Timothée Chalamet to play Willy Wonka in origins movie | Timothée Chalamet
[ad_1] Timothée Chalamet is set to take on the role of Willy Wonka in a new origins movie. According to Deadline, the Oscar-nominated star of Call Me by Your Name will follow in the footsteps of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp in an all-singing and all-dancing performance in a prequel inspired by Roald Dahl’s book […]
The reputation game: how authors try to control their image from beyond the grave | Philip Roth
[ad_1] Writers and critics are raising questions over the role that agents and estates play in managing archives and limiting access to biographical material. Fresh worries have been fuelled by the continuing fiasco over the publication of Philip Roth: The Biography, with accusations that access to the famed US author’s archival material is being unfairly […]
Toddler Hunting and Other Stories by Taeko Kono review – sex lives of the quietly kinky | Short stories
[ad_1] This unignorably strange collection of stories evokes warring responses of admiration and disgust in the reader: Taeko Kono is a writer who puts the toxic into intoxicating. The selection, written between 1961 and 1971, is a brave choice for one of the launch titles in W&N’s new list of modern classics. (Though the publisher […]
Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency review – how energy shaped the way we built the world | Art and design books
[ad_1] Consider the Georgian terrace, now a widely admired model of traditional city-building. Its most important material was not those of which it was ostensibly made, but coal: coal fired the kilns that made the bricks and the lime for the mortar; it helped make the glass for the large windows; it smelted and melted […]
Mateo Askaripour: ‘Everything is sales, whether we call it that or not’ | Fiction
[ad_1] Mateo Askaripour’s bookshelves are a mess of plants and cameras with dangling straps and books crammed in tightly. Prominently placed, parallel to the 29-year-old author’s left ear within clear view of the camera, is his debut novel, Black Buck. “At first I didn’t have it so prominently,” Askaripour says via a Zoom call from […]
Are we living in ‘Orwellian’ times? No we’re not | George Orwell
[ad_1] The celebrated Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers recently released a new single called “Orwellian”. “We live in Orwellian times,” it begins. A hungover literary journalist in his dressing gown, as memorably described in Orwell’s Confessions of a Book-Reviewer (1946), might agree, but should anyone else? People who ought to know better, including people […]
Diamond Hill by Kit Fan review – pre-handover Hong Kong noir | Fiction
[ad_1] “It had been two years since I set foot in Hong Kong, and it already looked a different beast,” remarks Buddha, the laconic narrator of Kit Fan’s gripping and highly accomplished debut novel. With its themes of powerlessness, upheaval, colonialism and displacement, Diamond Hill feels especially timely in light of Hong Kong’s ongoing pro-democracy […]
In the Heights review – Lin-Manuel Miranda musical loaded with Sunny-D optimism | Movies
[ad_1] There’s a sentimental kind of exuberance and more than two solid hours of dancing in the streets in this boisterous, if earnest, movie-musical version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hit from 2008. (Famously, it was while taking a well-earned holiday after this stage success that Miranda chanced upon Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton – […]
Hanif Kureishi: ‘I’d like to see a British Muslim Sopranos’ | Stage
[ad_1] Hanif Kureishi has been reflecting on toxic masculinity. He has heard a lot about it in the past year and it has entered the fiction he has been writing over lockdown – at quite a rate by the sound of it – and sparked stories about predation, sexual misdemeanour and “what’s going on between […]
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen review – an excess of genius? | Fiction
[ad_1] The first obligation, when turning to the work of the electrifying American writer Joshua Cohen, is to stress that he clearly is a genius. In his essays (Attention!) and stories (Four New Messages), and in novels such as Witz, Book of Numbers, Moving Kings and now The Netanyahus – a comic historical fantasia – […]
