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The short, blazing life of Italian philosopher Pico della MirandolaOf all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having “some touch of sweetness in it”. An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels.The basic facts are straightforward. Born in northern Italy in 1463, he was a child prodigy with astonishing powers of memory. (He is said to have been able to recite the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy backwards.) The story of Pico’s education has something of the feel of a video game, a tour through the great universities of Europe – Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Paris – completing some branch of knowledge – law, medicine, the classical languages – before moving on to the next level. Continue reading...

A sculptor embarks on a philosophical quest in this revelatory tale of love and loss, exploring our relationship with the divineIn 2020, when the statue of slaver Edward Colston was toppled into Bristol harbour, the public were treated to weeks of confected outrage and faux-philosophising about the aesthetic, civic and social meaning of sculpture. Around the edges of the reactionary culture war nonsense were occasional good-faith attempts to grapple with how best to talk and think about these large, static objects that pepper what is left of the public realm. Lumps of stone and brass; often representational, often hagiographic, often stately, often decaying, and often deeply, unnervingly strange.It is precisely this sense of strangeness – of statues hovering somewhere between architecture and painting, and between repose and movement – that animates the latest novel by the Irish artist and writer Adrian Duncan. From its opening pages, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth dives into heady, knotty questions about temporality, the occupation of space, the relative finitude of life, the fine line between observation and devotion, and the futility of attempting to render the numinous using only chisel and stone. This, in case I’m not being clear, is a relentlessly high-minded and serious novel. The enjoyably preposterous title is not a joke but an earnest indication of what is at stake; the old-school, unfashionable desire to explore what, if anything at all, life really means. Continue reading...

The author of books such as Slow Horses and Down Cemetery Road receives the prestigious Diamond Dagger award for his contribution to the genre British writer Mick Herron, best known for his Slough House series beginning with Slow Horses, has been awarded the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger award for lifetime contribution to crime writing.“To receive this accolade from these friends and colleagues is a career highlight and a personal joy,” said Herron. “I’m touched and thrilled beyond measure, and will try to live up to the honour.” Continue reading...

This wryly comic tale follows the lives of a stunted antihero and his long-suffering girlfriendThe title character of American author Kate Greathead’s second novel is not just a man; he’s an archetype, a quintessence, a lament in human form. Though decent at heart, George is self-absorbed, inattentive, forgetful, clumsy, indecisive and workshy. A philosophy graduate with vague literary ambitions that never quite come to fruition, he gets by on his good looks and family connections. By contrast, his longsuffering girlfriend, Jenny, is competent and conscientious. The story of their interminable, codependent relationship is told in a wry, third-person narrative foregrounding her plight: George’s laziness “felt like a specific kind of male arrogance … in the beginning, before she knew what to make of it, she had found it charming”; “His absentminded disregard for others, his resistance to doing anything that posed the slightest inconvenience to him. It was immature, it was selfish. It was not a good way to be!”Set in the US during the first two decades of the 21st century, the novel follows George from his adolescence to his 30s, as he lurches from one mildly amusing calamity to the next. After being briefly hospitalised after a panic attack, he is so affronted by the resulting medical bill that he punches a wall in anger, breaking his wrist and necessitating a further hospitalisation. When he earns an unexpected windfall by starring in a TV commercial, he contrives to squander the money on ill-advised cryptocurrency investments. Out on the town, he can’t find his wallet and is sure it’s been swiped, only to later realise he’d left it on his bed at home. Continue reading...

In frank and hilarious style, the author recounts the significant encounters that helped make him who he isIn this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds. Sex, White writes, with the nonchalant wisdom that runs throughout this book, is “a language one speaks” that is both “communal and isolating”. Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s” to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’”.White begins the memoir by confessing that, despite having “a small penis”, he has been “stung” by sexual desire since the age of 10. This early moment of authorial undress is a typical piece of self-satire, part of his puckish compulsion to make himself the butt of the joke. It is, he admits in one of many sharp asides about the mechanics of life writing, an auto-fictive sleight-of-hand, an act of “literary daredevilry” which here makes him a consistently endearing, amiable narrator. The book’s funniest moments arise in dialogue that White has himself speak as a delightfully dry and “curiously wise” adolescent. In one scene, he gauges the receptiveness of an apparently straight potential lover by inventing a tall tale about a promiscuous queer schoolmate. Noticing that his audience has become aroused, he announces: “Well it’s me. I’m the cocksucker.” Continue reading...

Author will highlight the ‘enormous disadvantage’ handed to children without access to books, and call on government to improve early-years literacyChildren’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children”.The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak. Continue reading...

The provocative Pulitzer prize-winner was known for his edgy comic strip and his screenplay for Carnal KnowledgeJules Feiffer, the Pulitzer prize-winning artist and writer, has died at the age of 95.His wife, JZ Holden, confirmed his death to the Washington Post. He died of congestive heart failure at his upstate New York home on 17 January. Continue reading...

