Latest news with #ToniMorrison
The Hindu
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
Whither America?
Quo Vadis? While we were growing up, America was the El Dorado, where every dream could turn into a reality with effort and enthusiasm. Those who left for those pastures came home to tell us that the country was one of immense promise for the young and inspired. They spoke of the universities with their libraries, research facilities, state-of-the-art laboratories, and wide campuses with students streaming in from all parts of the world in search of knowledge. A veritable repository of learning and opportunity. America has been the land of the immigrant from the moment the first immigrants stepped off the Mayflower on to American shores. With imagination and creativity, grit and struggle, with encouragement and opportunity they carved out lives for themselves and contributed to the idea of America, and its ideals of freedom and diligence. Today, owing to the exclusionary vision of the powers-that-be, international students are barred from the universities, Green Card holders are under threat, and migrants are treated without humanity. So many individuals of different origins have made the country great in all fields of learning and culture and it is not worthwhile to go back to the drawing board. The country can only become greater with greater cooperation from all countries and more humane, inclusive policies. All progress rises out of mutual interdependence and the immigrant heritage is truly what makes America exceptional. It is disappointing that the very ideals of freedom of expression and fairness of opportunity that America stood guardian for since the founding fathers should be under siege now. What the celebrated writer Toni Morrison said, 'In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate,' seems to ring true today. It would do well for America to hark back to the voice of Benjamin Franklin who said, 'God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the Rights of Man may pervade all the nations of the Earth so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say, 'This is my country.'' While we are far away from this idealised world today where every country is zealously guarding its turf, it would be right to realise the world would be more liveable if we can think in terms of mutual respect and dependence. sudhadevi_nayak@
Forbes
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Must-Read Books And Literary Works By Genre
Books are displayed at the home of the celebrated late British author Jane Austen on July 18, 2017 ... More in Chawton, England. Jane Austen spent the last eight years of her life in the cottage in Hampshire. Great literature disrupts assumptions and creates permanent cognitive shifts while making the impossible feel inevitable. Up until the 1970s, American literature resembled insider trading, with the same dozen names cycling through syllabi, prizes and review pages. The revolution began in the 1970s when marginalized voices stopped asking permission and started claiming space. Toni Morrison's Beloved emerged without seeking approval; García Márquez secured the 1982 Nobel Prize, cementing magical realism; and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart—published twelve years earlier—proved African stories needed no Western validation. The result is a contemporary canon that mirrors its readership's complexity. Top Literary Genres The dominant literary genres, literary fiction, romance, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction and horror represent how humans process experience and seek meaning. Romance, a billion-dollar genre, proves readers will pay premium prices for stories that model successful relationships. Mystery and thriller genres fulfill psychological needs for resolution that real-world justice rarely provides. Fantasy and science fiction use impossible scenarios to examine very possible futures. Historical fiction contextualizes contemporary problems by pointing to their origins. Horror forces readers to confront fears they'd much rather ignore. In autobiographies and memoirs, writers give firsthand accounts of a person's life, but they have separate purposes. Autobiographies cover the full scope of a person's life from birth to present; memoirs usually zero in on specific periods, themes or life-altering experiences. Both forms give the author agency to reflect on their experiences by exploring personal identity, trauma, recovery or transformation. Some of the most important books that have fallen into this category in modern times include Educated by Tara Westover (2018), a powerful retelling of escaping extreme isolation through learning; Becoming by Michelle Obama (2018), a reflection on race, ambition and a life devoted to public life and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2005), an extraordinary story of dysfunction, but ultimately, redemption. Former US first lady Michelle Obama meets with fans during a book signing on the first anniversary ... More of the launch of her memoir 'Becoming' at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. A biography tells the real-life story of someone who actually lived, drawing from documents, interviews and extensive research to present the holistic arc of their life. Unlike autobiographies, where people tell their own stories, biographers become detectives, sifting through old letters, interviewing anyone who knew their subject and sometimes spending years tracking down a