Review

One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review – freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI

This article is more than 9 months old

One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suits

Anthony Cummings

Tuesaday 11 November 2025

In the framing device that opens the Middle Eastern folk tales collected in One Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar avenges his wife’s infidelity by ordering her execution and marrying a new virgin every night, having each of them beheaded by sunrise so they won’t have time to cheat. When he runs out of victims, the young Persian queen Shahrazad volunteers but stalls her own murder by telling the king one captivating tale after another – and those become the stories we’re reading.

Jeanette Winterson in her haunted 18th-century house. Photograph: Kate Peters

Jeanette Winterson: ‘I’d like to go up in space as a very old lady and just be pushed out’

This article is more than 1 year old

The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author on being a good landlord to a grumpy ghost, her optimism about AI and the ideal size for cats

Sian Cain

Saturday 26 April 2025

Your debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit turns 40 years old this year. How do you feel about it at this point in your life?

Can you believe it? I find that astonishing. I’m always having to think about it because people keep bothering me about it! Its next iteration is a musical, and then I really hope that’s the end. Just let me go! Obviously I love Oranges and I revisited it again with [her 2011 memoir] Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? and the musical too. Surely, by the rule of three, this is it? Then I can live in peace and plant potatoes.

Life and style / Jeanett Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Interview

Q&A: Jeanette Winterson

This article is more than 16 years old

Rosanna Greenstreet

'How do I relax? Running. Sex. (But I hate sex on the run)'

Saturday 5 December 2009

Jeanette Winterson, 50, was brought up by adoptive parents in Accrington. At 23, she wrote Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won a Whitbread award, and later adapted it for a BBC series that won three Baftas. In 2006, she was given an OBE for services to literature. Her latest book is a children's story, The Lion, The Unicorn And Me: The Donkey's Christmas Story. She lives in Gloucestershire and London.

 

Yiyun Li, photographed by Denise J. Applewhite/Princeton University.

Yiyun Li on Comic Books, First Drafts, and Writing Children

By Stephen Patrick Bell

September 7, 2023

Yiyun Li tells me she loves to cut. Like a kindly doctor with a nervous patient, or an assassin, she sets the reader at ease with the gentle manner of her deceptively simple prose, then jabs them in the arm, or the gut, mercifully, with sharp, poignant needles of beautiful, raw humanity. The magic of the depths she can reach with such brevity is perhaps a trick of her editorial instinct, to cut away from the prose until the reader recognizes the absence on the page as something that’s alive within itself. In her latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, Li draws pictures of lives suspended in various stages of grief, mourning, and loss, but, because this is the nature of loss, her characters are often contending with something palpable and tangible that exists off the page, lost to the void. 

Yiyun Li / I'm more interested in the extras

Yuyin Li

Yiyun Li

I'm more interested in the extras

The author of The Vagrants joins the likes of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in writing in English as a second language. Yiyun Li's haunting tales about social outcasts are drawing similar acclaim.

By Sasha Abramsky

Volume 29 · Number 2 · Winter 2012

English professor Yiyun Li sits in the dining room of her spacious family home in the Oakland hills, and smiles as she talks about her fiction writing. A small reproduction of Van Gogh's bedroom painting adorns the wall above her. The clutter generated by her two young sons, Vincent and James, dominates the living room off to the side.

Writing Is a Second Life / An Interview with Yiyun Li

Yuyin Li

Writing Is a Second Life

An Interview with Yiyun Li

by Alicia Oltuski

Published on February 25, 2015

Your work is widely, internationally read and, although many of your narratives take place in China (where you grew up) or among Chinese Americans, you write in English. What are the nuances your English-speaking readership is most likely to overlook, misapprehend, or interpret differently from how they were originally intended?

My hope, of course, is that it doesn’t happen. There are certain expectations from the readers that I am aware of, but I don’t think it is my role to meet them. For instance, some readers would read my writing as commentary on China and ask why I can’t be more political; some readers think the stories and novels I write could only happen in China. These things are not why I write, and I find that I have been put into that place from time to time to be a spokesperson against my wish.

 

Claire Foy, Danny Boyle, Guy Pearce, and Jack O'Connell attends the "Ink" Screening and 2026 Opening Red Carpet during the 83rd Venice International Film Festival at Sala Grande on September 02, 2026 in Venice, ItalyEarl Gibson III/Deadline via Getty Images

Venice Film Festival 2026 Opening Ceremony, ‘Ink’ Premiere & George Clooney Lifetime Achievement Presentation

Robert Lang

2 September 2026

Lights go up on the Lido di Venezia tonight as the 83rd Venice Film Festival kicks off its Opening Ceremony amidst the city’s timeless canals and historic piazzas.

Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

A SOFTER SIDE

There was a time when a Celine red carpet dress was almost guaranteed to be covered in sequins, but Michael Rider has shifted the focus towards understated tailoring, as we’ve seen on Charlize Theron and now Maggie Gyllenhaal.

What saves this for me is the draping across the neckline and the fact that it feels right for her role as jury president. It has enough interest for a premiere without trying to compete with the evening’s more dramatic gowns.

Celebrities at the ‘Ink’ Venice Film Festival Premiere

Posted by Catherine Kallon / SEPTEMBER 2, 2026

Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

Rooney Mara / White is her other neutral

Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

WHITE IS HER OTHER NEUTRAL

Rooney Mara has long leaned towards sustainable labels, so seeing her in Stella McCartney Spring 2026 feels like a natural choice.

And if you’re surprised to see Rooney in white, don’t be. When she opts out of black, white is usually her next move. The clean lines and asymmetric draping are firmly within her minimalist wheelhouse, while the cut-out detail gives the look enough interest for a Venice photocall.

I’m expecting a return to black for this evening’s premiere, most likely Givenchy, but for daytime duties, this feels exactly right.

Styled by Ryan Hastings.

2026 Venice Film Festival Celebrity Arrivals

Sydney Sweeney arrived in Venice

2026 Venice Film Festival Celebrity Arrivals

Posted by Catherine Kallon

The 2026 Venice Film Festival starts on Wednesday, and the first wave of celebrities has already begun arriving at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. With 11 days of premieres, photocalls and parties ahead of us, consider this the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a very busy fashion week.

Which Margot Robbie ‘Wuthering Heights’ Press Tour Look Was Your Favourite?

Catherine Kallo / 18 February 2026

Judging by the comments and the conversations I had with some of you in the chat, many of you were not entirely sold on Margot Robbie’s Wuthering Heights press tour looks. 

Whether that came down to what felt like an overbearing theme that required too much explanation to land, or doubts about whether Margot had the prowess to carry some of the more complex looks, the scepticism was clear.

Beautiful Women / Bryce Dallas Howard

  

Bryce Dallas Howard

Beautiful women / Sylvie van der Vaart

LAS MUJERES MÁS BELLAS DEL MUNDO

Sylvie van der Vaart

Beautiful women / Águeda López

 

BEAUTIFUL WOMEN

Águeda López

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl By Yiyun Li

Illustration by Adrian Tomine

Fiction

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

By Yiyun Li

He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that.

Loss, Loneliness, and Love in Yiyun Li’s Latest Collection

Loss, Loneliness, and Love in Yiyun Li’s Latest Collection

'Gold Boy, Emerald Girl' by Yiyun Li 

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

By Melissa C. Wong

“Welcome to the land of the unfortunate and the deserted,” intones a character in the newest collection of fiction from rising literary star Yiyun Li. This melancholy statement serves as an apt introduction to the nine perfectly-realized worlds in “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.” Alongside her tales of the miserable and despondent, however, Li’s enchanting prose also nurtures a distinctly more uplifting message. Ultimately, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” thrives on a constantly pulsing, energetic undercurrent: a triumphant depiction of the power of interpersonal connection.

Yiyun Li

Review

Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li review – motherhood as loss

This article is more than 2 years old

These bruising, beautiful short stories explore the pain of lost children, along with parenthood’s more usual sacrifices – youth, romantic love and a sense of self

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

Sarah Crown

Saturday 30 September 2023

With the title of her new short story collection, the first since 2010’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li offers us a typically finespun hint at what we’re in for. The stories in Wednesday’s Child take as their subject the state of motherhood: its weight and its potency; the questions it raises, and the sacrifices and sublimations it exacts.

 

Yiyun Li

An Interview with Yiyun Li

BYELEANOR WACHTEL

Yiyun Li was born in China in 1972. Her father was a physicist, her mother a school teacher, and she herself was something of a math whiz as a kid. She studied immunology at university in Beijing and always planned to go the United States to further her education. When she was twenty-three, she fulfilled that dream and went to graduate school in Iowa. Her first year there, she was lonely. Her boyfriend, soon to be her husband, was still in China, so she enrolled in a community writing course, figuring she’d improve her English. Her first story was highly praised by her teacher. Yiyun Li was amazed; she’d never written fiction before, in English or Chinese. She continued in science and got a graduate degree before enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received two more M.A.’s—in fiction and creative non-fiction.