Latest news with #LucyCaldwell
Fox News
4 days ago
- Politics
- Fox News
'No better way for Dems to lose': Strategist blasts Hunter Biden's 'disaster' interview
Panelists Lucy Caldwell and Matthew Continetti join 'MediaBuzz' to react to Hunter Biden's first interview since his father former President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘I wanted to do something radical': Wendy Erskine on her debut novel, which deals with class, rape and parenting
Driving down the Cregagh Road in east Belfast, after the Museum of Orange Heritage, the eye is inevitably drawn to the gauntlet of union flags lining the street, which perhaps obscures the shift from middle- to working-class housing. Some things never change, you might think, yet you'd be wrong. It's perfectly safe nowadays to park your southern-reg car on a side street. The author Wendy Erskine lives nearby and has taught English in a local secondary school since 1997 (including to fellow author Lucy Caldwell), and Caffe Nero is an auspicious location. Michael Magee won the inaugural Nero debut fiction prize for Close to Home , his coruscating portrait of post-Troubles but still troubled Belfast. Erskine's equally powerful debut novel, The Benefactors, similarly captures a city no longer overshadowed by political and sectarian violence, allowing light to shine instead on other social ills such as violence against women and class divisions. The title relates to several disparate groups, evidence of the layered nature of the work. Misty, a young working-class woman whose sexual assault by three middle-class teenagers is at the heart of this novel, has an account on an OnlyFans-style website called The Benefactors or Bennyz. Bronagh, whose son is one of the boys guilty of rape, runs a charity dependent on wealthy American do-gooders. She also colludes with the two other mothers in buying Misty's silence, dressing it up as a goodwill gesture. There are also those who do the right thing for no financial reward, such as Boogie, who takes on the responsibility of raising his daughter, Misty, and her half-sister, Gen, when their mother absconds. READ MORE If the lives portrayed are sometimes difficult, the reading experience is anything but, leavened with a dry Belfast wit and benefiting from a sharp authorial eye and ear. 'Humour is so much a dimension of life that not to include it seems like a decision,' says Erskine. 'If you don't find it funny, it's very bleak.' Erskine's gift for authentic and entertaining dialogue is matched with one for deft and memorable characterisation, honed and displayed in her two short story collections, Sweet Home (2018) and Dance Move (2022). [ Wendy Erskine: 'There's a real high that comes from having written a short story' Opens in new window ] Her second collection's epigraph from William Blake – 'Joy and woe are woven fine/ A clothing for the soul divine' – could serve as a recipe for her fiction. She also approvingly quotes her literary hero, Gordon Burn, who imagined his artist friend George Shaw 'painting the back room of the social club in Tile Hill with all the seriousness of Monet painting Rouen Cathedral'. 'There is real brutality but also a lot of fun and joy in life,' she says of her literary sensibility, influenced by Burn's fearless focus on life's sleazy, tawdry underbelly. 'There is also an attention to detail, the specifics of people's worlds. I'm asking the reader to collaborate with me. You have to trust the reader, that they can cope with complex characters, a tolerance for people being contradictory. If you try to smooth it, you lose what makes them realistic. Of course, if they are just a jumble of contradictory elements, that also is not realistic. 'Specificity is not just verisimilitude,' she clarifies. 'If it were just to provide a mimetic facsimile of reality, then what's the point, why not just look at some photographs? It's about creating worlds.' She quotes Zola: ''Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.' I'm nosy as hell, I'm always noticing, listening, paying attention. I'm really interested in people, in structure.' She is not afraid to move beyond realism. The handover scene is inspired by Sergio Leone's westerns. One of the women even bursts incongruously into song. The Benefactors is about two worlds colliding. 'It's about sexual assault but that's only part of the book because so much is about what it means to be a good parent, it's about class, money, love, charity. And then cut into the novel we have 50 first-person monologues. I didn't want 50 different perspectives on what happened that night. I wanted a really polyphonic, kaleidoscopic, experience of a place. 'These voices are there to refract the central concerns of the novel. It's always struck me how arbitrary it is who you focus on as a writer. One writer might focus on those people sitting over there, somebody else the person serving. Often when I'm reading I'm going: okay, so I'm listening to your conversation but I wonder what that waiter is thinking. It's to give a broad, complex consideration of a particular place.' Each time you write a story you have to re-establish a world, even if it is quite geographically circumscribed. It's quite tiring Erskine's creative approach is to start with ideas for a character, which she has described as like playing with coins in her pocket, wondering what to spend them on. The novel has traditionally been regarded as a bourgeois form, privileging the individual over the collective, which some left-wing authors have sought to challenge by focusing on a group of people working together. So I wonder how much her diverse, multi-voiced approach to storytelling is down to methodology and how much to ideology? 