‘If I left England,’ Ted says, and chooses the most melodious of his many tones of voice to deliver the punchline, ‘I have a feeling England would collapse. We’re a little tribe here, you know, with the Queen looking after us. Where would I go?’
The Quickest Way to Lose Money
The art director Julien Rothenstein talks about the trials and tribulations of designing a literary journal in 1970s Britain. What were your first impressions of Emma Tennant? Julian Rothenstein: After I met Emma, within three days I was driving around in her ancient Mercedes Benz with The Supremes blasting out of the sound system. I […]
Keep Out
Back in early spring, when morgues in Italy were running out of space, and people were still coming to blows over toilet paper at the supermarket, Iain McKell returned to the fisherman’s cottage he was renting in Weymouth, an English seaside resort, to find a note pushed through his door: “You should not be in Weymouth, go back to where you live.”
Ten Timeless Beach Reads
From André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches to Emily Henry’s aptly-named rom-com, Beach Read, there are plenty of just-published books that are ripe for reading poolside, preferably with a daiquiri in hand. But there are also page-turning reads that never get old, some even attaining the venerable status of literary classic. We plundered the One […]
Ten Books Chosen by Ten Black Notables from Lupita Nyong’o to Ta-Nehisi Coates
In this tragic year in which the failures of the America’s promise to its citizen have been made abundantly clear, we have looked in our archives to identify ten books by Black writers chosen by Black notables. All should be required reading.
Notes from a Small-Town Bookshop
Nothing, of course, is easy. Or not for long. When Dasha began homeschooling her son, her art work took a hiatus. And despite her love of New York, she never lost the sense of being an outsider. “I had a lot of luck at the beginning but this luck did not translate
The 1970s Book Club is Here
Vote for ten books you want to read (or reread) from the year in which the Concord made it’s maiden flight, the Beatles disbanded, and Apollo 13 aborted its mission to the moon. Last year we launched our first book club, reading 10 books first published in 1969. This year we’re moving on by […]
Have a Mitford Christmas with our exclusive holiday gift
Three classics by Nancy Mitford chosen by Rufus Wainwright, Tilda Swinton, and Marianne Faithful, with a quarter pound of our favorite tea.
Children’s Author of the Month: Wanda Gag
About the time that A.A.Milne began writing his tales of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, and 12 years before the arrival of Curious George, the Minnesotan artist Wanda Gag, the daughter of impoverished immigrants from Bohemia, was quietly, almost inadvertently, launching a revolution in book publishing. Her first title, Millions of Cats, the oldest […]
Remembering Toni Morrison
“I really only do one thing,’ the writer Toni Morrison, who has died at the age of 88, told Hilton Als in 2003, when she was profiled for The New Yorker. “I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.”
