Classic France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. Contemporary Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into decor and where rural areas are emptying out.
From brilliant new voices to seasoned icons, many of the past year's breakout works are by Black authors. In June, Great Black Hope, a coming-of-age story reckoning with privilege and belonging, made first-time author Rob Franklin a household name. And in July, Stephanie Wambugu's gorgeous debut novel Lonely Crowds, which explores the intimacy and frustration in the relationship between two lifelong friends, climbed bestseller lists.
There has been progress in the diversity of texts on offer in the GCSE English literature curriculum, but uptake in schools is still low with just 1.9% of GCSE pupils in England studying books by authors of colour, up from 0.7% five years ago, according to a report. Compiled by the campaign group Lit in Colour, the report says progress is too slow and that
Gomis told DW the film includes a tribute to his late father. Part of the production was filmed in the village where his father was born, in the Cacheu region of Guinea-Bissau. "The grave you see in the film, the one the two characters speak to and touch that is my father's grave. The photograph of that man in the film that is my father," he said.
The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.
"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
Sounding amused, publisher Pramod Kapoor recalls the reaction of the Indian cricketing legend Bishen Singh Bedi when he learned Kapoor was printing 3,000 copies of his autobiography. Only 3,000? he protested. I fill stadiums with 50-60,000 people coming to see me play and you think that's all my book is going to sell? Kapoor, the founder of Roli Books, explains that Bedi's legions of admirers were unlikely to translate into book buyers. That was in 2021.
Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top, NBCC President Adam Dalva said in a statement Tuesday. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated - and to be widely read.
Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year the Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, the decades of violence stemming from England's occupation of Ireland. Other recent fiction about the Troubles-the novels and Trespasses , the TV show Derry Girls (all excellent)-is set firmly in the last century, relegating the violence to history. Ní Chuinn's work does the opposite: Their new book of short stories, Every One Still Her e, is set in contemporary Northern Ireland.
In addition to writing fiction, you're a staff writer for the and a screenwriter. How do you think of your career? I think of myself as a storyteller. I'm nosy, so once I'm telling a story, I want to know what happens. I do find, with fiction, I can't toggle in and out of it. It's like acting, where you have to stay with that character, in that world.
She moved before the pandemic, when gentrification with its huge skyscrapers and condominiums forced her out of Dumbo, Brooklyn. Between the kitchen and the upstairs room, in one corner of which lie part of the 5,000 pages of notes she took while writing it, Desai finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the monumental, 19thcenturystyle novel she has spent nearly two decades on.
Yiyun Li reads her story 'Calm Sea and Hard Faring,' from the March 9, 2026, issue of the magazine. Li is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novels 'Must I Go' and 'The Book of Goose,' and the story collection 'Wednesday's Child,' which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024.