The Library of Congress invites you and your students to join in a virtual program to celebrate El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day), an official literacy celebration of the American Library Association.

Author, illustrator Lulu Delacre, will lead this bilingual celebration by reading and presenting her award-winning book, “Olinguito From A- Z !” in both English and Spanish.

“Olinguito From A- Z !” will take place on Thursday, April 27 at 10:30 AM EDT, and will be streamed live at this URL: https://youtu.be/vvSRinFRAQ8

We hope you enjoy the program!

In this one-day workshop for K-2 educators, Library of Congress education staff and our current Teacher in Residence, will model a variety of strategies for using primary sources to engage young learners, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. This hands-on, collaborative session will feature maps, prints and photographs, historic audio and film recordings, and other resources from the Library’s collections, all of which are digitized and readily available to teachers after the session. Participants will learn about unique children’s books from the past and ways the Library is making them more accessible. In addition, a specialist from the Young Readers Center will explain resources and non-fiction books that support the K-2 learner.

Attendees will receive a personalized certificate for professional development hours.

Audience:  K- 2 educators interested in incorporating primary sources into their classroom instruction.

When: Saturday, May 6, 2017, from 9:00 am – 1:00 pm.

Where: Room 119 in the Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 10 First St. SE, Washington, DC 20540. (For directions, go here:  https://www.loc.gov/visit/directions/)

Deadline to apply: April 28, 2017

Questions? Please contact: teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

Interested in attending?  Please fill out the registration form on the page following and email it to teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

• K-2+Workshop+-+Application.docx

The deadline is rapidly approaching to apply for one of the five week-long Summer Teacher Institutes being held at the Library of Congress between June and August this year.  Educators will have until March 17 at midnight Pacific Time to apply online.

Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., these unique professional development opportunities provide educators of all disciplines with a host of resources and strategies to successfully use primary sources with their students. Each session will focus on practical teaching strategies, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these core strategies, attendees will also explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections. They will meet library experts and conduct research to identify primary sources related to their teaching, with the goal of developing an activity to use with their students in the coming school year.  See what some of our previous Institute’s participants have to say about their experience!

Five week-long sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 19-23
• June 26-30
• July 10-14

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 17-21

World War I Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 31-August 4

Institute and course materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Apply by March 17!  Note that a letter of recommendation will be required.  Learn more about the program and fill out the application here.

At your computer, sit and observe this picture for 60 seconds. 

Now describe what you see.  What do you notice first? What do you think is happening? Who do you suppose took the picture and for what purpose? Is there anything you wonder about?

Asking and responding to such questions is the cornerstone of students’ learning to think critically and construct their own knowledge. It is also the cornerstone of the Library of Congress’ Summer Teacher Institutes, where educators from across the United States learn how to use primary sources with their students, building skills in observing, reflecting, questioning, determining point of view and more.

The image you’ve just inspected is captioned: “A small French boy sitting next to his plan for a trench sector, constructed in miniature form. A U.S. soldier is touching an American flag sticking out of miniature sandbags.” It is one of the thousands of primary sources resources in the Library’s collections related to WWI.    

From July 31-August 4, the Library of Congress will host a special 5-day WWI-themed Summer Teacher Institute. The session is open to any K-12 educator interested in teaching with primary sources.  Tuition and materials for this special event are provided at no cost to participants; participants are responsible for transportation and housing. Applications are due on March 17, 2017. For more information and to apply, go here.

The WWI-themed Summer Teacher Institute coincides with a major new exhibit scheduled to open at the Library of Congress this spring:  Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I. 2017 is the 100 year anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I.  As such, WWI Summer Teacher Institute attendees will receive a special tour of this exhibit, viewing hundreds of WWI artifacts, and talk with Library experts to bring them to life. 

The WWI Summer Teacher institute is one of five Summer Teacher Institutes being offered this summer, between June 19 and August 4.  Three of those institutes will be general for all educators, one will be on science, and the final one will focus on WWI.     If you are an educator interested in using primary sources with your students, we invite you to apply today!