'Although I wasn't conscious of it, I think there is something in what you are saying,' she says, although her initial impetus was more practical. 'I'd written maybe 30 or 40 short stories and I wanted to write a novel. I thought I would like to reside in the same world as my characters for longer than six or seven weeks, for maybe a year. Each time you write a story you have to re-establish a world, even if it is quite geographically circumscribed. It's quite tiring. I know that sounds ridiculous but it's like building a stage set, then striking the set. 'I didn't want to write a novel that could have existed as a short story. I know the form is super flexible but at same time there are limits. You can't deal with five characters' entire existences, you certainly can't put in another 50 people. I knew there would be a complexity of voices and something formally quite radical. I didn't want a wee chamber piece with a super narrow focus. I knew I wanted to do something radical.' She was aware of the risk that readers might switch off, tiring of having to recalibrate to a new perspective in each chapter, but she likes a more challenging reading experience. 'A good novel will teach you how to read it. I'm not a driver – I failed my test seven times – but I know when I get in the car if the driver knows what they're doing.' The sexual assault at the centre of The Benefactors recalls the high-profile 2018 Belfast rape trial , whose defendants were acquitted. 'It would be extremely disingenuous of me to say I'd never heard of the rugby rape trial,' says Erskine, 'but I've lived in this city most of my life and so I'm aware of any number of different trials and experiences that aren't to do with trials, of what happens in people's lives.' She is all too aware that the North has a bad reputation for misogyny and violence against women. 'I can't remember the statistics but this is not a good place. An extremely high number of women were killed by partners in their home. In terms of social attitudes, this place is traditionally behind others, with a lot of internalised misogyny.' She highlights how prejudice is not universal and intersects with class bias, rendering working-class women more vulnerable to abuse. But the sexual assault was not the starting point. The genesis of the novel was two characters, Frankie and Boogie. 'I wanted people from different backgrounds to be brought somehow into close proximity. That became a sexual assault.' In the initial stages, the book consisted of lots of little shards of memories just floating around in her head – 'I have a houseful of empty notebooks' – such as a YouTube video of a guy putting Mentos into a bottle of Coke. 'I liked that guy's attitude to having fun with kids. I wanted to write about someone who is an unlikely but really good parent.' Erskine dislikes didactic storytelling. 'I don't like fiction that has huge designs on me, or where characters are used as vehicles. They have to take precedence. I know it sounds a bit Mystic Meg, but you have to allow characters to push back,' rather like actors taking issue with the script. But there are times when Erskine and her creations are singing from the same hymn sheet, such as when the wonderfully potty-mouthed, born-again Christian Nan tells Misty, her great-granddaughter, that the boys who harmed her 'are not our type of people'. The divide she is reinforcing is not the North's usual tribal Catholic-Protestant one but the class divide. 'I really enjoyed that conversation,' says Erskine. [ In the Kitchen by Wendy Erskine: consider the clutter Opens in new window ] One of the 50 random, anonymous voices that insert themselves between the traditional chapters also feels like Erskine's philosophy shining through. 'Mate, let me tell you, I got to the stage of life where, if it's not about love to some degree, then I don't want to know.' She agrees, adding: 'That's on the No Alibis tote bag'. A debut novel backed with its own bookshop merch. Time is not linear and Erskine is passionate about the ever-present nature of the past and how it influences, even dictates, her characters' thoughts and actions. She scorns the notion of a character having a backstory as some kind of optional extra. 'For what I do, it's just a word that doesn't work. To my mind everything is simultaneous. There is no such thing as past.' Instead we have flashbacks or separate timelines, where we see for example Frankie being groomed as a teenager in care, learning to look after herself but becoming hardened to the extent that, when she in turns becomes a stepmother, the child in her care feels like an orphan. Structuring the novel proved an interesting challenge. 'A much more traditional structure would be to have the sexual assault come in the first third. I wanted the novel to be almost like a bowtie, that well-known literary term. You've got all these people, trust me on this, it all comes together, then it all goes out again.' The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas interested her as a model. 'In The Slap, there are eight different narrative points of view, constructed as a kind of relay, one coming after the other, each advancing the story. At no point do we return to the point of view of an earlier character. Whereas, in The Benefactors there is a rotation. We have Frankie, then Boogie, then Miriam, then Misty, then Bronagh and then we return again to their perspectives at various points. 