Books

Books

Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.

MacKenzie Scott helped build one of the most recognizable companies in modern history-all while writing her first novel. As Amazon scaled from a fledging startup to a global force, Scott was simultaneously cultivating a literary life. Long before Amazon, Scott launched her literary career. While studying creative writing at Princeton University, Scott landed herself a highly coveted spot as one of Toni Morrison's advisees, a relationship that would shape her literary pursuits.

On Instagram, under the handle @will.this.make.me.happy, she posted a photo of a craggy yellow pastry that fit perfectly in her palm. "No. Buttermilk scones with lemon zest do not alleviate anxiety," she captioned it. On December 4th, she posted again, declaring, beneath an image of a sugar-ringed cookie perched between her thumb and forefinger, "No. Pecan shortbread did not help me reconcile my massive ego with my meager sense of self."

Remember that Friday night when your friends were heading to the crowded bar downtown, and you chose to stay home with your crossword puzzle instead? I've been there. Actually, I'm there most weekends. While everyone else was posting stories from packed restaurants and noisy clubs, I was curled up with a book about behavioral economics, completely absorbed and perfectly content.

It is the summer of 2019, and Sophie Evans, the reckless protagonist of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett's unsettling second novel, has arrived on an idyllic island in the Cyclades with her university friends Helena, Iris and Alessia to celebrate Helena's forthcoming marriage. Helena doesn't want it called her hen Like we're dumpy little featherbrains going cluck, cluck, cluck, but all the same, the men including Sophie's curator boyfriend of six years, Greg will not arrive for another five days.

Maybe it was the M train rattling the windows of your bedroom as it hurtled past your apartment six times an hour. Maybe it was the crunch of gravel in the driveway when your mother returned home from the night shift. Maybe it was your PlayStation starting up. Maybe it was your parents screaming at each other. Maybe it was the brassy, braggart shriek of roosters at four in the morning. Noise is like water: it will enter everywhere it can, by seep or by surge, and change the shape of things.

Each week we cut through the noise to bring you smart, practical recommendations on how to live better from what is worth buying to the tools, habits and ideas that actually last. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. When it comes to Valentine's Day, I'm nostalgic for candy hearts and childhood crushes.

For many Canadians, Scholastic brings about an instant wave of nostalgia. Memories come flooding back of flipping through colourful catalogues, circling must-have books, and browsing tables stacked with trinkets from scented erasers to posters and pencils set up in school auditoriums during book fair week. For generations of elementary school students, Scholastic brought excitement and joy and for many kids today, even in an age dominated by screens, that magic hasn't faded, say educators.

In addition to writing fiction, you're a staff writer for the and a screenwriter. How do you think of your career? I think of myself as a storyteller. I'm nosy, so once I'm telling a story, I want to know what happens. I do find, with fiction, I can't toggle in and out of it. It's like acting, where you have to stay with that character, in that world.

Dunk's story so far in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has mostly been a comedy. We've watched this big ol' lovable idiot-a pure, mountainous soul (played by Peter Claffey) who is too good for the terribly violent world of Westeros-fumble around as he attempts to make a name for himself. Hell, his newly knighted name is Ser Duncan the Tall, and I'm still calling him Dunk. Even worse? His best friend in the whole world just lied to him.

Madeline Cash's debut novel, Lost Lambs, tells the story of a modern American family: semi-estranged parents in an ill-fated open relationship and three teen daughters with internet boyfriends and dangerous connections to the tech billionaire up the road. The book made such a splash when it was published last month - "vivid, breezy prose alight with casual wit," said the New Yorker; "the comic novel we need right now," declared the Washington Post -

The three volumes of Green's Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions.

Granada Hills Grubfest and the Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce Farmers Market: The Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce presents the food truck "Grubfest," 5-10 p.m. Feb. 6 (on Chatsworth Street between Zelzah and White Oak avenues; www.granadachamber.com/food-trucks/); and the certified market, 6-9 p.m. (winter hours; White Oak Avenue between Chatsworth and Los Alimos streets; www.granadachamber.com/56292-2/; 818-298-9790) on Feb. 6. Both events run on Fridays; check website for seasonal changes in hours. 818-368-3235. www.granadachamber.com/

It's always a challenge to write a sequel. Five years elapsed between publication of The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child, and now it will be more than 20 between The Gruffalo's Child and the third book. I actually had the basic idea for the story a long time ago, but couldn't think how to develop it. It was only when the National Literacy Trust, whose work I'm very impressed by, used the first two books

We believe the future of reading or listening needs to be flexible and fit more seamlessly into people's lives,

In contemporary publishing, female characters are often portrayed as hyper-independent: self-possessed, boundary-savvy, and well-contained. Emotional unavailability, especially in men, is still packaged as independence, mystery, even depth. Meanwhile, real-world romance is dominated by swipe culture, avoidance, and chronic ambiguity. "Keeping it casual" is a default stance, and ghosting is treated as a communication style. Meg Nolan's novel Acts of Desperation offers an unflinching portrait of attachment wounds, longing, and self-betrayal, without rescue fantasies and without a tidy resolution.

Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons Mag­yar, which is spo­ken and writ­ten in Hun­gary, ranks among the hard­est Euro­pean lan­guages to learn. (The U.S. For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute puts it in the sec­ond-to-high­est lev­el, accom­pa­nied by the dread­ed aster­isk label­ing it as "usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult than oth­er lan­guages in the same cat­e­go­ry.") But once you mas­ter its vow­el har­mo­ny sys­tem, its def­i­nite and indef­i­nite con­ju­ga­tion, and its eigh­teen gram­mat­i­cal cas­es, among oth­er noto­ri­ous fea­tures, you can final­ly enjoy the work of writ­ers like Nobel Lau­re­ates Imre Kertész and Lás­zló Krasz­na­horkai in the orig­i­nal. Alas, no degree of mas­tery will be much help if you want to under­stand a much old­er - and, in its way, much more noto­ri­ous - Hun­gar­i­an text, the Rohonc Codex.

She enjoyed laughing at her own jokes, revelling in the misfortunes of others, and telling people off. If an event combined opportunities for all three activities, so much the better. When my father was six, he refused to eat the meatloaf that his mother had given him for lunch. Gisela took the piece of meatloaf, now rapidly turning rancid in the Zimbabwe afternoon heat, and served it to him for dinner, and breakfast, and every subsequent meal until he forced himself to eat it.

Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, the decades of violence stemming from England's occupation of Ireland. Other recent fiction about the Troubles-the novels and Trespasses , the TV show Derry Girls (all excellent)-is set firmly in the last century, relegating the violence to history. Ní Chuinn's work does the opposite: Their new book of short stories, Every One Still Her e, is set in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Jilly Cooper's memorial last week started with the dean of Southwark telling a story from her funeral last year: as the congregation made their way to her final resting place, five horses ambled majestically across a field, and came to stand in formation, looking at the grave. They would not be budged and their intention was crystal clear: they were paying their horse-respect (this is not verbatim by the way) to an author who did as much for equine-kind as she did for humans.

Punxsutawney Phil has emerged from his cozy underground burrow and spoken: There are still six more weeks of winter ahead to endure. February may bear the unfortunate distinction of being the shortest month of the year, but it has no shortage of new releases hot off the presses. With winter still roaring in full force, this is the perfect time to catch up on the reading you swore you'd do as a New Year's resolution.

Set in a version of Cape Town in the years after the First World War, this sure-handed, gothic-tinged novel tells the story of Soraya, a young Muslim woman who works as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly English widow. Soraya has "a fanciful mind" and is able to see ghosts and communicate with spirits, including previous domestic workers. Much of her time is spent preparing the house, "a strange place full of fright,"

Banned as it's been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That's not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn't care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby."

Competitors must attempt to answer 240 questions, such as the following, from 2022: "Playing for Bangalore against Pune in the IPL in April 2013, who set a new record for the fastest century in professional cricket by reaching 100 off 30 balls?" If it makes you feel better, the median number of correct answers the year of that test was 64.

On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, instead of sharing clothing hauls or skincare routines, creators are sharing their book stacks or media diets promising to make their viewers "disgustingly educated" in a matter of minutes. For further optimization potential, take note of these brain hacks to improve memory (so that your time cracking open Plato's Republic won't go to waste).

This is for that friend that finishes the Wordle in three tries and solves the purple clues first in Connections. League of the Lexicon reminds me a bit of Trivial Pursuit - players or teams take turns asking everyone questions from a double-sided card with answers on the back. Questions come in five categories and cover synonyms, word origins, spelling, definitions, archaic words, grammar, linguistic trivia and more.

The Secret Day My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired, And now tomorrow comes and beats upon the door; So I have built To-day, the day that I desired, Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more, Lest comfort come no more. So I have built To-day, a proud and perfect day, And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands; The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way;

The most important thing for you to know is that by the time Ser Duncan rides into Ashford Meadow at the start of this series, the people of Westeros have grown tired of the Targaryens. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set over 200 years into the Targaryen dynasty, and about 70 years after the devastating civil war depicted in House of the Dragon.

You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.

An ancient Egyptian papyrus held by the British Museum has been cited as possible evidence supporting some of the Bible's most controversial claims about giants. The 3,300-year-old document, known as Anastasi I, has been in the museum's collection since 1839 and has recently resurfaced on the Associates for Biblical Research, renewing interest in its possible links to biblical accounts. The papyrus describes encounters with the Shosu people, said to stand 'four cubits or five cubits' tall, up to eight feet in height.

Michael is best known to many queer audiences for his sharp, confessional style of comedy that's long centered vulnerability, self-awareness, and the tension between how we're expected to behave and how we actually function-with an occasional touch of raunchiness along the way. That sensibility carries into Attention Seeker, which approaches ADHD with humor and real-life honesty rather than with stigma.

Had Fatima Bhutto been left to her own devices, her devastating forthcoming memoir would have been almost entirely about her relationship with her dog, Coco. I know it sounds nuts, she laughs. And it's true that being dog-crazy doesn't quite track with the public perception of Bhutto as a writer, journalist, activist and member of Pakistan's most famous political dynasty. But the pandemic had forced something of a creative unravelling and when Bhutto took stock, she found herself only really able to write about Coco.