IT by Alexa Chung
11 Sep 2013 03:39:42
I loved everything about the Spice Girls. Their clothes, their music, their manufactured artificiality. But I especially loved the fact they showed women could become celebrities without having any talent. Here's a couple of photos of me completely naked.
My favourite book is Lolita because I just adore the pubescent teenaged girl look. It rocks. I also like the Edie Sedgwick look. How many drugs can one girl take? Never enough, because taking drugs looks really, really cool. Kate Moss is the h... Read Full Story
One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore
11 Sep 2013 03:38:37
Attending Moscow's most exclusive school, they form a Pushkin-inspired club, the Fatal Romantics, and swear to "live for love and romance". But when a play-acting duel goes wrong and two of them die, their club is discovered and condemned as "bourgeois sentimentalism", the children – some as young as six – are arrested and imprisoned, and Stalin's inquisitors embark on a witch-hunt.
Sebag Montefiore's knowledge of the period helps him bring 1945 Moscow to bleak, fascinating life, its "crumbling... Read Full Story
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
11 Sep 2013 03:36:40
At least, that's the stereotype. So when a Hungarian marries a diffident Englishwoman, has a daughter and then runs off, leaving the Englishwoman a financial hostage to her in-laws, all sorts of complicated mittel-European issues arise.
When Charlotte Mendelson's new novel Almost English begins, Marina is 16 and steadily miserable at a mixed boarding school somewhere in the home counties. Her mother, Laura, is living under the benign tyranny of three elderly Hungarians and having an entirely un... Read Full Story
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
08 Sep 2013 04:58:28
The Lowland is a sweeping, ambitious story that examines in intimate detail the intersection of the political and the personal, encompassing nearly 50 years of Indian and American history through the lives of one family. The novel ripples out from the beginnings of the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal in 1967. Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, are attracted by the radical communist movement while at university in Calcutta. But Subhash, the more cautious and sensible of the two, quickly per... Read Full Story
Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir
08 Sep 2013 04:55:44
n a world increasingly polarised by wealth, the efforts to find a metaphor that unifies rich and poor, a shared humanity, if you like, has become both a lucrative and a slightly desperate publishing enterprise. Most of the academic traffic is concentrated at the busy crossroads between economics and psychology, where a nudge is as good as a blink. The idea that we are defined by and subject to market forces is taken as a given in this work; the interest lies in the gap between the economist's fa... Read Full Story
Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe
08 Sep 2013 04:54:10
Not only could Coe have scarcely made it up, the 1958 World's Fair, and Britain's role in it, is spookily attuned to the novelist's imaginative territory. From the satire of What a Carve Up! to the autobiographical comedy of The Rotters' Club, Coe has put his fiction to the service of a mind fascinated – even obsessed – by the rare idiosyncrasies of British life, at home and abroad. Periodically, in various registers, this subject has attracted the attention of Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Magg... Read Full Story
Beatrix Potter fairy tales
06 Sep 2013 04:31:47
The Lake District holiday home where Beatrix Potter sketched her pet rabbit Peter asleep on the hearthrug and red squirrels scampering in the surrounding woods, and a hedgehog snuffling through the undergrowth will on Thursday be given Grade II status by the government.
The listing of the property next to Derwentwater is partly to recognise the nationally important creation of the architect Alfred Waterhouse, but mainly to commemorate it as the inspiration for some of the best-loved children's ... Read Full Story
New Hercule Poirot - new life and new stories!
06 Sep 2013 04:29:40
There are a few clues to exercise the little grey cells – it will be set vaguely in the late 1920s, after the shocking French train strangling business and before the well-timed fireworks at End House in Cornwall; and there will be no Captain Hastings. It is bound to have a twist and it will certainly be the first and perhaps only Poirot book not written by Agatha Christie.
The author's estate and publisher HarperCollins has announced plans to follow the examples of James Bond and Sherlock Holm... Read Full Story
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
06 Sep 2013 04:18:30
Offstage throughout is a horror-film director, Stanislas Cordova, described variously as "legendary" or even "a myth". A cross between Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento, the reclusive Cordova is renowned for peculiar working practices, enormous sensual appetites, and the terrifying nature of his movies, most of which are only available as bootlegs. Now his beautiful, mysterious and "intense" daughter, Ashley, has died in possibly dodgy circumstances. Enter our hero and narrator, disgraced fortys... Read Full Story
Run, Brother, Run by David Berg
05 Sep 2013 04:23:27
The readers have spoken. The runaway winner of our summer reads readers' choice award is Run, Brother, Run: A Memoir of a Murder in My Family by David Berg with almost half (49%) the votes. As promised we are publishing an extract below. An honorable mention goes to our runner-up, The Good Life Lab by Wendy Tremayne, which got a solid 31%. We hope you have enjoyed reading our selection of newly published book this summer. We will back towards the end of the year with a new batch of Winter Reads.... Read Full Story
Danubia by Simon Winder
05 Sep 2013 04:21:57
In Chernivtsi I saw the huge and extraordinary Jewish cemetery, testament to a civilisation expunged. Just outside the Ukrainian resort of Tatariv, I saw the cemetery of Austro-Hungarian soldiers who fell there in the first world war. In Transylvania, I looked at monuments to Romanian and Hungarian heroes. In Trieste, once the empire's great port, I watched a christening at the Serbian Orthodox church.
With the anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war under a year away, books about 19... Read Full Story
For all 50 shades series fans
05 Sep 2013 04:20:10
British author EL James, whose infamous knee-trembler has sold more than 70m copies worldwide, revealed the news on Twitter. She wrote: "I am delighted to let you know that the lovely Dakota Johnson has agreed to be our Anastasia in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." A few minutes later, the novelist added: "The gorgeous and talented Charlie Hunnam will be Christian Grey in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey."
Speculation over the identity of the main cast members for Taylor... Read Full Story