'I also think just generally it's like The Slap in that a central incident is used to hold together a consideration of a range of preoccupations.' So much of what I understand about how to write, structure, conceptualise relationships, I learned from Chekhov She originally planned for the 50 anonymous voices to bunch in the middle 'like a choric interlude' but that didn't work so instead they are scattered throughout. Miriam, another of the mothers, is grieving her late husband, complicated by the knowledge a young woman was with him in the fatal car crash. The novel she is reading is 'full of young women's non-problems'. 'Miriam had expected a kind of cool and expansive perspicacity, but this is juvenile solipsism.' What might seem a sassy diss on Erskine's part is in fact in character for Miriam, who has a grudge against young women generally. By contrast, when Bronagh mocks Donal for a poetic turn of phrase, Erskine owns it. 'What some people think of as fine writing is very misguided. It's like the Dolly Parton thing: It takes a lot of work to look this cheap. My dialogue is edited over and over to get it just right.' This reminds me of Erskine's appreciation of the austere beauty of a whitewashed church wall in contrast to the Baroque's excess. 'I used to get migraines all the time, and when I came round I felt euphoric, looking at a white wall my husband was painting and Lonely Sad Eyes by Them was playing,' she says. 'I honestly regard that as one of the high points of my life, the simplicity of it.' Kathryn Ferguson has directed a short film scripted by Stacy Gregg and starring Aidan Gillen based on Erskine's short story Notalgie, written for The Irish Times. She has written an essay on Pasolini, another on fashion, a film script, several stories and 20,000 words of a new novel, about a Vanity Fair Becky Sharp-style grifter in mid-Ulster in the late 70s.' [ Nostalgie, a short story by Wendy Erskine Opens in new window ] Erskine wrote an unpublished novel in her 20s but was almost 50 when her short story Locksmiths won her a place on a Stinging Fly writing course in Dublin taught by Sean O'Reilly. 'But so much of what I understand about how to write, structure, conceptualise relationships, I learned from Chekhov.' [ Locksmiths, a short story by Wendy Erskine Opens in new window ] Contemporaries she admires include Adrian Duncan, Will Ashon, Svetlana Alexievich, fellow teacher-writers Elaine Feeney and Kevin Curran, 'people who just do their own thing'. She had studied in Glasgow, then taught in England, but personal circumstances brought her back to Belfast. Her goal had always been to return to Glasgow 'but as it turned out I love living here, it's beautiful, compact, there's a real energy here, in terms of writing, the arts, it's such an interesting place. The deep structures are obviously problematic.' What would make it better? 'On this particular road, a bar!' The Benefactors is published by Sceptre on June 19th
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Fox News panelist makes personal revelation while defending Biden
A Fox News panelist has made a startling personal revelation while defending former President Joe Biden's health fitness for office. During a heated exchange on MediaBuzz, Lucy Caldwell argued that Biden could have served after his cancer diagnosis before revealing a shocking personal confession. Caldwell then revealed that she is personally battling cancer at the moment. 'Clay is not a urologist or an oncologist,' Caldwell said. 'I am actively a cancer patient right now. I also feel great.' 'Cancer is a very complicated disease. It's very hard to speculate why he wasn't screened … I think that the idea that this was a coverup of a cancer diagnosis seems quite unlikely,' she said. Her comments came after conservative commentator Clay Travis argued that Biden would have been forced to resign due to his recent prostate cancer diagnosis. 'And I just think we're very lucky as a country that Donald Trump is in office because otherwise, I think Joe Biden would have to step down and Kamala Harris would be elevated,' Travis said. 'The idea that this was a massive cover up, we just don't know.' 'You don't know what is going on with your cancer from one moment to the next,' she said. 'Joe Biden was just diagnosed. The fact that his doctors don't have all the information does not necessarily reflect that there's a cover-up. 'Cancer is a treatment. They're all different. And it's evolving moment to moment. You don't know.' The host asked if Caldwell's cancer was diagnosed at an early stage, to which she replied 'No - it was not actually - it was stage three.' This comes after medical experts have questioned claims that failure to test Joe Biden for prostate cancer was a routine omission. Last week, the ex-president's office said the 82-year-old, who left office in January, was diagnosed with an 'aggressive' form of prostate cancer that spread to his bones. According to Biden's aides, doctors stopped testing his prostate-specific antigens in 2014, despite US guidelines that suggest all men over 70 require routine testing. Since the announcement of his diagnosis, several doctors have questioned how the vicious disease was not detected earlier in the former US president - who is supposed to have had access to some of the best medical care available. 'To take a blood test from a man over 50 and not do a PSA is practically an assault. It is the most male-specific health-related blood test you can do,' a senior surgeon told The Telegraph. 'If you get an abnormal result, then you do a scan (I imagine the White House has an MRI scanner) and then after that you do a biopsy. It is not as if we throw drugs at anyone with a high PSA, but I simply cannot envision a world where nobody at the White House ever ticked yes to a PSA test for him.' Biden's cancer announcement last week led to an outpouring support for the former commander-in-chief, though many remain skeptical about the timeline of his diagnosis.
