20 h. ago ‘It’s over! It’s over!’ they shout, but people here in Gaza still fear what the future may bring | Hassan Abo Qamar

Phase one of Donald Trump’s peace plan has brought joy and relief, yet it’s hard to believe this fragile peace will lastHassan Abo Qamar is a Palestinian writer and journalist based in GazaOn Thursday morning, I didn’t wake up to the sound of explosions, but to my brother shouting: “It’s over! It’s over!” For a moment, I thought I was dreaming. I wondered: what is happening? Has another loved one been targeted? What is over? Then he told me that Donald Trump had said it. “I am very proud to announce that Israel and Hamas have both signed off on the first Phase of our Peace Plan,” the president wrote on his social media. For the first day in a long time, people in Gaza woke up to news that could be called happy. The ceasefire went into effect at noon. The sound of Israeli warplanes still echoed in the sky, but, for once, they didn’t feel frightening.The first phase of the agreement only includes the exchange of prisoners. That means 20 Israeli hostages in Gaza thought to be alive and...

Politics

24 h. ago ‘They didn’t even read the book’: Palestinian American children’s authors censored in US

Authors tell of book bans, cancellations and harassment – ‘they’re trying to disconnect us from our stories’Jenan Matari had just begun promoting her debut children’s book this summer when the cancellations began. First, Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles called off her event after what Matari described as pressure from local community members. The employee who had booked the event refused to cancel it, and the bookstore fired her. Two days later, another employee quit in solidarity.Then came New Jersey. Watchung Booksellers, a community bookstore in Montclair, was set to host her next reading but abruptly canceled, explaining in an emailed statement it was “to ensure the safety of our staff and customers”. Continue reading...

Culture

24 h. ago ‘They didn’t even read the book’: children’s authors writing about Palestinian experience censored in US

Authors tell of book bans, cancellations and harassment – ‘they’re trying to disconnect us from our stories’Jenan Matari had just begun promoting her debut children’s book this summer when the cancellations began. First, Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles called off her event after what Matari described as pressure from local community members. The employee who had booked the event refused to cancel it, and the bookstore fired her. Two days later, another employee quit in solidarity.Then came New Jersey. Watchung Booksellers, a community bookstore in Montclair, was set to host her next reading but abruptly canceled, explaining in an emailed statement it was “to ensure the safety of our staff and customers”. Continue reading...

Culture

24 h. ago ‘They didn’t even read the book’: How children’s authors are being canceled over Palestine

Authors tell of book bans, cancellations and harassment – ‘they’re trying to disconnect us from our stories’Jenan Matari had just begun promoting her debut children’s book this summer when the cancellations began. First, Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles called off her event after what Matari described as pressure from local community members. The employee who had booked the event refused to cancel it, and the bookstore fired her. Two days later, another employee quit in solidarity.Then came New Jersey. Watchung Booksellers, a community bookstore in Montclair, was set to host her next reading but abruptly canceled, explaining in an emailed statement it was “to ensure the safety of our staff and customers”. Continue reading...

Culture

41 h. ago UK libraries urged to remove children’s books with URL hijacked by porn site

Puffin issues alert to schools and local authorities over books in popular Spy Dog series by Andrew CopeThe children’s publisher Puffin is hurriedly contacting UK schools and local authorities after it discovered that a website address included in a popular children’s book series had been hijacked by a pornography site.The publisher has urged school libraries to remove the books after a website address printed in the Spy Dog, Spy Pups and Spy Cat series by Andrew Cope was redirected to unrestricted adult content. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago Elizabeth Harrower wrote some of Australia’s best novels then disappeared for decades. Even she wasn’t sure why

A new biography unravels one of Australia’s great literary mysteries and comeback stories, and teases out details of the troubled early years that informed the author’s devastating studies of domestic despotsGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIn 1966 Elizabeth Harrower was on the brink of literary fame. Critics hailed her fourth book, The Watch Tower, as one of the year’s most important Australian novels, alongside The Solid Mandala by her friend Patrick White. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Harry Kippax wrote that “one can be grateful to have had in twelve months two such additions to the small body of distinguished Australian novels”. An ABC reviewer said Harrower’s “brilliant” book was “one of the best Australian novels I have read for a long while”.Seven years later White won the Nobel prize for literature. By then Harrower had written another novel but withdrawn it from her English publisher, disappointed by his reaction. After some false starts she stopped writing and all...

Events

3 d. ago Camilla’s tribute to ‘legend’ Dame Jilly Cooper after author’s death aged 88

The ‘bonkbuster’ author died after a fall on Sunday morning, her children announced.