The Library of Congress is now accepting applications for its week-long summer institutes for K-12 educators. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., this professional development opportunity provides educators of all disciplines with resources and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching.  Each session will focus on pedagogy, with an emphasis on supporting student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

While practicing these teaching strategies, attendees will explore some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available in the Library’s collections.  They will also conduct research to identify primary sources and develop an activity related to their classroom content.

Five week-long sessions will be offered this summer:

General Focus – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 19-23
• June 26-30
• July 10-14

Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do: 

• July 17-21

WWI Focus – recommended for K-12 educators who teach some aspect of WWI as part of their curriculum, or collaborate with those who do:

• July 31-August 4

The institute and course materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due March 17 and require a letter of recommendation. Learn more and apply here:

Join reference specialist Abby Yochelson, of the Library of Congress Humanities and Social Sciences Division, as she discusses “Books Go to War: Armed Services Editions in World War II” based on the Library’s America Reads exhibition.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, it opposed nations that had banned and burned books. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime, working with the War Department, began distributing pocket-size volumes to every theater of war. Approximately 123 million copies of 1,300 titles in every genre were printed and distributed. The program rescued from obscurity such now-classic books as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn became a national favorite.

Today, the books are loved by collectors, and the Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division has the only complete set. Join us to learn more about this fascinating collection. Register here .

Individuals requiring accommodations for this event are requested to submit a request at least five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

Today’s Thanksgiving holiday has roots in a number of celebrations that occurred centuries ago in different regions of North America. Over time, the United States has come to observe a holiday that has taken many forms and has been observed in many different ways. Students can broaden their perspectives on Thanksgiving – a holiday that is “peculiar to the nation” – with our recently-updated Thanksgiving Primary Source Set.

In addition to exploring a variety of holiday traditions, students can also explore Thanksgiving proclamations and read Sarah Hale’s letter to President Lincoln lobbying for the day to become an official national holiday.

As with all of the Library’s Primary Source Sets, a Teacher’s Guide is available with background information, teaching ideas and additional resources.

Please direct questions to the Resources for Teachers Ask a Librarian page. 

On December 10, 2016, the Library of Congress will host a free, one-day workshop for K-12 educators interested in incorporating music-related primary sources into their classroom instruction.

In this hands-on, collaborative session, education and music specialists from the Library will model a variety of strategies for using music-related primary sources to engage students, build critical thinking skills, and construct knowledge. Through a series of inquiry-based classroom activities, educators will engage with historic audio files, sheet music, song sheets, prints and photographs, and other resources from the Library’s collections. Most of these items are digitized and will be freely available online for teachers to use with their students.

In addition to these activities, a reference specialist from the Library’s Music Division will lead a special program on using the Library’s music resources with K-12 students.

Certificates are available for teachers completing the workshop.

Additional Information:

Audience: K-12 music educators and teachers of other disciplines interested in incorporating music-related primary sources into their classroom instruction.

When: Saturday, December 10, 2016, from 9 am – 4:30 pm. Where: Whittall Pavilion, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 10 First St. SE, Washington, DC 20540 Directions here. The room will be open at 8:30 am. Attendees are encouraged to leave plenty of time for travel and to process through security.

How to register: Register online here! Apply now, as space is limited.

Questions?  Please contact: teachinglcsummer@loc.gov

Library Hosts Online Conference for Educators

As the new school year gets into full swing, the Library of Congress will bring teachers and education experts from across the nation together in its second annual online conference for educators. This free two-day event, “Discover and Explore with Library of Congress Primary Sources,” will be held October 25-26, from 4-8 p.m. EDT and will be open to K-12 educators from across all teaching disciplines. Last year’s event brought together more than 1,500 participants for the sessions.

Over the course of two days, there will be 15 one-hour sessions facilitated by Library specialists, instructional experts from the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium and other recognized K-12 leaders. Session topics will range from assessments and literacy to historical newspapers and kindergarten historians, and all sessions will focus on the effective use of Library of Congress primary-source documents.

According to Lee Ann Potter, director of educational outreach at the Library, "Primary sources can capture student attention, and by analyzing them, students can engage with complex content, build their critical-thinking skills and create new knowledge. The Library’s online conference for educators will allow teachers to learn how to access Library of Congress resources and to discover new strategies for integrating primary sources into their instruction.”