single detail. When done right, these books pull readers in like a good novel, but with the added thrill of knowing it all really happened. Some compelling examples of this genre are Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, which details the Apple founder's achievements but shows his genius alongside his cruelty, making readers understand how someone could revolutionize technology while treating employees terribly. Robert Caro spent decades following Lyndon Johnson's story while creating books that read like political thrillers and showing how power works in Washington. Then there's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot which tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose HeLa cells were removed without her approval or knowledge in 1951, leading to a medical breakthrough. Some of the best biographies use individual lives as windows into entire moments in time, helping readers understand not just who these people were, but how they changed the world and vice versa. Classic fiction earns its status through uncomfortable prophecies. George Orwell's 1984 (1949) predicted surveillance states but also became an instruction manual. Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen is still core reading material not because it's old and important, but because Austen was able to provide timeless commentary on social dynamics that still speak to how humans behave. These books survive because they diagnose problems we're still too cowardly to solve. Charles Dickens laid the groundwork for modern social critique that contemporary politicians still can't match. Austen's psychological precision makes modern relationship advice seem primitive. And Mark Twain's satirical genius exposed American contradictions we're still living with today, which proves that classic fiction doesn't age because it was never really about the past; it was always about us. Dystopian fiction asks what happens when the world breaks and who we become in the aftermath. These stories imagine futures where societies are governed by fear, technology and control, where freedom is a memory and resistance is survival. Some household-name dystopian works include 1984 by George Orwell (1949), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985), which have become shorthand for modern anxieties: surveillance states, engineered happiness, and the policing of bodies. Atwood, in particular, helped to advance this genre by grounding her vision not in fantasy but in history repeating itself. Alongside Orwell and Huxley, she helped turn dystopian fiction into a cultural barometer that tells us not just where we're headed, but where we already are. Critics once dismissed fantasy fiction as escapism, but the genre succeeds by making the impossible feel inevitable. While works like George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire collection unpack political corruption with more sophistication than most contemporary political fiction. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter (1997) series doesn't only feature magic but creates a boarding school where institutional racism is literally taught as Defense Against the Dark Arts. N.K. Jemisin's subgenre science fantasy Broken Earth trilogy uses magic systems as metaphors for systemic oppression so acutely they make sociology textbooks seem abstract. These aren't just stories about dragons or spells; rather, what fantasy does, when it's working, is pull you in with spectacle and leave you thinking about systems. You come for dragons; you stay for the allegory. In these imagined worlds, the cruelty is familiar, the politics recognizable and the heartbreak real. That's the idea. Feminist literature probes what happens when women's voices are elevated. It is a genre whose authors have been comfortable with confronting systems of power, examining gender roles and reclaiming the histories that history has left out. Rather than providing easy answers, feminist literature thrives on raising sharper, more profound and more disruptive questions. Across time, form and tone, feminist literature has spanned works like 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (2014), Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (2014) and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949). These texts demand that readers see women's stories through the lens of autonomy, grit, survival and agency. Contemporary voices like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose books, essays and manifestos intelligently challenge misogynistic systems, and Audre Lorde, whose poetry and essays intertwine identity, race and feminism, remain potent voices in this evolving genre. Historical novels revisit the past with the aim of retelling history through characters who make some of humanity's core moments seem less distant. They answer the questions textbooks never ask: What did it actually feel like to live through that? What was acceptable in that era? Who did what? Some notable works in this genre include The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (2015), which reimagines the French Resistance from the vantage point of two French sisters; The Help by Kathryn Stockett (2009), which addresses the complex dynamics of race and class in 1960s Mississippi and the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (1991), in which a British nurse travels through time to 18th-century Scotland and falls for a Jacobite rising. Other notable writers in this genre are acclaimed Welsh author