How the Stasi poets tried to win the Cold War
Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle reveals how the GDR taught its spies to use verse as an ideological weapon.
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“My culture will survive”: the Uyghur poet Fatimah Abdulghafur Seyyah on her family’s devastating persecution
In a series of specially commissioned poems, the writer who left China in 2010 refuses to be “defined by genocide”.
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Reviewed in short: New books by Sofi Thanhauser, Jessica Au, Jo Browning Wroe and Joseph Sassoon
Worn by Thanhauser, Cold Enough for Snow by Au, A Terrible Kindness by Wroe and The Global Merchants by Sassoon.
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Monica Ali’s Love Marriage: sex, class, race and satire
The Brick Lane author’s first novel in a decade is overstuffed but delightfully so.
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Living in an immaterial world
The metaverse promises infinite new realms just as tangible as the one we will leave behind.
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Sheila Heti: “When someone you love dies, you become close to the world of the dead”
The Canadian author on grief, nature, fiction and why criticism may be the purpose of life.
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Sheila Heti’s dream-world
Pure Colour, Heti’s risk-taking, reality-bending new novel about a father and daughter, is a thing of frustration and wonder.
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How Isidore Isou ignited an age of youth rebellion
The “energy and savagery” of Isou’s Lettrist revolution lived on in May 68 and punk.
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