Highlights of the conference:

• The keynote speaker will be the award-winning author Tonya Bolden, who will discuss her process of research for writing children’s books about historical figures.
• Library experts will include specialists from the Chronicling America historical newspaper archives, the historian of the Library of Congress, professionals from the educational outreach division, and more.
• Other presenters will include Joel Breakstone from Stanford University, Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute, and Kelly Schrum of the Center of History and New Media.

After the live online conference, the Library will make recordings of all sessions available to the public on its website for teachers, loc.gov/teachers/. Teachers will be able to earn up to 15 hours of CEU/PDU by participating or viewing online conference sessions, and certificates will be available for completing each session.

Register for the conference: www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/webinar/online-conference-2016.html?rssloc=eanft 

Interested educators can follow the preparations for the conference on Twitter at @TeachingLC and by following #LCTeachConf.

Library Hosts Online Conference for Educators

As the new school year gets into full swing, the Library of Congress will bring teachers and education experts from across the nation together in its second annual online conference for educators. This free two-day event, “Discover and Explore with Library of Congress Primary Sources,” will be held October 25-26, from 4-8 p.m. EDT and will be open to K-12 educators from across all teaching disciplines. Last year’s event brought together more than 1,500 participants for the sessions.

Over the course of two days, there will be 15 one-hour sessions facilitated by Library specialists, instructional experts from the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium and other recognized K-12 leaders. Session topics will range from assessments and literacy to historical newspapers and kindergarten historians, and all sessions will focus on the effective use of Library of Congress primary-source documents.

According to Lee Ann Potter, director of educational outreach at the Library, "Primary sources can capture student attention, and by analyzing them, students can engage with complex content, build their critical-thinking skills and create new knowledge. The Library’s online conference for educators will allow teachers to learn how to access Library of Congress resources and to discover new strategies for integrating primary sources into their instruction.”

Highlights of the conference:

• The keynote speaker will be the award-winning author Tonya Bolden, who will discuss her process of research for writing children’s books about historical figures.
• Library experts will include specialists from the Chronicling America historical newspaper archives, the historian of the Library of Congress, professionals from the educational outreach division, and more.
• Other presenters will include Joel Breakstone from Stanford University, Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute, and Kelly Schrum of the Center of History and New Media.

After the live online conference, the Library will make recordings of all sessions available to the public on its website for teachers, loc.gov/teachers/. Teachers will be able to earn up to 15 hours of CEU/PDU by participating or viewing online conference sessions, and certificates will be available for completing each session.

Register for the conference: www.loc.gov/teachers/professionaldevelopment/webinar/online-conference-2016.html?rssloc=eanft 

Interested educators can follow the preparations for the conference on Twitter at @TeachingLC and by following #LCTeachConf.

For his second-year project, Juan Felipe Herrera—the 21st Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry—invites you and your students to collaborate with him to write a story entitled, “The Technicolor Adventures of Catalina Neon.”

If you are an elementary school librarian and love inspiring your students not only to read but also to write, we hope you—with your second and third graders—will participate in this exciting online project!

 The project launches with an introductory chapter and prompt written by Herrera and illustrated by artist Juana Medina. The prompt is posted on the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center’s www.read.gov website. We ask that you and your second or third grade students read the prompt, talk about it, imagine what could happen next, and collaboratively write the next chapter of Catalina’s adventure.

You will be able to electronically submit your class’s chapter to the Library of Congress.  From the chapters submitted, one will be selected, shared, and illustrated—and you and your class will again be invited to write the next chapter of the adventure. 

The narrative poem will contain six chapters, all guided by input from librarians and students. This process will continue five times until June 2017, when Herrera and Medina will post the final chapter.

The Technicolor Adventures of Catalina Neon" is co-presented by the Library’s Educational Outreach Division and the Publishing Office. To view the project, visit www.read.gov/catalinaneon.

We are excited to announce that on Monday, August 1, 2016, the Library of Congress will host a STEM Challenge Teacher Workshop from 8:30-12:30, in room 100 of the Library’s Adams Building. 

Presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media, this workshop is designed to help teachers spark interest in STEM learning among their students by tapping into their natural passion for playing and making video games. 

