Project’s Enrico Fermi orchestrated the first human-made chain reaction in the squash court of the University of Chicago. “The flame of nuclear fission brought us to the forked road of promise and peril,” writes Tim Gregory.

The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed “atoms for peace”: the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: “It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.”

Whether you’re planning for a vacation, a staycation, or just enjoying the warm days ahead, we’re here to help you map out your summer reading. Splash into the summer spirit with absorbing beach reads, stories that evoke the season, and books for letting your mind relax and unfurl. And don’t worry, unlike in a certain AI-generated summer reading list, these are all real books we chose ourselves that actually exist (or will soon). Plus, these titles have been recently featured or are scheduled to be featured in our digital magazine, so you can peruse our reviews and “beyond the book” articles along with them.

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Tacoma is famous for one thing: its smell. If Seattle is considered a remote backwater in the 1950s—and it is—then Tacoma, poor sister to the south, is even more remote, more philistine, beneath contempt. Tacoma is Seattle’s industrial flunky, the also-ran, the perennial embarrassment. Its setting once bore the rich grandeur of the Northwest, framed […]

According to most sources, the current figure for how many Americans are in a book club is five million. However, this figure hasn't been updated in over 25 years, so a new estimate is long overdue. Before we share our new estimate, let's go over where the old estimate came from, and why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.

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She was Michael Gove’s wife and Samantha Cameron’s best friend. But then Brexit happened

Politics is awful.

If you want the digested read of Sarah Vine’s memoir on life as a Westminster WAG, that’s it: politics, she writes, is a hateful business that ruined her marriage to Michael Gove, her health and happiness. (Don’t ask what the Cameron years did to anyone else: this book is absolutely not about anyone else.) But like many a passionate hatred, this one started out as love.

Queer historical fiction is having a moment. Acclaimed recent novels have imagined queer lives in settings as varied as Puritan New England, antebellum Mississippi, and England during the first World War. For LGBTQ+ readers, the genre’s appeal isn’t hard to understand. Reading queer historical fiction lets us imagine our way into the gaps in the […]

Gwen’s talent vastly outshone her brother’s – but both are treated with subtlety in this outstanding dual biography

A young woman sits reading, a pot of tea to hand, her blue dress almost the only colour in a still, sandy room. Gwen John’s painting The Convalescent shows a subdued yet happy moment, for this woman is free to think and feel. That, we see in Judith Mackrell’s outstanding double biography of Gwen and her brother, was her ideal for living: to be at liberty even if that meant existing in deepest solitude.

The quietness of a life spent largely alone in single rooms, reading, drawing, painting and occasionally having wild sex with the sculptor Rodin, is counterpointed in this epic narrative by the crowded, relentless, almost insanely overstimulated life of Augustus John. Lion of the arts in early 20th-century Britain, he was a bigamist, adulterer, father of so many children you lose track (so did he), and an utterly forgettable painter.

In the first novel from the author of We Move, descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage are connected across continents and centuries

Gurnaik Johal’s first book, 2022’s We Move, demonstrated how rewarding it can be for a gifted young writer to ignore conventional wisdom. Writers who land in agents’ inboxes with collections of stories are invariably told to come back when they have a novel, and to write about what they know. Johal’s stories were set in a world he knows intimately – the immigrant communities of west London – but they moved between professions and generations with thrilling confidence.

Saraswati is also populated by a large cast of diaspora Punjabis. But where Johal’s collection stood apart from the landscape it was published into, his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed “translit”, which didn’t catch on then and certainly won’t now – but its features are all too recognisable. These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed – with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are paleontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians. The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts.

A canny biography of the early career of this strange, brilliant novelist

Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.

She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years (“a hatchet job; full of insults”, she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn’t hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool.

David Means, the author of six story collections (including Assorted Fire Events and Two Nurses, Smoking), has won this year’s PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Since 1998, the award has been given in honor of the late Malamud, the writer behind The Natural and The Fixer. Malamud was a […]

Got your towels and sunscreen ready? How about your summer reading? Here are some books to start the season right: a reflective memoir about relationships and selfhood, a fantasy imagining a world where doors lead to unpredictable fates, an ambitious story of identity in America, and a darkly funny novel set in modern Ukraine. Follow along with upcoming coverage in our digital magazine.

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I had a remarkable freshman student who intuitively understood the modality of totalitarianism, and how it might be represented in literary form. In class she made the offhand comment that in King Lear, frivolous and deadly serious skirmishes follow upon one another without hierarchy or temporal markers. She said that chronological sense has to be […]

A key a protagonist of the psychedelic counterculture, Rosemary Woodruff lived a life every bit as fascinating as her husband’s

Of Timothy Leary, we know plenty. How, in the early 1960s, he gave LSD to his psychology students at Harvard, to the inmates of a maximum-security jail to see whether it would stop them reoffending, to artists such as Charlie Mingus and Allen Ginsberg to map how it expanded their creativity.

The Beatles’ song Tomorrow Never Knows was based on his writings. Mick Jagger flew to Altamont in a helicopter with him. He had perma-smile good looks, evangelical patter and likened himself to Socrates and Galileo. He even had a Pied Piper invitation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. No wonder Richard Nixon believed he was “the most dangerous man in America”.

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to: * Sebastian Castillo (Fresh, Green Life) Dennard Dayle (How to Dodge a Cannonball) Geoff Dyer (Homework) Megan Giddings (Meet Me at the Crossroads) Ivy Pochoda (Ecstasy) * Without summarizing it in any […]

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how […]

Nan Z. Da explores King Lear, Maoist China, and the unpredictable nature of power. | Lit Hub Criticism Caroline Fraser on environmental contamination, violence, and how Tacoma became a hotbed of crime and kidnapping in the 1920s. | Lit Hub History B. Pietras considers the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner: “They are, in short, queer […]

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction

• Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85
• Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’

Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinnati, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.