Ken Follett, Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead, and Nigerian literary giant Chinua Achebe. Some important historic events that have been the inspiration for other literary works in history include World War I, World War II, The American Civil War, The Holocaust, Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, The Great Depression and 9/11 and the War on Terror. Fear sells. It always has, and horror authors leverage this by forcing readers to question everything they assume about safety, sanity, and human nature. Stephen King does this particularly well in his 1977 gothic horror book The Shining, where he takes a seemingly unassuming hotel in the Colorado mountains and turns it into the perfect laboratory for Jack Torrance's psychological unraveling. Similarly, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) blurs the line between supernatural disturbance and reality, which leads readers to wonder whether Eleanor is haunted by ghosts or her mind. In House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000), reading itself turns into an uneasy, mind-bending experience that suggests they may not even be safe from horror at home or in the safe space of a book. This is a genre that proves the most effective horror doesn't create new fears; it only gives names to the ones we already carry. Jack Nicholson peering through axed in door in lobby card for the film 'The Shining,' based on a ... More Stephen King horror book. Children's literature represents storytelling's most sophisticated challenge: how to hold the attention of young, curious minds effectively. The most successful children's novels do this on two levels: they entertain readers while giving caretakers room to explore during bedtime readings. For example, Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (1952) examines loyalty, mortality and friendship with a philosophical depth that outshines adult literature. Matilda by Roald Dahl (1988) offers some commentary on bullying, intellectual curiosity and institutional resistance through a child protagonist who outsmarts corrupt adults. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (1950) also builds on layered allegories about power, sacrifice and moral development. Authors like Beverly Cleary, Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume all achieved cultural permanence by recognizing that children's cognitive capabilities far exceed what most adults assume; they don't need simplistic stories because they, too, appreciate ones that respect their emotional intelligence. When conventional storytelling techniques seem inadequate, magical realism succeeds in filling the gap. Gabriel García Márquez didn't invent magical realism, but he recognized that Latin American history was already so surreal that fiction barely needed embellishment and brought that understanding to One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). The novel resonated powerfully because its blend of political turmoil, family curses and flying characters felt authentic to readers who had lived through coups, dictatorships and social chaos that defied rational explanation. The genre's global appeal became clear when Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (1982) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) proved the approach could transcend Latin American experience. Today's practitioners like Haruki Murakami write books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (2001) as though they understand that modern readers don't need magic explained because they're already living it. Real-world injustices tend to drag on indefinitely and political scandals disappear into news cycles, but mystery novels promise closure—crimes solved, villains exposed, justice delivered. The formula works because it fulfills a psychological need that a problem will eventually be solved. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) remains the gold standard for this genre because it plays into this idea: every clue is visible, and every revelation is earned through logic rather than authorial manipulation. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) established that the best mysteries combine methodical deduction with atmospheric tension. Contemporary authors like Gillian Flynn have evolved the form by making the puzzle intellectual rather than procedural, and her book Gone Girl (2012) works because it doesn't just ask 'who did it' but 'why do we believe what we believe about marriage, media and morality?' The genre continues to be a favorite for readers because it offers something increasingly rare: problems with definitive solutions. Psychological thrillers offer the precision of a crime procedural, the intimacy of a marriage novel, and a midpoint twist so disorienting it flips the entire plot. Most characters in psychological thrillers are intentionally described as unreliable or operating under some psychological strain—not as a gimmick, but as a narrative engine. Their fractured perspectives drive the tension, blurring the line between perception and reality, and forcing readers to question not just what's happening, but whom they can trust. This is especially true in Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train (2015), where memory lapses and alcoholism obscure the truth until the final reveal. Other authors approach the genre differently: James Patterson has built a prolific career by focusing less on psychological complexity and more on fast-paced plots that prioritize