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.
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.
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.
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| Sydney Sweeney arrived in Venice |
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.
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.
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| Illustration by Adrian Tomine |
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| Yiyun Li |
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
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.
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| Yiyun Li |
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.
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| Yiyun Li |
Yiyun Li was born in 1972 in Beijing. Along with her parents and one sister, she lived in an apartment complex built as housing for employees of the Department of Nuclear Industry, where her father worked as a physicist. In 1991 Li reported to Xinyang to complete one year of service in the Chinese army before going to college. After receiving her bachelor of science from Peking University, in 1996 she moved to the United States to study immunology at the University of Iowa. However, after taking a writing course as a way to improve her English, she found herself writing fiction. She decided to change the focus of her studies, entering the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop after receiving her master of science in 2000. She earned her master of fine arts in 2005 with a focus on fiction and creative nonfiction.
The latest instalment in the novelist’s series based around his idiosyncratic character John Cromer is a marvel of care and attention to language
Adam Mars-Jones managed to find himself twice listed as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, in 1983 and 1993, despite the small matter of never having actually published a novel. Yet the judges were obviously on to something: Caret, his long-awaited new book, is the latest hefty chunk in a comic sequence – described by the author as “semi-infinite” – that, after Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), now totals 2,000 pages, as if in overabundant repayment of a debt.
The third instalment in the brilliantly immersive autobiography of tragicomic creation John Cromer takes a picaresque tour of 1970s England
Sarah Crown
Wednesday 16 Augusto 2023
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Adam Mars-Jones – a Granta best young novelist, twice, before publishing his first slim novel – tells Jasper Rees how he came to start on an epic trilogy
The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis
Sarah Crown
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?
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| Peter Nadas |
Susan Sontag gave that high praise to “A Book of Memories,” a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism.
Peter Nadas, a Hungarian author who was best known for “A Book of Memories” (1986), a labyrinthine chronicle of life under Communism, and who was often discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday at his home in Gombosszeg, Hungary. He was 83.
The physical copy of Peter Nadas’s “Parallel Stories” does not hold up well to a particularly aggressive reading. In at least one reader’s experience, cracking the book’s spine to make the 1,133-page tome into a more manageable bedtime read caused pages to break loose from their binding; by novel’s end piles of disordered pages were scattered every which way.
