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Image courtesy of British Library Images Swayed by the motion of the Circle Line, I grip the overhead rail with one hand, an Oxford Classics paperback in the other. The modernist fragmentations of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf become increasingly oblique as I read (without a hint of performativity), making me wish I had a hand free to scratch my head. My attention starts to wane. Opposite, a fellow commuter smiles warmly into a screen. A message from someone close, perhaps;

Image courtesy of Iñaki del Olmo for Unsplash I know I’m a little late to the game for 2026 reading suggestions, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling a post-Goodreads challenge burnout in February, especially amidst the assessment period cram. Anyhow, I was inspired by this burnout to help curate Goodreads to-be-read-piles this year to fight the post-challenge blues.  The ‘new literary canon’ would seem like contradictory wording when the modern literary world has been so inte

Photo from Wikimedia Commons The Emperor of Gladness , an Ocean Vuong novel published in May 2025, is a work of American fiction. But is it any more fiction than whatever promises America makes to its inhabitants, if not to the world?  A severe shift from the epistolary, poetic form of  On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous  (an inescapable title in an English Lit classroom) and the experimental poetry collections published in previous, Vuong attempts to write the quintessential A

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons The first night of the London Literature Festival is opened by Sayaka Murata, interviewed by Octavia Bright. Sayaka Murata is a new-generation Japanese writer, celebrating the translation of her speculative fiction novel ‘Vanishing World’ into English. She has sold over two million copies of her books in over forty countries; famous for challenging family, romance and societal conventions in her blunt, defiant writing.  Her book ‘Vanishing

The Death of Bunny Munro is a gritty tale dissecting father and son relationships with themes of  alcoholism, addiction and grief.

Photo from Steven Miller, Creative Commons Novelist Claire-Louise Bennett appeared in conversation with writer and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen as part of the 2025 London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre. Bennett’s acclaimed first book Pond  (2015), a short story collection, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize , and her novel Checkout 19  (2021) was a 'Books of 2021' pick in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and   The New Statesman . Her latest, “Elatingly risk

Author Benjamin Wood sits down with us to discuss his latest fiction, Seascraper, after being longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025!

Photo from Creative Commons In this day and age, poetry is like marmite. You either love it or you hate it. Until last year, I used to...

A Polish journalist plays cards in his Tehran hotel room. He observes the disconcerting cycle of missing people and 'criminals' on his hotel television screen. Thus begins Ryszard Kapuściński’s tale of the Iranian revolution in Shah of Shahs. 

Photo by Artemis McMaster-Christie Gorgeous and raw, The Use of Photography , by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and the once obscure...