momentum over character depth. Both approaches succeed because they understand a fundamental truth about modern readers—in an era of information overload and competing narratives, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives. The best psychological thrillers entertain but also mirror the cognitive dissonance of contemporary existence. Romance fiction is a billion-dollar industry and still one of literature's most maligned genres. Critics dismiss it as formulaic, but the formula obviously works because it delivers on something that human readers inherently believe: that love, forged through effort, vulnerability and respect, can prevail. At over $1.4 billion in annual revenue, romance outsells most other fiction genres combined, yet rarely earns critical respect. Its best works, however, are far from sentimental. Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook is a cult classic because it recognizes love's endurance through loss, aging and erasure. Julia Quinn's The Duke and I (2000) launched the 'Bridgerton' empire by blending Regency tropes with commentary on consent and agency. E.L. James' Fifty Shades series (2011) sparked a global debate around female desire, proving romance can provoke as much as it soothes. And then there's Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice (1813) laid the groundwork for the enemies-to-lovers arc still driving the genre centuries later. Romance may be dismissed by the academy, but the market tells another story. These novels are not escapist fluff but emotional blueprints for how people hope, hurt, forgive and try again. Close up of the hands of a college student holding a miniature edition of 'Pride and Prejudice,' ... More with popups and illustrations, in the Special Collections department of a University library, 2016. Courtesy Eric Chen. The self-help industry generates $13 billion annually by promising what formal education often fails to deliver: practical instruction for managing oneself and others. These self-help books succeed because they address the gap between academic knowledge and emotional intelligence, teaching readers how to manage relationships, build confidence, and achieve professional success through actionable strategies rather than theoretical concepts. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is a concise guide on how to build social skills and develop an interest in deepening connections with others. Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was a game changer in its personal development niche, which it accomplished by focusing on character-based rather than personality-based success. For Brené Brown, her book Daring Greatly accomplished something remarkable: it transformed how people viewed vulnerability and encouraged authentic connectivity. Teen fiction is no longer confined to locker rooms and love triangles. The genre's target audience is readers who are aged 12-to-18, with some overlap into the 19+ range. There is also a significant overlap with adult readers who enjoy YA fiction for its emotional depth and relatable storytelling. According to a 2023 study, 55% of YA literature consumers were over 18, and 78% of adult consumers bought YA books for themselves. In the past two decades, teen fiction has evolved from its standard coming-of-age story format into a forum for engaging with themes of identity, power, trauma and social injustice. Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give (2017) made national headlines by confronting police brutality and racial profiling through the eyes of a 16-year-old girl, compelling YA readers to engage with uncomfortable issues that are increasingly requiring urgent attention. Wings of Starlight by Allison Saft (2025) brings together political intrigue and forbidden love as a cartographer's daughter and a pilot from enemy nations fall in love, and The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993) follows the story of 12-year-old Jonas, chosen to inherit the memories of humanity's lost experiences. Writers like Jason Reynolds, Sharon M. Draper and J.K. Rowling have helped to shape teen fiction into a genre that doesn't oversimplify adolescence but encourages them to engage with important issues. True crime has never been more consumed, or more carefully worded, as writers continue to elevate fact into narrative form. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), which applies novelistic precision to the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Kansas, is widely regarded as the genre's first true masterpiece. Decades later, Michelle McNamara's posthumous I'll Be Gone in the Dark (2018) reframed the form entirely, weaving together memoir, investigation, and cultural reckoning in her pursuit of the Golden State Killer. Ann Rule brought startling intimacy to The Stranger Beside Me (1980) after realizing that her former coworker and classmate, Ted Bundy, was responsible for a series of brutal murders in the Seattle area. The result was a mind-boggling exposé that was as unsettling as it was meticulously researched. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003) layered architectural ambition with serial murder, while Dave Cullen's Columbine (2009) dissected media mythologies and institutional failures. True crime endures not for its shock value but for the clarity it brings to the chaos beneath the surface. Young adult (YA) novels capture the messy and often intense years between childhood and adulthood. The typical protagonists in these stories are between 14 and 18 and are still trying to figure out who they are, where they belong and how to do life. The genre took off in the late 1990s when Harry Potter proved that stories about young people could hook readers of all ages, but seminal YA books like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967) and Judy Blume's novels (1970s-'80s) were already shaping the genre. Most YA books get close to their characters, telling stories through the protagonist's voice or staying tight on their perspective, making readers feel like they're living through every heartbreak, family fight and moment of self-doubt right with them. YA authors write with an emotional intensity that mainstream fiction often polishes away, creating stories that feel both specific to adolescence and authentically human. Three books show just how compelling YA can be. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games turns teenage rebellion into a fight against a brutal government, with Katniss Everdeen becoming an unlikely symbol of resistance. John Green's The Fault in Our Stars doesn't sugarcoat cancer; instead, it gives us Hazel and Augustus, two teenagers who face death with wit, philosophy and honesty. Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park captures that all-consuming first love between two outcasts who find safety in each other despite the chaos of their home lives. Additional Types Of Literature Literature transcends the novel through forms that serve distinct cultural functions. Poetry compresses experience into lines that lodge permanently in memory—top Black author Maya Angelou's verses became civil rights anthems precisely because they were memorable enough to chant. Drama transforms literature into a collective experience, while graphic novels like Maus prove visual storytelling can tackle history's most difficult subjects with unique power. Global traditions continue shaping contemporary literature in unexpected ways: West African griots' call-and-response techniques appear in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's narrative rhythms, while ancient Persian mysticism makes Rumi the best-selling poet in America through Coleman Barks' translations. These diverse forms prove literature's evolutionary intelligence—it adapts to meet readers wherever they are, from Instagram to theater seats. Comic books have quietly become America's most democratic storytelling medium. What began as disposable entertainment for children has evolved into a sophisticated art form that tackles everything from political corruption to personal trauma, often with more nuance. The shift is remarkable. Superman and Batman may still dominate popular consciousness, but works like Alan Moore's Watchmen (1986-1987) deconstruct heroism itself, while Brian K. Vaughan's Saga explores immigration and family through a space opera lens. The medium has evolved from merely newspaper strips to being a national central part of Comic-Con events. Digital platforms have also altered how comic books are distributed and created, enabling webcomics and digital-first publishing while expanding global readership through apps and online platforms. Creators like Neil Gaiman push narrative boundaries by incorporating mythology, horror, crime, sci-fi, romance, memoir and fantasy into visual storytelling that naturally appeals to readers across age groups and literary tastes. Poetry has long been literature's most concentrated form—language pared down to its most deliberate, rhythmic and resonant elements. It communicates with urgency and precision, often accomplishing in a line what prose can't in a page. From Shakespeare's brilliant 'Sonnet 18' (1609) to Maya Angelou's wise, defiant mastery of verse in 'Still I Rise,' poetry has served as both a cultural archive and a personal manifesto. Its range is wide: haikus from Nakamura Kusatao, free verse from Langston Hughes, spoken word from Sarah Kay, the political edge of Sonia Sanchez, the autobiographical grit of Tupac Shakur and of course the once-in-a-lifetime talent of Oscar Wilde. What connects them isn't form, but force. Poetry makes language carry weight. Poetry remains relevant not because it changes with the world, but because it refuses to rush through it. Short stories are literature stripped to the bone. No subplots, no digressions—just concentrated insight, delivered in a few thousand words or less. The best of them hit like a punch disguised as a whisper. Consider Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Franz Kafka's The Vulture or Alice Munro's Runaway; these are all plots that feel bigger than their page counts, built from sentences that do more than their share of work. In short fiction, the constraint is the form and there is no room to wander because every line is literary currency. That makes the genre irresistible to writers obsessed with control and to readers who want impact and story without committing to 300 pages and other greats like Poe, Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor also knew this all too well. Bottom Line What we call 'literature' today would be nearly unrecognizable to readers a century ago. The canon didn't expand out of institutional or political pressure; it split open because the old boundaries could no longer contain the scale and plurality of human storytelling. So when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks about 'the danger of a single story,' she's not just defending African literature but explaining why literature itself had to change.