Use this link to register for this free workshop. 

• 160222.STEM+Challenge+Teacher+Workshops.pdf

Dear Fellow Educators,

Knowing that you are making plans for the coming school year now, we wanted to tell you about an exciting opportunity that you may want to include—a project that the Library of Congress will officially be announcing in a few weeks.

For his second-year project, Juan Felipe Herrera—the 21st Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry—wishes to write a story in collaboration with you and your students entitled, “The Technicolor Adventures of Catalina Neon.”

If you are an elementary school librarian and love inspiring your students not only to read but also to write, we hope you—with your second and third graders—will participate in this exciting online project!

In September 2016, Herrera and artist Juana Medina will post an illustrated prompt which will introduce the fictitious character, Catalina Neon. The prompt will be posted on the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center’s website. We ask that you and your second or third grade students read the prompt, talk about it, imagine what could happen next, and collaboratively write the next chapter of Catalina’s adventure.

You will be able to electronically submit your class’s chapter to the Library of Congress. From the chapters submitted, one will be selected, shared, and illustrated—and you and your class will again be invited to write the next chapter of the adventure. This process will continue five times until June 2017, when Herrera and Medina will post the final chapter.

About the project, Juan Felipe Herrera said, “I am so super-thrilled to be working with you in the Neon near future and your amazing Neoni students (yes, that's their new name once they join up with Catalina Neon!).” Herrera went on to say, “Imagine a Neoni-writing nation creating an original children's book, together with Juana Medina's art downloads and you at the center of the Neon table (really!). All this is my dream: to write with the new sparkly word-artists of our time and to have it all online for the whole planet! Become part of the creative heart of our incredible Library of Congress. I just can't wait to Neon with you.”

During the course of this adventure, you and your students may get really excited about writing chapters that follow the ones that are selected and posted by the Library—but you may also be inspired to keep writing the story that you begin with your first chapter. That’s okay too! This initiative is intended to inspire writing and collaboration, creativity and sharing.

Stay tuned for more details to come and enjoy the rest of your summer!

Sincerely,

Lee Ann Potter

Director of Educational Outreach

Free One-Day Teacher Workshops at The Library of Congress Inspired by the Exhibition, Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives”

Join Library of Congress education specialists on Thursday, July 7, or Friday, August 5, for a one-day workshop inspired by the exhibition, Jacob Riis: Revealing “How the Other Half Lives.” Through collaborative onsite activities, discover teaching strategies for using digitized primary sources—including historic newspapers, photographs, and maps—related to themes of communication and social reform from the Gilded Age to the dawn of the Progressive Era.

Click here for details and to register. Space is limited.

Primary sources support the study of many disciplines, including both history and geography. One way to help students think about primary sources geographically is to focus them on the five themes of geography: location, place, movement, region, and human-environmental interaction. The latest edition of The TPS Journal, an online publication created by the Library of Congress Educational Outreach Division in collaboration with the TPS Educational Consortium, explores how the five themes of geography can be applied to analyzing primary sources, providing students with multiple perspectives and contributing to greater understanding of a topic.

The TPS Journal: Historical and Geographic Thinking contains a full discussion of primary source analysis focused on the five themes of geography, as well as sample lesson plans, additional resources from the Library of Congress, current research on the topic, and more.

Want to see previous issues of the Journal? You can read them in the Journal Archives.

The Educational Outreach Division of the Library of Congress is seeking applications from current teachers or library/media specialists for an Early Elementary Teacher-in-Residence position during the 2016-17 school year:

Educational Outreach develops and delivers teaching materials and programs to make the Library’s unparalleled collections of primary sources visible, accessible, and easy for K-12 teachers to integrate into the classroom. Previous Teachers-in-Residence have led professional development workshops, developed teaching materials, conducted research in the Library’s collections, and led and supported projects to reach a diverse audience of educators nationwide. The Library is seeking applications from early elementary (K-2) teachers in order to better understand the unique needs of young learners when working with primary source materials.

Qualifications of successful candidates include:

• Knowledge of the Library’s digitized primary sources with experience using them in instruction with early learners,
• Leadership experience, especially in designing and delivering professional development,
• An innovative, flexible and collaborative work style, able to work on a team in an office environment,
• Excellent communication skills,
• The ability to live and work in the Washington, DC, metro area for the duration of the school year.

