Review

The Castle by Jon Ronson review – bizarre tales of modern masculinity

A journalist embarks on a wild goose chase that might – or might not – be informative about the male condition

Anthony Cummings
Tuesday 8 September 2026

 

Recovering from surgery at home in upstate New York in 2023, Jon Ronson awoke to a string of texts from his adult son about a weird evening he just had at a stranger’s castle in Connecticut. Having gone along with a friend who’d been invited to a party there, he arrived to find a few lost-looking young women with the sixtysomething host, Chris Mark, a steel heir filming a reality show about “101 princesses” whose first rule was “Never say no to King Chris”.

 

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.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY
Review

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – God is in the detail

The latest instalment in the novelist’s series based around his idiosyncratic character John Cromer is a marvel of care and attention to language

Anthony Cummins

Mon 7 Aug 2023 07.00 BST

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.

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams review – a smart and breezy debut

This article is more than 7 years old

A Londoner’s low self-esteem leads to a series of ill-advised flings in an amusing first novel

Anthony Cummins
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.

 

Review

Audition by Katie Kitamura review – an evasive experiment

This article is more than 10 months old

This tricksy novel from the author of A Separation takes its cue from Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy – but what starts as intrigue soon starts to feel like time-wasting

Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura among authors longlisted for Women’s prize for fiction

Katie Kitamura: ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’

Anthony Cummins

Monday 14 April 2025

Katie Kitamura’s most recent books, A Separation (2017) and Intimacies (2021) – each narrated by an unnamed woman upping sticks for Europe in the wake of emotional upheaval – were among several American novels to take inspiration from the coolly analytical style of Rachel Cusk’s Outlinetrilogy. Kitamura’s new novel, Audition, centred on marital strife between an actor and an art critic in New York, likewise deploys that Outline-patented register of philosophical meditation, this time to unsettling and even unfathomable purpose – which is another way of saying I just didn’t get it.

Lydia Davis
Paris, 1973

Interview

Lydia Davis: ‘I write it the way I want to write it’

This article is more than 4 years old

The author on flash fiction, translation as a route to creativity, and why we need to prioritise the climate crisis over ‘business as usual with writing’

Anthony Cummins

27 November 2021

Index Entry, the shortest of the very short stories for which the American writer Lydia Davis is best known, runs to just four words: “Christian, I’m not a”. When Davis won the Man Booker International prize in 2013, Ali Smith called her a “daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic writer who reminds you… what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean”.

 

Mick Herron

Interview

Mick Herron: ‘I’m interested in incompetence, things going wrong’

This article is more than 3 years old

The Slow Horses author on the ‘virtue of limitations’ and drawing life lessons from The Wind in the Willows

Anthony Cummins

Saturday 9 July 2022

Mick Herron, 58, is the author of 19 books, most recently Bad Actors, the eighth novel in his Jackson Lamb series about a group of demoted MI5 agents. In 2013, he won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the second instalment, Dead Lions, which Herron’s original publisher rejected on account of the poor sales of the first book, Slow Horses, now an Apple TV+ drama starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is on the shortlist (for a fifth time) of the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award (announced 23 July), for Slough House, the seventh in the series, out in paperback. Herron met me in Oxford, where he has lived ever since leaving Newcastle to study English in 1981.

 

BOOK OF THE DAY / FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Review

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review – intense and inventive

Ten of the best new books in translation

This article is more than 5 years old

A murder mystery set in horror and squalor, this English-language debut signals the rise of a Mexican star

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 25 February 2020

Astructurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long.

BOOK OF THE DAY /  FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Review 

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci review – duplicity, double identity and horror

Ten of the best new books in translation

This article is more than 6 years old

Two boys flee Albania in Statovci’s complex and gruelling follow-up to My Cat Yugoslavia

Anthony Cummins
Tuesday 7 May 2019

“Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw,” says Bujar, the androgynous Albanian narrator of Crossing, the second novel by Finnish-Kosovan writer Pajtim Statovci, acclaimed for his debut My Cat Yugoslavia.