Han Kang is a disquieting storyteller who leads the reader into the very heart of human experience, where the singular crosses the universal. Author of ten books of fiction and poetry in her native Korean, Han’s subversive work has been brought onto the Anglophone stage through close partnership with her award-winning translator Deborah Smith. Smith’s elegant renditions of the novels HUMAN ACTS (2016) and THE VEGETARIAN (2015) form part of a recent blossoming of international interest in Korean literature; Dalkey Archive’s Library of Korean Literature launched in 2013 and consists of 25 translations so far. Originally published as three novellas in South Korea nearly a decade ago, Han has said that THE VEGETARIAN was initially received as ‘very extreme and bizarre’ in Korea. It has since become a cult bestseller, with translation rights sold in twenty countries and its central novella ‘Mongolian Mark’ awarded the prestigious Yi Sang Literary Prize in 2005. HUMAN ACTS, her latest novel, was awarded the Korean Manhae Literary Prize last year, adding to her numerous other accolades.
Friday, July 3, 2026
Han Kang / Moon-shaped rice cake
Moon-shaped rice cake
by Hang Kang
Last spring, someone asked me whether I’d had ‘a particular experience, when you were young, which brought you close to sadness?’ during a radio interview.
White / State of Mid by Hang Kang
White | State of Mind
Newborn gown
My mother’s first child died, I was told, less than two hours into life.
Thursday, July 2, 2026
Beyond Bob Marley / The sound of resistance
A solitary drummer in a Jamaican interior, where rhythm carries memory, resistance, and the unfinished struggle against Babylon
Beyond Bob Marley: the sound of resistance
How reggae became a global language of decolonization, memory, and revolt
Hakim Ikhlef
29 Junr 2026
The world of reggae: beyond Bob Marley Bob Marley’s world—the one that matters—was never about comfort. It was a world of resistance, return, and the radical imagination—where chant is constitution, the drum is memory, and dance is the first act of freed movement. Going beyond Bob Marley points to restoring the genuine and authentic meaning of reggae in its original context. It enables us to place it back in its historical dimension of sonic and poetic insurgency, exploring the global context of decolonization and Third Worldism in revolutionary times—even if the 60s and 70s attempts failed irremediably.
Hakim Ikhlef
29 Junr 2026
The world of reggae: beyond Bob Marley Bob Marley’s world—the one that matters—was never about comfort. It was a world of resistance, return, and the radical imagination—where chant is constitution, the drum is memory, and dance is the first act of freed movement. Going beyond Bob Marley points to restoring the genuine and authentic meaning of reggae in its original context. It enables us to place it back in its historical dimension of sonic and poetic insurgency, exploring the global context of decolonization and Third Worldism in revolutionary times—even if the 60s and 70s attempts failed irremediably.
Long Wave By Daisy Johnson review – a sublime novel of motherhood and loss
BOOK OF THE DAY
Long Wave By Daisy Johnson review – a sublime novel of motherhood and loss
Covering three generations, this tangled story of secrets, childhood, abandonment and care might be her best work yet
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
In 2018 Daisy Johnson was the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted for the Booker prize, for her debut novel Everything Under, a gender-fluid reimagining of the Oedipus myth involving canal boat communities and their complex family dynamics, plus a strange monster lurking in the depths. Before that, her short‑story collection Fen, with its blend of the uncanny and the workaday, was critically acclaimed. She has Written Sisters, a psychological horror that uses supernatural elements to explore sibling bonds and grief, and The Hotel, series of seriously chilling interlinked ghost stories. Now comes Long Wave, which, while it shares some of these hallmarks, is in many ways finer and more subtle: perhaps her strongest work yet.