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Fox News panelist makes startling revelation while arguing that Biden could have served after cancer diagnosis
A Fox News panelist has made a startling personal revelation while defending former President Joe Biden 's health fitness for office. During a heated exchange on MediaBuzz, Lucy Caldwell argued that Biden could have served after his cancer diagnosis before revealing a shocking personal confession. 'Cancer is a very complicated disease. It's very hard to speculate why he wasn't screened … I think that the idea that this was a coverup of a cancer diagnosis seems quite unlikely,' she said. Her comments came after conservative commentator Clay Travis argued that Biden would have been forced to resign due to his recent prostate cancer diagnosis. 'And I just think we're very lucky as a country that Donald Trump is in office because otherwise, I think Joe Biden would have to step down and Kamala Harris would be elevated,' Travis said. 'And we just saw that the nation, overwhelmingly, all 50 states, moved against her compared to 2020. We did not want her to be president.' 'So I'm thankful for Trump,' he continued. 'I feel like we dodged a bullet.' Shortly after, Caldwell revealed that she is personally battling cancer at the moment. 'Clay is not a urologist or an oncologist,' Caldwell fired back. 'I am actively a cancer patient right now. I also feel great.' The Democratic strategist then defended the former President, using her own experience with the disease. 'The idea that this was a massive cover up, we just don't know.' 'You don't know what is going on with your cancer from one moment to the next,' she said. 'Joe Biden was just diagnosed. The fact that his doctors don't have all the information does not necessarily reflect that there's a cover-up. 'Cancer is a treatment. They're all different. And it's evolving moment to moment. You don't know.' The host asked if Caldwell's cancer was diagnosed at an early stage, to which she replied 'No - it was not actually - it was stage three.' This comes after medical experts have questioned claims that failure to test Joe Biden for prostate cancer was a routine omission. Last week, the ex-president's office said the 82-year-old, who left office in January, was diagnosed with an 'aggressive' form of prostate cancer that spread to his bones. According to Biden's aides, doctors stopped testing his prostate-specific antigens in 2014, despite US guidelines that suggest all men over 70 require routine testing. Since the announcement of his diagnosis, several doctors have questioned how the vicious disease was not detected earlier in the former US president - who is supposed to have had access to some of the best medical care available. 'To take a blood test from a man over 50 and not do a PSA is practically an assault. It is the most male-specific health-related blood test you can do,' a senior surgeon told The Telegraph. 'If you get an abnormal result, then you do a scan (I imagine the White House has an MRI scanner) and then after that you do a biopsy. It is not as if we throw drugs at anyone with a high PSA, but I simply cannot envision a world where nobody at the White House ever ticked yes to a PSA test for him.' Biden's cancer announcement last week led to an outpouring support for the former commander-in-chief, though many remain skeptical about the timeline of his diagnosis.
Sydney Morning Herald
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why do all book covers look the same now?