Starting out his career in New York, during the magical and radical years that fell between gay liberation and Aids, he then worked hard and long enough to be eventually acclaimed as the “elder stateman” of American queer literary fiction. White’s most characteristic trick as a writer was to pair his impeccably “high” style with the raunchiest possible subject-matter. When talking about gay men’s sex-lives, the goods have rarely been delivered so elegantly. Author and director Neil Bartlett suggests some good places to start.

To be stuck at a disastrous party is a fate with which we’ve all had to contend. There is nothing worse than running into your toxic ex over a tepid cheese plate, or making agonizing small talk with your drunk boss at the office holiday soiree, or being trapped in the stripper-pole party bus on […]

Image from Reuters/Mike Blake It’s one of those weeks that already feels like a month: the Gaza relief ship Madleen has been illegally seized in the middle of their peace mission by Israel, Trump and his hogmen have put a new travel ban in effect, and in LA, a new wave of ICE arrests and […]

Life is turned upside-down by a new arrival, in this weird and charming tale of nature and family – with a guest appearance from the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson

Often thought of as the northernmost point of the British Isles, the Scottish island Muckle Flugga lies on the outer reaches of the Shetland archipelago. Norse legend has it that this craggy and almost uninhabitable place was created by two warring giants, obsessed with the same mermaid. While throwing boulders at each other, one of the rivalrous giants’ missiles accidentally plopped into the sea: and so the island was born.

A version of this mythic tussle is central to Michael Pedersen’s debut novel. When the narrative opens, delivered in a lively present tense sprinkled with Scots, The Father and his 19-year-old son Ouse are the only residents on the island. The Father mans Muckle’s lighthouse, and is as volatile as the waves he illuminates. A gossip from a neighbouring island describes him as irascible, with “a viper in his throat and … a broken soldier’s thirst for whisky”. Ouse, meanwhile, is “a queer sort” “who sounds as if he’s been sooking helium out of party balloons … always staring off into the distance”. He’s famed in the area for being an “artiste”, a dab hand at needlework with a reputation for producing beautiful handmade textiles.

Former footballer Ally McCoist also among guests as festival seeks to broaden its appeal

The Edinburgh book festival is to champion the positive power of hope later this summer with events involving Hanif Kureishi, the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and an exiled Brazilian tribal leader.

The core theme for this year’s festival will be the “expansive” concept of repair, and offering solutions and optimism at a time of crisis and conflict, said Jenny Niven, the event’s director.

The Edinburgh international book festival runs from 9 to 24 August. Tickets go on sale on 21 June.

Jess Walter’s novel, So Far Gone, is available now from Harper, so we asked him a few questions about writer’s block, writing advice, unexpected routines, and more. * Who do you most wish would read your book? In order: 1. People worried about America. 2. People somehow not worried about America. 3. People obsessed with […]

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a genre-bending memoir to a sexy novel about finding meaning in life

A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishism

Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as”. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.

The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics” (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness”), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don’t have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them.

An eye-opening account of superyachts, the billionaires who buy them, and what it all means for the rest of us

Nothing says so much about a superyacht or its owner, writes Evan Osnos, as its LOA. The initials stand for “length over all” – or what one aficionado he interviewed calls “phallic sizing”. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, before he got the idea of sending celebrities like Katy Perry into space, commissioned a $485m yacht called Koru. With its towering masts, the 127 metre-long boat proved too tall to pass beneath Rotterdam’s famous Koningshaven Bridge, and while its manufacturers suggested dismantling the bridge, rather than the yacht, the heroes of that particular story – the Dutch – refused.

I had a similar problem recently. Delivery people couldn’t remove our old fridge because we had, in the interim, narrowed the hall with an understairs cupboard. In that moment, I identified with Bezos. True, as Osnos reports, one well-stocked diesel yacht can produce as much greenhouse gas as 1,500 passenger cars, while my broken fridge produces none, but the parallel remains.

Online book clubs let you engage with others about books instead of just reading them alone. They bring together curious readers on forums, apps, or virtual meetups to discuss a shared book in depth. In a good online book club, you connect with fellow bibliophiles around the world, explore themes and characters you might have missed, and find motivation to finish your reading. Unlike a celebrity "pick of the month" or a casual social media thread, a serious book club is a discussion-based experience with a clear structure. Many readers join these clubs because they want a dedicated space and thoughtful conversation, things that celebrity-led clubs or one-off chats don't provide. In other words, an online book club is about participation, no... [More]

Book club favorites vary from year to year, and we're here to keep you updated on the most current trends!

In this year's subscriber survey, we once again asked book club members to name their top three book club books of all time. From their answers, we've compiled our latest list of book clubs' top ten overall favorite books.

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Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

This past semester I taught The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which is less read and talked about than her other books – to my undergraduates. One of the most interesting things about it is that Richard and Clarissa Dalloway appear as minor characters at the beginning. In each of my rereadings (and for my students who read the novel for the first time), when the Dalloways leave, it feels as though the air pressure of the novel drops for a moment. A reader feels a longing and a wistfulness watching them disappear – a feeling that Woolf must have shared too. The Dalloways must have haunted her and waited for her to become a more mature writer.

Ahead of the author’s much anticipated memoir, we count down the best of her books – from climate dystopias to her world-conquering handmaids

After more than 30 years, Atwood caved to pleas to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not since Harry Potter had a publication caused such a sensation: computers were hacked in search of the manuscript and advance copies were kept under lock and key. With classic Atwood timing, the novel coincided with the phenomenal success of the TV adaptation of the original – not to mention the arrival of Trump at the White House. The Testaments won Atwood her second Booker prize, shared (controversially) with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.