Atlantic
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Toni Morrison's Definition of a Legacy
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. In 2012, I visited the home of Toni Morrison, who was then 81, to discuss, among other things, her legacy. Morrison's Nobel Prize sat on her kitchen island. She had just published her penultimate novel, Home, and she was quietly but unabashedly engaged in making sure her work would be read as widely as possible. She recalled for me a recent visit to the University of Michigan, where 'my books were taught in classes in law, feminist studies, Black studies. Every place but the English department.' Even as a Nobel laureate, she worried that her work would be confined to courses on identity, shelved in a side room of the American literary pantheon. At the time, I found her efforts difficult to square with her lifelong insistence that she was ' writing for b lack people ' and no one else. Now, almost six years after her death, it makes more sense to me, especially after reading the essay that my colleague Clint Smith wrote about Toni at Random, a new book that tracks Morrison's parallel career as a book editor. First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic 's books section: The real reason men should read fiction ' Fools for Love,' a short story by Helen Schulman The perils of 'design thinking' Americans are tired of choice. The cure for guilty memories In the 1970s, before Morrison was world-famous for her fiction, she worked at Random House, publishing writers who were uncompromising in their vision and advocacy for Black people—but she also had to appeal to a mass audience. This wasn't easy; she was a rare Black editor in a publishing industry that was mostly run by white people for white people. 'A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, 'We can't sell books on both sides of the street,'' Smith writes: 'There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn't merge.' Yet Morrison didn't believe Black writers had to cater to white audiences. They, too, could create 'something that everybody loves,' she said. Morrison's writers were not middle-of-the-road types: They included Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. But she protected their integrity while raising them to the highest standards, putting the same level of rigor into editing them that she brought to her own novels. She interrogated gauzy concepts and clarified ideas. She made their work unimpeachable. And she resisted efforts to make their memoirs more relatable. (After one reader asked for more 'humanness,' she wrote to her boss that that was 'a word white people use when they want to alter an 'uppity' or 'fearless'' Black person.) She believed that a book didn't have to be written for the broadest possible audience to be widely read. In one interview with The Guardian, while explaining her insistence on writing for a Black audience, she noted that Leo Tolstoy hadn't written his classic novels for her, 'a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio.' Nonetheless, she recognized his brilliance, and white readers could recognize hers. In her way, Morrison was offering a definition of a legacy: That a work reaches beyond not just the writer's lifespan, but her intended audience as well. In both her writing and her editing, Morrison was recording the experiences of Black Americans without looking over her shoulder at white readers or critics. She revealed that there was a market for Black literature on both sides of the street—but she also left an even more important mark. She succeeded, in the long term, not by carefully calibrating the work or by selling the 'humanness' of her characters and her writers, but by putting humanity plainly on the page, where it would outlast her and her critics alike. How Toni Morrison Changed Publishing By Clint Smith At night, she worked on her novels. By day, as an editor at Random House, she championed a new generation of writers. What to Read Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell Before they became the show of the same name, Bushnell's columns in the pink pages of The New York Observer documented, with light fictionalizations, the sex and social lives of New York's ambitious and powerful—and her own, though she frequently disguised her run-ins as the affairs of her 'friend,' the character Carrie Bradshaw. In this volume of collected Observer columns, most of them focused on Carrie, Bushnell reveals herself to be a sage of power and social capital, an expert on relationships and how they can be used to build careers, accumulate social clout, and stomp on feelings. For anyone with a sense of ambition, whether you're moving somewhere new or settling down where you already are, her work is both an entertaining read and an instruction manual for how even the most casual acquaintanceships can transform your life. Cultivating them intentionally, Bushnell implicitly argues, can turn even the biggest metropolis into a small town where your next opportunity (or at the very least a good party) is just a conversation or two away. — Xochitl Gonzalez Out Next Week 📚 I Want to Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman 📚 Oddbody, by Rose Keating 📚 Angelica: For Love of Country in a Time of Revolution, by Molly Beer Your Weekend Read The Blockbuster That Captured a Growing American Rift By Tyler Austin Harper In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten. Working-class residents battle with an upper-class outsider regarding the best way to kill the shark. The fish eventually dies in an orgy of blood. And the political sympathies of the novel are clear—it sides with the townspeople, and against the arrogant, credentialed expert who tries to solve Amity's shark problem.
