Books & Poetry

Alex Clark, the first female editor in Granta’s 120-year history, debuts with a collection of writings about fathers, a rather tardy bookend, perhaps, to #88’s ‘Mothers’...

‘It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes strength to be gentle and kind…’ So sang Morrissey in the 1986 Smiths song ‘I Know it’s...

Stephen Sprouse met Debbie Harry when he moved in upstairs in 1973, aged 20. Blondie was newborn, and Sprouse was Halston’s main assistant with his eyes on above-the-title billing. Harry...

Since, in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, Sigmund Freud based his analysis of what keeps us up at night on a short story, it is fitting that writers should respond in kind. In this...

Tobias Hill likes mystery. From the subterranean riddles in ‘Underground’ to the layered ciphers in ‘The Cryptographer’, the coded tattoos in ‘Skin’ to the urban...

One thing that emerged from our recent TV versus film debate  is that television lacks the snobbishness  and self-importance that blight the cinema world. But self-importance seen another...

After his epic wodge of intricate Victoriana, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’, this pared-down fable – part of the ‘Myths’ series commissioned from a roster of...

Anita Mason’s Latin American fixation has shaped the trajectory of her recent writings: ‘The Racket’ explored the shadowed landscape of Brazil in the ’80s, while ‘The...

Begun in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Wally Lamb’s new novel follows Columbine teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, the school’s nurse,...

Mark E Smith, the uncompromising and often belligerent leader of the late John Peel’s favourite group, The Fall, is not an easy man to write about. Since 1976, his opaque lyrics and caustic,...