Joy Williams and humanity’s ultimate failure
The author’s new collection of short stories is haunted by animals – and by our failed stewardship of the natural world
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Neel Mukherjee
Neel Mukherjee is the author of A Life Apart, The Lives of Others and Choice
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How global warming has frozen fiction
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement poses two, thought-provoking questions about how we write about climate change.
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Beyond the frame: the best recent graphic novels
Neel Mukherjee is moved and unsettled by everything from psychological realism to ghost stories.
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Mahabharata unbound: rewriting the world’s longest poem
Coming in at three times the length of Paradise Lost, Carole Satyamurti’s modern version of the epic is a remarkable achievement.
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Live through this: Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel makes us question death – and life
The End of Days kills its protagonist five times in a novel grounded in the turbulence of 20th-century Europe.
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Many gods, many voices: the Murty Classical Library is uncovering India’s dazzling literary history
The Murty Classical Library of India tackles a multilingual, epic tradition.
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Fevers and mirrors: the surreal graphic novels of Charles Burns
Green, one-eyed men, a chubby, disfigured dwarf, writhing worms with humanoid faces, aborted foetuses and vast, white eggs with…
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The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer: Intricate, complex and surprising
Can we imagine morality on the scale of the human species as a whole?
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Homing instinct: October by Zoë Wicomb
Wicomb was born in South Africa but has lived in Britain since the 1970s. Like previous work, her latest book…
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