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Articles on Books

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Julianne Moore’s star turn in Still Alice provides a lesson in understanding neurodegenerative diseases. Icon Film

Still Alice, and the advocacy for Alzheimer’s in fiction

Still Alice – starring Julianne Moore – tells the story of Alice Howland, a linguistics professor diagnosed with a form of early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. Moore has already netted a Golden Globe and is…
Helen Macdonald, winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year. Marzena Pogorzaly

Why popular culture is mad for medical fiction

Whatever your opinion of book prizes, they remain a useful tool for understanding what is popular in the literary world. The Costa Book of the Year, awarded this year to Helen Macdonald for her book H…
Joaquin Phoenix plays hippy private eye Doc in Inherent Vice. Warner Bros. Pictures

Inherent Vice: how to adapt a difficult book for the screen

In a revealing moment from Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 “nostalgia-noir” novel, hippy private eye Doc Sportello speaks to a client, Trillium Fortnight, who is able to diagnose the whereabouts of…
Scandinavian cultural exports are showing the world a different mode of representing struggle, crime, and death. edittrix/Flickr

Tying the Knausgaardian knot: struggle, Scandinavian-style

The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is the most recent export of a particularly Scandinavian expression of personal struggle. This ethos of resistance to larger socio-political forces, coupled with…
Otto Dov Kulka in Terezín, 1960s. Archive of Security Services (ABS), Czech Republic

Can we question Holocaust memoirs?

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, the victims of the Holocaust stand, with a good reason, at the centre of our attention. It is survivors’ memoirs that shaped…
50 Shades? How dare you! Olesya Feketa/Shutterstock

What the books you receive this Christmas say about you

Christmas is a time to give generously and receive graciously. And yet… And yet. Many of us have opened Christmas presents and thought: what does it say about me that you thought this – this! – was the…
Books do not necessarily bring us all together, tell ‘our’ story, unite us. AAP/Joe Castro

PM’s Literary Awards: how reading opens us to a world of pain

On Monday night, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced with a tie in the fiction category between A World of Other People by Steven Carroll and the Booker Prize and Queensland Literary Award…
Best to keep it under the covers? Lisa S.

Why I’d say yes, yes, yes to the Bad Sex award

Sexual intercourse is getting on a bit. Not only has it been boosting the human population since we emerged from the primordial swamp, it’s more than half a century since Philip Larkin noted its arrival…
Bibliophiles have lamented the death of bookshops due to eReaders, but eReaders can encourage reading in new ways. Flickr/nate bolt

eReaders aren’t destroying reading – they’re just changing it

The nature of reading books is changing: the closure of traditional bookstores indicates that paper book sales are in decline. It is easy to feel as though this will discourage children from engaging with…
PD James died on November 27, aged 94. Henning Kaiser/EPA

Long live the work of PD James, crime fiction pioneer

The news of P D James’s passing has inevitably prompted me to consider the Queen of Crime and what she created. But her death has made me think not of loss, but of what the genre, and me, have gained…
Odds were on for Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o winning the Nobel Prize this year. University of California/Ho/EPA

Five African novels to read before you die

There is a surfeit of book prizes. Big ones, small ones, ones that award experimental fiction, others that concentrate on female authors, or young authors, or authors from Ireland or Latin America. African…

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