“Maybe humans aren’t such a terrible animal after all,” reflects a whale that daydreams about aeroplanes in the sky and fatefully falls in love with a Japanese submarine. As the whale insouciantly navigates the sardine-filled waters of nature, the human sea-routes of warships and submarines and the airways of military planes are rife with death...
Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan’s ground-breaking The Medium is the Message, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist examine the unstoppable impact of technology on contemporary culture. Touring a world redefined by the internet, decoding and explaining what they call the ‘extreme present’, The Age of Earthquakes harnesses the images, language and perceptions of...
We translators are used to becoming experts on subjects we know nothing about, describing sights we’ve never seen and speaking in voices that are not our own. But translating the Equatorial Guinean novel By Night The Mountain Burns, by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, seemed to require a bigger leap of faith than usual. How could...
When the Pico burned and I saw my grandfather cry, my curiosity in him grew and I wondered about who he really was. And I thought about what we’d seen when we went into his room. What did we see in grandfather’s room? Well, after all those people were taken by the cholera, it was...
Scott McCloud’s first graphic novel in almost a decade is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond. David Smith is a young sculptor who is literally giving his life for his art. Thanks to a deal with Death, David gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with...
Tony Juniper’s latest book, What Nature Does for Britain, sets out to undermine the received folly that protecting nature is somehow bad for the economy and, via first-hand accounts from around the country showing how environmental damage is under repair, builds a persuasive manifesto for a greener nation. We sit down for a wide-ranging chat...
In Manchuria, now north-east China, a large she-wolf and a girl just four years old squatted in a sorghum field. The wolf was sturdily built, but she was old and patches of her fur had fallen out and most of her teeth were missing. The little girl wore a white shirt with red baggy pantaloons,...
Chair of judges Bill Bryson has announced the shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize, one of the quirkiest – and richest – literary awards in the UK. Open to both fiction and non-fiction, the prize was set up in 2009 to celebrate books that engage with any aspect of medicine, health or illness. Worth £30,000,...
One of Denmark’s most inventive and acclaimed contemporary writers, Dorthe Nors’ story collection Karate Chop and her novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space are now published together in a special back-to-back edition. Her spare, poetic, ominously disturbing stories present disconnected lives at critical moments of change – while the novella is a playful experiment in finding mood and...
When she goes to bed, which is earlier and earlier now, he stays up at the computer. He checks the weather, reads an online tabloid, and plays backgammon with someone who says he’s a retiree. Who wins is an open issue, and shortly after midnight the retiree logs off. So then he surfs around, visiting...
These books have nothing and everything in common. They come from different times, different genders. Their stories are as diverse as the way they are told. Some were written for adults, some for young people. The windows they provide into adolescence are varied, each refracting something distinct. But then: there are the first loves, the...
Lissa Evans’ riotously comic Crooked Heart tells the story of bright ten-year-old orphan Noel Bostock, who is evacuated to St Albans from London to escape the Blitz. He is taken under the wing of sharp, unscrupulous Vera Sedge who, as soon as she claps eyes on Noel, hits on a flagrant new way to make...
