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.
Emil Huseynzade; Gallery/Scout Press
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-WilliamsOne 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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
She was a sex-positive star in the 80s and 90s who became an ‘accidental activist’ and her life is explored in a HBO documentary produced by Sarah Jessica Parker
Jim BarberRobin Byrd has no doubt about where the archive of her life should end up. “I think it should be in the Smithsonian,” she said. “I like to think big.”
Among the personalities known to frequent Fire Island Pines, none stood out quite like Robin Byrd. Robin Byrd is a former American porn actress and host of “The Robin Byrd Show,” a show that appeared on commercial-use cable television in New York City for over 30 years.
A recent documentary explores the conflictive relationship between the British author and his most popular work, which became a scandalous phenomenon due to Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation
Belita Gracia was one of the many women photographers who seemed condemned to oblivion until Ana Valiño discovered her story. From that fortunate encounter came an exhibition, the first major public recognition the León native received a few days before she died at 101
Virginia Woolf once wrote that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” The work of Belita Gracia remained hidden throughout her life in albums she kept at her home in Barcelona. A few months after turning 101, much of her photography came to light in an exhibition in her hometown.
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| James Baldwin |
Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs review – the relationships that drove a genius
A new biography puts Baldwin’s sexuality – and the men he loved – front and centre
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| Dave Eggers |
As his new novel is published, the US author talks about nurturing the next generation of creatives, debating Sam Altman – and why he writes on a boat in San Francisco Bay
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