Let's play a game. Imagine a book cover emblazoned with an illustrated figure, or two. Their faces are obscured, either by sunglasses or a brushstroke. Or maybe there's nothing at all – a patch of negative space where eyes and lips should be. The figures are outlined, flat, drawn in blocky silhouettes. The title? Always a tasteful sans serif on a colourful backdrop. What book are you thinking of? Crazy Rich Asians? Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Or something more recent – Intimacies, Lucy Caldwell's short-story collection about the misadventures of various young women. Or Show Them a Good Time, Nicole Flattery's short-story collection about the misadventures of various young women. Perhaps it's Australian: Jessie Tu's A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing. Perhaps it's translated: Nanae Aoyama's A Perfect Day to Be Alone. Perhaps it's brand-new, like the latest from Pulitzer finalist Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons. Actually, no. It's obviously Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends. Peruse enough bookstores – or just stroll past their window displays – and you'll certainly have encountered the design trends adorning our best (and bestselling) literature. Illustrations abound: always saturated, never subtle. The hues burn. The text shouts. It's an optometrist's pay day. Book covers have always sold – or oversold – their contents. Like all art, book design is a sign of the times: of consumer whims and cultural advances. The best ones are works of art in their own right; even the most prosaic signal something about genre and tone. But right now, covers are louder, bigger, weirder, musclier; the nerd who got jacked and made it everyone's business. So, how did we get here? To understand the trend cycle of a book cover is to prise open the publishing industry: all its mysteries and myths, its arcane machinations and archaic rituals. Long before an artist has touched a draft, decisions have already been inked. Evi O, an award-winning book designer and publisher who spent a decade at publishing house Penguin before opening her eponymous design studio, says the process frequently starts with a literary agent. 'Since the beginning,' she says, 'the agent has already shaped some kind of positioning, some kind of financial promise.' From an author's work, an agent extracts potential value. It's Rooney meets Moshfegh. It's Richard Osman set in Castlemaine. It's Helen Garner for TikTok users. (I pray this last one does not exist.) These comparisons – sold by agents and shaped by editors and publishers – often feed directly into a cover. For designers, publishers produce a brief including 'a synopsis, positioning, competition, top 10 in the [market]', Evi O says. A book is weighed against its confreres in the same genre and a designer begins conceptualising anywhere up to 15 different directions. This is how a bestselling cover ends up with hordes of copycats. Look no further than Atomic Habits – the 2018 mega-phenomenon that still keeps airport bookshops afloat – and then look at its pop psychology peers, like recent brain bender The Dose Effect or recent heavy hitter The Let Them Theory. All three feature text in chunky, declarative letters, haloed by a field of dots. 'This is science!' the dots aver. They're meant to resemble pixels, light particles, the minutiae of the universe. But if you squint they look like mosquitoes on a summer porch. At each stage, says Evi O, contact between authors and designers is limited – sometimes even discouraged. The most thorough designer will read an entire manuscript to ensure their work is faithful to the source, although just as often they'll pull ideas straight from the brief. They'll send their drafts back to the publisher, who then prods and probes each design in a cover meeting with other internal bigwigs. 'The interesting thing is what happens in that cover meeting room,' Evi O says. 'And the most annoying people in that meeting are sales and marketing.' This is the department, she says, where data reigns supreme and covers get homogenised. Their response is always consistent: 'The type is not big enough! … It doesn't matter how quiet a story is, they believe if you can read [the title], you're already winning.' And so the operation repeats. The designer tweaks, the publishing house doles out feedback – until the cover, like all covers, is sufficiently showy, pleading for the attention of a wayward buyer. Of course, the most resilient designers find glimmers of idiosyncrasy even in the anonymising churn. Just look at Evi O's studio, whose covers are thrillingly acidic, brimming with winding illustrations that invite a second – and third – glance. She also name-checks Australian artist Josh Durham, who wields a 'clever' visual humour, as well as Jon Gray, the design titan behind all of Zadie Smith's recent books – and the famous sardine tin of Normal People. No good cover, though, goes unpunished. Even the best idea gets boring when it's emulated a hundred times – as it is in the publishing industry. 'They like to play it safe,' Evi O says, 'and that's why you end up with all these covers looking quite similar.' But book covers have always followed trends. In the history of book covers, you can divine the development of both technology and social preferences writ large. Like our contemporary eye-poppers, the earliest book jackets were gaudy affairs. Pages were hand-bound and wrapped in leather and goatskin; luxury volumes in medieval times were further embellished with treasure binding, a form of book cover encrusted with gems and precious metals. The flashier the book, the closer to God. The association has never quite waned. In the 19th century, advances in book-binding birthed the first printed, mass-produced covers, designed to tout and titillate on a much broader scale than the bespoke finishes of yore. As the publishing industry matured and ballooned in the 20th century, the trends flew thick and fast: the painted pulp covers of the 1940s and '50s, the ascension of photography in the 1960s, the outre typographic experimentations of the '70s. Even the best idea gets boring when it's emulated a hundred times – as it is in the publishing industry. Dr Jenny Grigg, a senior design lecturer at Melbourne's RMIT University, says book covers have long been subject to market whims. 