Wednesday, July 1, 2026
Family Life at Clinton Street by Lydia Davis
Family Life at Clinton Street
The wooden Chinese junk, with its carved crew, used to sit on a small table in Grandfather’s bedroom, before his death. It had been a gift from his friend Burlingame when they were both young. Burlingame had brought it back from a trip with his father to the Far East.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller
Candice Carty-Williams; the cover of 'Queenie Is Working on It'.Credit : Emil Huseynzade; Gallery/Scout Press
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Emil Huseynzade; Gallery/Scout Press
Book of the day
Review
Queenie Is Working On It by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart sequel to a breakout bestseller
Agynaecological examination is a good analogy for the kind of painful self-inspection at which Queenie Jenkins excels. The heroine of Candice Carty-Williams’s 2019 debut Queenie memorable begins that novel with a medical appointment for a mystery ailment that turns out to be a miscarriage. The sequel, Queenie Is Working on It, picks up the story eight years on, with the now 33-year-old Queenie back on the gurney, this time for a fertility checkup. “I didn’t realise they did condoms for anything other than … penises,” Queenie observes lamely as the unsmiling doctor sheaths a probe. Life has changed, but in many ways, Queenie has not.
Candice Carty-Williams / ‘People feel very attached to Queenie’
Candice Carty-WilliamsINTERVIEW
Candice Carty-Williams: ‘People feel very attached to Queenie’
One of the questions Candice Carty-Williams has spent the past few years batting away is whether she is Queenie. It is perhaps inevitable: her bestselling debut novel followed Queenie Jenkins, a twentysomething south London journalist navigating heartbreak, racism, terrible men and an escalating sense that her life was slipping beyond her control. Like Carty-Williams, Queenie is south London-born, Black and works in media.
Candice Carty-Williams / ‘You get accustomed to men saying, "You’re pretty for a black girl"’
Candice Carty-Williams: ‘You get accustomed to men saying, "You’re pretty for a black girl"’
The debut novelist struggled to find books about women like her, so she wrote one. She talks about interracial dating, white middle-class publishing and her love for social media
Fiona Sturges
Saturdady 30 March 2019
A
fortnight ago the writer Candice Carty-Williams was talking to a man on a dating app. They began to discuss meeting up, then out of the blue, he announced: “I like really strong ebony women and I want them to dominate me.”“This has happened to me, like, 100 times,” Carty-Williams says with surprising cheerfulness. “He was a white man. It’s only now that I’m old and wise enough to understand my value that I didn’t take that forward. The younger me – the girl growing up believing that black girls are not desirable except for sex – would have entertained that for a long time.”
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review / A smart and breezy debut
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart and breezy debut
Tuesday 16 April 2019
You can’t help but suspect that literary fiction short-changes readers when it comes to portraying black Britons. A novel such as Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, about middle-class midlife marital crises, felt radical mainly because the alternatives tend to be gritty or nothing: a choice between, say, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City, about estate kids caught up in riots, or John Lanchester’s south London panorama Capital, without a black British character in sight.
Monday, June 29, 2026
A Searing Memoir of Being Raised by Radicals on the Run
NONFICION
A Searing Memoir of Being Raised by Radicals on the Run
DANGEROUS, DIRTY, VIOLENT, AND YOUNG: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, by Zayd Ayers
May 19, 2026
There have been numerous novels, films and memoirs inspired by the American radical left of the late 1960s and early ’70s, but Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s fascinating and affecting memoir, “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young,” stands out as definitive. Dohrn is both an outsider and an insider, having been born into the underground: His parents are the former Weathermen Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Dohrn’s dual perspective yields a meticulously researched history of an explosive time as well as a deeply felt, intimate portrait of a very unusual family.
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn review – child of the revolution
Review
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn review – child of the revolution
The son of fugitive leaders of the militant Weather Underground recounts his chaotic, peripatetic upbringing
Peter Carty
Friday 26 June 2026
Every aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to the small children within it; only hindsight can bring what was abnormal into relief. Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s earliest years were spent on the run from the FBI; his parents were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground faction, a group dedicated to the overthrow of the US government.
National Bestseller / Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
The wholesomely pornographic Robin Byrd sued Time Warner to keep her show on the air
The wholesomely pornographic Robin Byrd sued Time Warner to keep her show on the air
‘Mr. Rogers meets Debbie Does Dallas’
The camera slithers over a pair of prostrate legs that glimmer with sheen. Her white fingernails trace a kneecap, tickle a tan thigh. She flips the side of her thong panties to reveal smooth, hairless skin. A belly chain twinkles underneath her breasts, which she’s tucked into a black crochet bra.