Iris Murdoch is one of the most important English-writing novelists and philosophers of the 20th century. What threads run through her philosophical and literary work? What makes a philosophical novelist? We begin with a biographical note about Murdoch’s life, work, and reputation. We then discuss the themes and layered meaning of three of her…

TODAY: In 1963, Ann Patchett, American author and owner of Parnassus Books, is born. Photo by Rodrigo Fernández. “Literary style should be a way of knowing how the world is met in its unfolding.” In conversation with Booker Prize-winner Paul Lynch. | Lit Hub “A poetic work of the highest order.” The late Gabriel García Márquez…

Akshaya Mukul’s biography of the influential Hindi poet Agyeya, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya, (Penguin) has won the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize for 2023, in its sixth edition. It was picked from a shortlist comprising Achyut Chetan’s Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (Cambridge University Press), Rotem Geva’s Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford…

Ten years ago, French economist Thomas Piketty wrote a book trying to explain the fundamental economic forces that shape the world. Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely bestseller, introducing to the book-buying masses such themes as the capital-income ratio, modifications to the Kuznets curve and the elasticity of substitution of labour. For a…

They include an espionage caper, the tale of a murderous librarian and a high-stakes adventure that takes place inside the various stomachs of a whale. This year’s best thrillers come in various shades of suspense, dread and wonder. But each leads the reader down a twisty path toward an unknown destination. Let’s begin with Daniel…

It was a conversation with her uncle that sparked the idea for her story, says Srividya Tadepalli, the winner of the newly-established Deodar Prize for Indian fiction.  ALSO READ Rebel with a soft heart | Review of Taslima Nasrin’s new poetry book, ‘Burning Roses in My Garden’ “A few years ago, my uncle went to…

1 December The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen All Enid Lambert wants is everyone home for one last Christmas. Her husband, Alfred, is rapidly deteriorating with Parkinson’s. And so her three adult children – banker Gary, wannabe writer Chip and celebrity chef Denise – dutifully make their way from Philadelphia, Lithuania and New York up the…

The 2024 Booker winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, is a vastly admirable book, but there is something deeply odd about it: it is a novel about a dystopian coup that takes down Ireland’s ‘liberal democracy’, not about the dystopian coup that was actually happening at the time it was written. By definition, most novels are stories…

Jan Carson Jan Carson’s next book, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, is out next April. Photograph: Izzy Carson My book of the year is undoubtedly Catherine Lacey’s epic Biography of X. Lacey’s writing continues to astound me and this hybrid novel/pseudo-history of 20th-century America masquerading as a biography put me in mind of WG…