Building on his seminal lecture ‘The Shoah After Gaza’ (LRB 21 March 2024) and his earlier books From the Ruins of Empire and The Age of Anger, novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra’s latest work The World After Gaza (Fern Press) seeks to place the current crisis in Gaza and Palestine within the broader context of the troubled and tragic history of c…

Marion Milner, across her long career as psychoanalyst, essayist and artist, thought deeply about creativity in all its forms, exploring fields as diverse as anthropology, folklore, education, literature, art, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology. In Marion Milner: On Creativity, David Russell, Professor of English at the University of California,…

Rebecca Solnit’s latest essay collection explores subjects as diverse as the climate crisis, toxic masculinity and the rise of the far right with her usual flair and capacity for radical hope: Merlin Sheldrake has described No Straight Road Takes You There as ‘a book of fierce and poetic thinking - and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non…

Before she became a well-known novelist, Margaret Atwood was an award-winning poet. She has been publishing poetry for more than 60 years, from the self-published, hand-set Double Persephone in 1961 to its follow up The Circle Game which won the Governor General’s Award, to her latest, critically-acclaimed collection Dearly in 2020. Paper Boat (Cha…

‘Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.’ Solvej Balle’s septology On the Calculation of Volume (Faber), thirty years in the making, was published in Danish by the author’s own press to huge and universal …

Gliff, the latest novel from Ali Smith, forms the first part of a duology; its title, the Scots word for a glimpse or shock, will be echoed but not replicated in next year’s Glyph. In a dystopian, Kafkaesque fictional lanscape, Smith explores how we make meaning and are made by it, and what it would actually mean for the next generation to sort out…

Josh Cohen’s new book, All the Rage (Granta), explores anger, in all its permutations - social media arguments, political divides, road rage, passive aggression – in the words of Deborah Levy, ‘brilliantly investigating what it is when we are enraged’. What should we make of our anger; to what use can we put it? Cohen’s previous books include Not W…

In The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg – author of the HWA Crown Award-shortlisted Woman’s Lore - looks behind the tinsel and the turkey to explore the darker traditions of the Christmas season. At wassails, hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by ghastly, grinning horses, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors, we discover how these customs …

Eileen Myles reads from their first collection of poetry since 2018’s Evolution. The poems in a “Working Life” evoke the joy and unease in the quotidian, moving ‘with call and response between perception and thought’, as Camille Roy writes in Brooklyn Rail magazine. Myles is in conversation with journalist and activist Amelia Abraham, whose Queer I…

Isabelle Baafi, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for her pamphlet Ripe, constructs her debut collection Chaotic Good (Faber) around the story of an escape from a toxic marriage. ‘Chaotic Good is a debut of amazing endurance,’ writes poet Will Harris. ‘Its formal pressures create a kind of kaleidoscopic intensity that – with each turn of the cha…

In Poor Artists (Particular Books) Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente (AKA The White Pube), explore the bizarre world of contemporary art through their protagonist Quest Talukdar. In surreal encounters with other artists, Quest learns profound truths about money and power, and must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true…

The Third Realm is the next instalment of the series Karl Ove Knausgaard began with The Morning Star and continued in The Wolves of Eternity; like its two precursors, it is a breathtaking exploration of ordinary lives on the cusp of irrevocable change, ‘re-enchanting the cosmos with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it’ (in the words …

‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is’, writes Andrew O’Hagan of Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today…

In Black Meme (Verso) Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understand…

In his memoir Sonic Life (Faber), Thurston Moore recounts a life that has been defined by music. Following a childhood rock ’n’ roll epiphany in the early 1960s, his infatuation with the subversive world of 1970s punk and no wave led him to move to New York City, where he immersed himself in the underground music and art scenes. In 1981 he co-found…

Described by Mick Herron as ‘seductive, entrancing, and quite off the wall’, Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake (Cape) reaffirms her position as one of America’s most exciting and accomplished writers of fiction. In a reimagining of the spy novel for an age of ecological crisis, Kushner leads us to a remote Neanderthal cave in rural France…

In ‘a wonderful book about looking and learning’ (Gavin Francis) retired GP Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger’s work and friendship had on her working life as a doctor in a deprived London borough. Five decades of engagement with Berger’s work and twenty years of friendship with the man himself made her, she is convinced, a better …