Culture

5 d. ago A shooting near Houston suburb leaves two children dead and two others in critical condition

Authorities in the Houston suburb of Angleton, Texas, say two children died and two more were critically injured in a shooting

Events

6 d. ago Tim Dowling: II love books – but can’t remember anything about the ones I’ve just read

In bed I lie awake, staring at the books on my nightstand, trying to remember a single salient fact about any of themThe oldest one is recommending the book he’s just finished to me.“You should read this,” he says, handing me a well-thumbed paperback, which I turn over in my hands. Continue reading...

Politics

6 d. ago Tim Dowling: I love books – but can’t remember anything about the ones I’ve just read

In bed I lie awake, staring at the books on my nightstand, trying to remember a single salient fact about any of themThe oldest one is recommending the book he’s just finished to me.“You should read this,” he says, handing me a well-thumbed paperback, which I turn over in my hands. Continue reading...

Politics

7 d. ago Coatbridge author James Kennedy releases children's book 'Baxter The Highland Unicorn'

Story a heartwarming tale inspired by a real Highland cow and set against the stunning Scottish countryside.

Culture

8 d. ago Irvine's Scottish Maritime Museum announces children's workshops for upcoming school break

Museum will host free 'make and take' art drop-ins as well as a special children's drama workshop with author Maura McRobbie

Economics

1 week ago I wanted to know if having a kid on a burning planet was right. I found that antinatalism is seriously taboo | Bri Lee

Society has come a long way in making space for maternal ambivalence and the childfree movement, but those frameworks ask whether we want to have children, not whether we shouldWhen I first started researching antinatalism a few years ago I presumed its proponents would be losers and edgelords. You know, those men who love playing “devil’s advocate”. Incels masquerading as philosophers and 14-year-olds who have just discovered Nietzsche.The world’s most famous antinatalist academic, David Benatar, has a book called The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys. I remember rolling my eyes back into my skull, thinking: here we go. Continue reading...

Events

2 w. ago Canadian privacy watchdogs call for TikTok to enhance protection for children on platform

Canadian privacy authorities say TikTok’s efforts to keep children off the platform and prevent the collection and use of their sensitive personal information are “inadequate” but the company is taking steps to address concerns

Politics

2 w. ago Trump’s claims on MMR vaccines are ‘nonsense’ and could put children’s lives at risk, UK experts warn

US President’s claims over vaccines could risk children’s lives, the UK’s public health authority says

Events

2 w. ago If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an A...

Events

2 w. ago Sarah Ferguson apologised to Jeffrey Epstein after disowning him, leaked emails suggest

Duchess had promised convicted sex offender she would never have anything to do with him againThe Duchess of York “humbly” apologised to her “dear friend” Jeffrey Epstein a month after publicly disowning the convicted sex offender, according to leaked emails.Sarah Ferguson told the disgraced late financier that she never called him a paedophile in an earlier newspaper interview, and suggested that she had disavowed him to protect her career as a children’s book author and philanthropist, according to emails obtained by the Mail on Sunday (MoS). Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago For years I struggled with infertility and loss. Then I had a life

On some level, I realised it was a bit unhinged, writes the author and podcaster Elizabeth Day. But what did I have to lose? On 29 December 2022, I received a text. ‘Hi mum I’m texting you off a friends phone I’ve smashed mine and their phones about to die, can you WhatsApp my new number x’ I was in a rental car when I got it, my partner at the wheel next to me as we drove down an anonymous stretch of motorway. Both the sky and the road were grey. It was that indeterminate space between Christmas and New Year when the days become sludgy and diffuse; a time when teenagers meet up with their friends to go shopping or gather in each other’s homes and post Snapchats or exchange festive gossip while pretending not to vape. It was the time of waiting – for the next thing to happen, for the promised excitement of New Year’s Eve and snogging underneath leftover mistletoe. So it wasn’t a particularly unusual text to receive, especially not given the trademark adolescent lack of grammar ...

Politics

2 w. ago I always thought narcissism was just a buzzword – until I read a book and realised I was a hapless victim

After reading a new book, ‘My Parent the Peacock’, Charlotte Cripps realised that narcissistic parenting may well have been at play in her large family. She explains how she was cast in the role of the ‘golden child’, and the impact of this on her later life

Events

3 w. ago Sally Rooney and Annie Ernaux among authors urging Macron to reinstate Gaza writers programme

20 authors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen and Abdulrazak Gurnah, call on the French president to restart scheme to help creatives evacuateSally Rooney, Deborah Levy, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen are among 20 authors urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a “lifeline” programme for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars and artists from Gaza.The Pause programme for writers and artists in emergency situations, as well as a student evacuation programme, were abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a “collective punishment”. Continue reading...

Politics