4 d. ago Desperate search for missing schoolgirl, 12, who vanished from city two days ago

COPS have launched an urgent hunt for a missing 12-year-old who vanished two days ago. Concerns have been growing for Olivia, who disappeared from Mackworth, Derbyshire, on Sunday afternoon. The 12-year-old was last seen in the area at around 5.45pm. Olivia is 5ft 3ins tall, of a slim build with plum coloured shoulder length hair....

Events

8 d. ago The best literary fiction out now: The Silver Book by Olivia Laing, One Aladdin, Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson, Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada

Claire Allfree reviews the best literary fiction out now

Politics

2 w. ago Heartbroken mum of tragic Olivia, 11, speaks of her pain after suspected ‘drugs death’

THE heartbroken mum of a schoolgirl who died in a suspected drug death has told her how her “laughter and kindness will always be remembered” Tragic Olivia Curley passed away on Monday after taking suddenly unwell on Friday, November 14. She was just 11-years-old. Speaking after the senseless tragedy, her distraught mum Samantha paid emotional...

Events

3 w. ago Dazzling good literary fiction out this week: ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME III by Solvej Ball, LIGHTBREAKERS by Aja Gabel, THE MATCHBOX GIRL by Alice Jolly

Stephanie Cross reviews the best literary fiction out now

Politics

3 w. ago The Silver Book by Olivia Laing review – a thin line of beauty

The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel“Ugliness,” noted Pier Paolo Pasolini, “is never completely depressing or repulsive. It contains within it an allegory of hunger and pain, its history is our history, the history of Fascism It is tragic, but immediate, and for this reason, full of life.” For Pasolini, ugliness was its own kind of truth, such that Rome could lay no claim to being the most beautiful city in the world “if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest”. For some, though, that truth risked becoming “unseeable”. The gaze of the touristic voyeur, said Pasolini, skimmed over slums for the poor “filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution”, “convinced of the extraneousness and untimeliness of this sub-proletarian, underdeveloped world”.Olivia Laing’s second novel, The Silver Book, is a work preoccupied with beauty. Set in the world of Italian cinema in 1974, the book o...

Politics

3 w. ago Nostalgic Disney show that fans are 'forever obsessed' with is ready to watch

An "extraordinary show" that launched singer Olivia Rodrigo's career is now available to stream for free.

Technology

3 w. ago One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson review – freewheeling reflections on life, art and AI

One Thousand and One Nights is the framing device for the author’s pithy and thought provoking takes on everything from eugenics to trouser suitsIn 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.As Jeanette Winterson puts it in her new book – a dizzying whirligig of memoir, history, philosophy, politics and self-help, loosely tied to commentary on the Nights – Shahrazad’s feat of creativity “refuses the present emergency – the contrived drama of a powerful man”. The echo of life in the Trump era is deliberate...

Politics

4 w. ago Olivia Laing on writing their second novel The Silver Book: ‘It was one of those eerie experiences that happens once in a lifetime’

Few living writers have had as impressive a career in non-fiction as this British author – but now they’re leaving it all behind. Laing speaks to Hannah Ewens about turning to fiction, creativity and their political queer romance novel, The Silver Book

Culture

4 w. ago Knaussgaard is back in this week's literary fiction: THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT by Karl Ove Knausgaard, THE MERGE by Grace Walker, QUEEN ESTHER by John Irving

Anthony Cummins reviews the best literary fiction out now

Politics