El Floridita, where daiquiris, chandeliers, and Hemingway’s shadow still linger © Photo by Jane Ammeson

Hemingway's Havana

Exploring the tumultuous life and lasting legend of Ernest Hemingway on the island he called home

Jane Ammeson

4 January 2026

I drove into Old Havana in a pink Chevy convertible with pink and white striped leather seats and fins so sharp that even a shark would go green with envy. It’s exactly like the car my great aunt bought after her divorce, but had to sell when she remarried, as her new doctor husband said it was too sexy.

"Hemingway House Key West, Florida United States" by Michelle Maria, available under CC BY 3.0. Cropped from original

Key West through Hemingway's eyes

How the writer's favorite island continues to preserve his stories, traditions, and spirit

Jane Ammeson

4 September 2026

Returning from Spain, where he had covered the Spanish Civil War along with Martha Gellhorn, a young blonde he had met at Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite bar, Ernest Hemingway discovered his wife Pauline had spent an extraordinary amount of money to build a pool in their backyard, the first one on the island of Key West.

Wednesday’s Child / Stories by Yiyun Li

Wednesday’s Child: Stories by Yiyun Li

FICTION

New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages.

This new collection of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in America. She has won numerous awards for her work, most recently the 2022 PEN/Malamud Award and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award. Readers familiar with her work will recognize her signature style of layered, rich detail, stories within stories, and intertextuality in settings from America, China, and Europe.

An Interview with Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

 An Interview with Seamus Heaney

An excerpt

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ELEANOR WACHTEL

Brick 86

Posted on September 30, 2013

Seamus Heaney was born into a Catholic nationalist family in the mainly Protestant unionist Northern Ireland. When he was eleven, he won a scholarship to a boarding school, St. Columb’s College in Derry. He went on to university teachers’ college in Belfast, publishing his first book of poetry when he was twenty-seven. Forty-four years later, he is the author of a dozen poetry collections, numerous translations, plays, prose, and countless chapbooks and limited editions. His following is so large that crowds lining up to hear him are dubbed “Heaneyboppers.”

 

Ai WeiWei, 2012

An Interview with Ai Weiwei

BYELEANOR WACHTEL

A version of this conversation was broadcast on “Wachtel on the Arts” on Ideas on CBC Radio One in November 2016, produced by Sascha Hastings.

 

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