George Orwell outside the whale
What the writer teaches us about politics and the imagination in a time of crisis.
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Reviewed in short: New books by Ai Weiwei, Elizabeth Strout, Colm Tóibín and Harvey Whitehouse
1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai, Oh William! by Strout, The Magician by Tóibín and The Ritual Animal…
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Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob: an epic that sinks under the weight of facts
The Nobel winner’s novel about a religious cult in 18th-century eastern Europe suffers from an addiction to digression and a…
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Patricia Highsmith’s many vices
The thriller writer’s journals record her vast appetite for sex, drink, violence and – above all – work.
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What Dostoevsky knew about evil
The great Russian writer was no saint. But 200 years after his birth, his work shows how we might confront…
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Our favourite children’s books
From The Jungle Book to Z for Zachariah, New Statesman writers remember the children’s books that shaped us
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We should all be worried about the blacklisting of literature
It may not be true censorship to blacklist books in a Western country with free and open internet access. But…
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George Saunders: “We’re in this intimate tennis game, the reader and the writer”
The Booker Prize-winning novelist on the Russian masters, the shortcuts to great work, and his new creative writing Substack.
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