Smell has an outsize effect on our thoughts and moods, so it’s worth paying more attention to itIf you have been on holiday recently, do you think you could recall and describe what the place smelled like? You probably don’t get asked that question very often. And yet, the characteristic smell of a place seems to contain its special essence. Photos can’t truly bring back the feeling of being there, but smell has that power.Our sense of smell develops before we’re born, and it is strongly linked to brain centres associated with creating new memories and perceiving emotions and bodily sensations. As a result, smells can merge these together, forming vividly personal memories. Most of us have smells that act as a trigger, transporting us to another time and place; for some it is the ocean breeze in summer, for others it might be urban smells of coffee houses, exhaust fumes or a hot pavement on a sunny day. I remember moving to Chicago after completing my PhD in Sweden 15 years ago. In the taxi from the train station, amid the gloomy midwestern winter, I realised the entire city was doused in the most incredible chocolate smell. I opened the window and took a deep sniff. That familiar scent, coming from a chocolate factory on the west side of town, immediately made me feel at ease. I believe Proust was right when he wrote that smells contain “the vast structure of recollection”. Continue reading...

The American author’s anthology of his many physical encounters is a spiritual quest as much as a sensual oneDon’t expect to read Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life with one hand. True, it is subtitled A Sex Memoir, and it hotly reminisces about a few dozen of the 3,000 partners White, who is 85 and still counting, has so far totted up. It does contain some glances at the more esoteric specialities of gay sex, including a scene in which White kneels in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse to imbibe six cans’ worth of warmly recycled beer “from the tap of my date’s microbrewery”. There is also a fortunately terse reference to what in medical shorthand is called a BM. But this coital anthology turns out to be about love and its dreamy spirituality, despite the risque and often risky rutting it describes.Above all, White’s preoccupation is language, since for him sex initially ignites in the head and is consummated on the page, with bodily pleasure or pain as a merely intermediary stage. The itch of lust, in most of these encounters, soon turns into swooning poetic ardour. “Older queens”, as White says, tutor him in the technical skills that sex requires; to learn about the accompanying emotions, he returns to the Renaissance troubadours, who invented the idea of love in the songs and sonnets they addressed to an inaccessible mistress, “a remote, rather ball-shrinking stand-in for the Virgin Mary”. Continue reading...

The third book from the twice Pulitzer prize-nominated American author is a complex portrait of parallel lives on a par with the great Russian novelsAdam Haslett is one of those incandescently smart and elegant authors that the US seems to produce almost accidentally and to excess, names who haven’t quite risen to international literary stardom, but perhaps deserve to: think Jonathan Dee, Garth Risk Hallberg, Lauren Groff or Claire Messud. Haslett’s brilliant debut novel, Union Atlantic, looked into the bleak moral heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis. His second, Imagine Me Gone, was a meditation on fatherhood and depression. Now, with Mothers and Sons, he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.This is a novel about practice. Chapter by chapter, we move from Peter’s world in the first person to Ann’s in the third, building up a picture of their lives, the rhythms of their days. Peter is an asylum lawyer in New York, his time spent with the desperate and destitute. His personal life is almost nonexistent – he is lonely, hopeless, trapped by his own past. After a brief and hesitant affair with a schoolfriend, tragedy strikes. He blames his mother for the guilt that has haunted him ever since. Now he buries himself in his cases. “I work – that’s all I do. I get people to tell me their stories, I try to prove what they tell me, then I do it again.” It’s a thankless task, with the state increasingly hostile and his co-workers as harassed and frustrated as he is. “Travelling into one life after another, intimacy without intimacy.” Then a new client arrives, a gay young man, an Albanian. The shame and horror of his story opens up a window into Peter’s own dark past. Continue reading...

An astute debut novel follows the personal and political upheaval of three friends in a thinly fictionalised contemporary MumbaiIndia and its youth jointly confront the challenge of self-definition in Devika Rege’s excellent debut novel, Quarterlife. Set in the months after the 2014 landslide victory of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (here fictionalised as the Bharat party), the book tunes into the hopes and anxieties of a knot of spirited young individuals, as they navigate caste, class, selfhood, ambition and pride amid the rising tide of Hindu nationalism.Among them is 31-year-old management consultant Naren Agashe who is back home in Mumbai, after a decade spent in the US. Lured by the economic and policy reforms promised by the new government, he sees himself as part of the “golden generation” that will lead the country into a future of prosperity. Accompanying Naren is 27-year-old New Englander Amanda Harris Martin, a university friend who has accepted a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-dominated Mumbai slum in a bid to find her true purpose. Naren’s younger brother, Rohit, an indie film-maker with whom Amanda gets involved, is on his own private journey of self-discovery, after his once-solid conviction that he and his friends “were the voice of a generation” has fissured. Rohit’s friends “are all outraged that a man with blood on his hands has the nation’s mandate” while Rohit, much like his brother, is optimistic about the future (“Parties evolve,” they both believe). Continue reading...

A young woman with creative ambitions is obliged to care for her uncle, a famous painter, in an accomplished debut set in 1920s ProvenceArtistic patriarchs who wreak emotional havoc on their families have provided rich literary rewards in recent years. Charlotte Mendelson examined the artistic tyrant in The Exhibitionist, while Rachel Joyce’s forthcoming The Homemade God portrays the psychological dysfunction of four siblings whose problems stem from their father, a domineering painter.Lucy Steeds’s impressive debut, set in 1920, embraces a similar theme. The patriarch in question is a renowned but doggedly private artist, Edouard Tartuffe (Tata), who lives in Provence with his seemingly timid and obedient niece, Ettie. Many years previously, Ettie’s mother ran away with a lover, became pregnant and, later, suffered a tragically early death: “Ettie cannot remember her mother’s face. It is one of the things that pains her most, makes her clutch her stomach at odd moments.” In the care of her uncle for as long as she can remember, Ettie keeps house for him, cooks his meals, and procures and arranges the various ephemera required for his paintings. Continue reading...