Irish Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Irish author Donal Ryan wins Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for novel Heart, Be at Peace
Irish author Donal Ryan has won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel Heart, Be at Peace . . Ryan, from Nenagh, Co Tipperary, described winning the award as 'a great honour and very unexpected'. " I was kind of getting past my imposter syndrome but it's come charging right back up now,' he said. 'I'm not exactly politically active and am not astute when it comes to the syntheses between fiction's political and aesthetic potentials, but I believe it's true, to quote Toni Morrison, that 'All good art is political. There is none that isn't. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, we love the status quo.'' [ Donal Ryan: 'Stop apologising for yourself,' is one of the last things my mother said to me Opens in new window ] Heart, Be at Peace explores the 21st century problems of a small, tight-knit community in Ireland . Set 10 years after his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, Ryan returns to the same Irish town, telling the story through 21 interconnected voices as the community faces contemporary challenges including social media, drugs, and illegal industries that threaten local children while the older generation struggles to protect what they hold dear. READ MORE Chair of judges for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, Jim Crace, said: 'Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland, after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past. The boom years – in both senses of that word – might be over, but in Donal Ryan's exceptional Heart, Be At Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum. ' [ Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan: 'Companion' novel to The Spinning Heart is a welcome return Opens in new window ] Ukrainian novelist and war crimes investigator, Victoria Amelina, has posthumously won the Orwell Political Writing prize for her book Looking at Women, Looking at War . Amelina's book is a powerful examination of women's courage in resistance and documents the stories of Ukrainian women involved in the struggle against Russian occupiers. When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, Amelina joined the resistance. She died on July 1st, 2023, from injuries sustained in the Russian bombing of a restaurant in Kramatorsk. The 2025 judging panel for both prizes includes distinguished names from the worlds of literature and journalism. The Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the work that comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition 'to make political writing into an art'. Each prize is worth £3,000 (€3,520) to the winner.
New York Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
You Know the Novelist. Now Meet Toni Morrison the Editor.
TONI AT RANDOM: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams Among the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions for 'icon' is this: 'In Eastern Orthodox Christianity: a representation … used as an object of veneration or a tool for instruction.' No writer has been churned through the iconography machine more than Toni Morrison, especially since her death in 2019. There are objects galore adorned with her image: Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets, T-shirts and on and on. Beyond objects, her words are culled from her lectures and rigorously crafted novels and presented as context-free inspo. Dana A. Williams's new biography, 'Toni at Random,' does much to lift the writer above this morass. While the book has the words 'iconic' and 'legendary' in its subtitle, one of its primary virtues is that it treats Morrison as neither. Instead, it basks in her ordinary humanity. With great respect and meticulous research, Williams reveals Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century. While Morrison's career as a writer could scarcely be more heralded and closely studied, Williams's book is the first exploration of her nearly 20 years at the publisher Random House, where Morrison worked as a trade editor across various imprints from 1965 until 1983. She started out in Syracuse at the textbook publisher L.W. Singer, which had recently been acquired by Random House. Taking the job was a risk: She was a single mother of two, living at the time in Ohio. 'The idea of returning to upstate New York with two young sons and no family to help her raise them was daunting,' Williams writes. But she needed employment, and, as Williams explains, 'being paid to work with books all day was undeniably appealing.' She worked at the publisher for two years before moving to New York to join the editorial team at Random House proper in 1967. There she found not only employment but also fulfillment, and she commenced a mission, one supported by the team at Random: publish books by Black authors about Black life. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