'There's all of these undercurrents of how books are sold, how publishers choose to sell their books as fashion accessories or to tap the right market,' she says. 'The actual reading experience is so distant … and sales-based.' Often, one literary mega-hit can spawn hundreds of imitators. I still shudder at the sight of an abstract blob: those cotton-candy nebulae that bedecked the covers of two bestsellers – Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half and Torrey Peters' Detransition, Baby – before saturating every single book cover from 2020 to 2022 in a rainbow of terror. Others might have a similarly Pavlovian response to the melancholy women adorning fiction of late – always turned away, often in a red dress, sometimes born from a single stock image and doomed to eternal duplication. Grigg used to work in commercial publishing, where she found herself brushing up against this copycat mentality. 'The example I always come back to,' she says, 'is a 20-strong sales team just wanting the amount of sales that Dan Brown had with The Da Vinci Code. They thought it was totally reasonable to say, 'Can you just design a version of this book?'' What, then, do our modern proclivities say about us? We're awful and we're common – that hasn't changed. It's a battle that's been raging for decades. In 1974, a cadre of top US designers formed an organisation called Graphic Artists for Self-Preservation – that's GASP for short – protesting the homogeneity of their hallowed profession. 'I'm working on four novels of possession right now,' one illustrator told The New York Times. 'And they all want the same thing. A combination of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist.' Gulp. Gasp! Sometimes, even authors have taken up the pitchfork: when Agatha Christie released her Poirot novel Sad Cypress in 1940, she lambasted her publisher for their aesthetic sensibilities. 'Don't let Collins decide univocally on some frightful cover,' she wrote in letters released in 2015. 'Their jackets … are AWFUL – so COMMON!!' What, then, do our modern proclivities say about us? We're awful and we're common – that hasn't changed. But according to a new Australia Reads survey conducted by Monash University, most of us are now reading for comfort more than for any other emotion. And 'there's comfort in trends', says Grigg. On the internet, the dizzying pigments and mammoth titles of contemporary volumes are more conspicuous, more diversionary than their quieter peers. In the US, Amazon controls more than 50 per cent of the print book market – and a cover, says Evi O, 'needs to work on an Amazon thumbnail'. It also needs to work amid the constant hum of a TikTok or Instagram feed, where online bibliophiles can make or break an author's career within 45 seconds. 'You want a cover that is … recognisable on the screen, even when it's flipped, [because] a lot of people film with the front camera,' says Jing Xuan Teo, co-founder of the online bookstore Amplify. 'You want something [where] the title is so large that you can see it at a distance from the camera … on the bookshelf or on the bedside table.' One of Teo's favourites this year is Maggie Su's Blob, a romance between a woman and a gelatinous splodge whose cover is simple: a hunk of squelching text on a sea of yellow. Its title treatment is uniquely (and aptly) disgusting, like a distended zit that might burst at any second. But its layout is hardly original. You'll see the same trope – huge text with few other graphic markers on the page – in dozens of new covers. There's the shuddering title of Katie Kitamura's equally destabilising Audition; the devilish font of Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte's carnival of grotesqueries; the hulking serif of Ada Calhoun's barbed marriage novel Crush. Not even Vietnamese-born Australian writer Nam Le is immune: the US cover of his 2024 collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem rendered his name in domineering fashion, extended over the page like a brutalist structure. Loading On the other end of the spectrum, says Teo, are the 'cartoon couples' of romances du jour. You know the ones: the side-eyeing lovers of Red, White & Royal Blue; the knowing gaze of viral romp Icebreaker – steamy enough to melt the frigid surrounds; the frolicking vacationers of every Emily Henry affair. Teo credits the illustrations to the stratospheric rise of romance in Gen-Z readers. Unlike the bodice-busters of yesteryear, she says, 'romance is trendy [now]. You want to be seen with it, but there's still a level of shame.' The middle ground? 'A weirdly cartoonish book that looks YA.' These trends, she says, are inseparable from the publishing industry – an industry locked in a permanent existential struggle, where innovation can pale against the need to survive. Loading 'It's really difficult to want to do something different when your margins are so slim … No one sits there and predicts the trends in publishing. They just follow the trends.' And so it's blobs, brushstrokes and big, big letters all the way – at least until the next Sally Rooney.