Deadline: Applications Due Tuesday, April 12th.

Additional information can be found here.

Library of Congress 2016 Summer Teacher Institutes –Teaching with Primary Sources

The Library of Congress is now accepting applications for its week-long summer institutes for K-12 educators. Held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., this professional development opportunity provides educators with tools and resources to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching, with an emphasis on student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge.

The Library is offering five programs this summer.  Four of the programs are open to teachers and librarians across all content areas.  One focuses on primary sources in science, technology and engineering. During each five-day institute, participants work with Library education specialists and subject-matter experts to learn effective practices for using primary sources in the classroom, while exploring some of the millions of digitized historical artifacts and documents available on the Library’s website.

General Institutes – open to K-12 educators across all content areas:

• June 27-July 1
• July 11-15
• July 18-22
• July 25-29

Science, Technology, and Engineering Institute – recommended for K-12 educators who teach science, technology, or engineering, or collaborate with those who do: 

• June 20-24

Tuition and materials are provided at no cost. Participants will be responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations.

Applications are due February 29 and require a letter of recommendation. Read more and apply now !

Immerse yourself in the practice of teaching with primary sources from the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress this summer. Apply to attend one of the following week-long professional development programs for K-12 educators in the nation's capital:

• June 20-24
  (Science, Technology, and Engineering Focus)
• June 27 - July 1
• July 11-15
• July 18-22
• July 25-29

Each five-day institute provides educators with tools, resources, and strategies to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classrooms. Teachers and school librarians of all grade levels and curriculum areas are encouraged to apply to the open sessions, and educators who focus on science, technology, or engineering are invited to apply to the special focus week.

Tuition and materials are provided at no cost to participants. However, participants are responsible for transportation to and from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and any required overnight accommodations. Interested participants have the option of completing additional requirements (and paying a fee) to earn three graduate credits from George Mason University.

The deadline to submit an application is February 29, 2016.

Additional information and the application form can be found here!

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Click here for more information.

The LCPA What If… Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum and the Educational Outreach Team present:
Fascinating and Immersive: Strategies, Spaces, and Science Fiction

“Fascinating and immersive” are terms that both the Museum of Science Fiction and the Library’s Educational Outreach Team use to describe their approaches to Education. The team creating the Museum believes that science fiction presents an ideal device for sparking interest and spurring proficiency in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)
and STEAM (including the arts) academic areas.

The Library’s Educational Outreach Team agrees—and believes that primary sources related to science and science fiction can inspire students and teachers to embark on lifelong journeys of discovery. Come learn how these two groups are working with science educators and students in compelling ways!

Come join us on Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 12:00 Noon in the Mumford Room, 6th Floor, Library of Congress Madison Building and learn how to use science fiction to spark kids' interest in science.

Contact Hope O’Keeffe at loke[at]loc.gov for more information.

If you were unable to join us for the Library of Congress free webinar  “Primary Sources from the World Digital Library” the recording is now available.

Participants engaged in a model primary source analysis, discussed strategies for incorporating primary sources into projects, and heard from Library experts about what the World Digital Library has to offer.

Recordings of previous webinars and information about upcoming webinars from the Library of Congress and can be found  here.

If you were unable to join us for the free webinar  “Building Literacy Skills and Teaching about the Civil Rights Movement with Primary Sources” from the Library of Congress and Teaching Tolerance the recording is now available.

During this webinar participants analyzed a map and explored the map’s context—the world in which it was created and not just the world that it shows. Education experts discussed the significance of maps, model thinking routines and highlighted items from the exhibition, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom.”

Recordings of previous webinars and information about upcoming webinars from the Library of Congress and Teaching Tolerance can be found on our webinar page.

The Library of Congress is now accepting applications for a Summer Teacher Institute for K-12 educators to be held in conjunction with its exhibit focusing on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recent deposit of the Rosa Parks collection. The week-long program will focus on strategies for teaching with primary sources—photographs, manuscripts, oral histories, songs, and more from the Library’s collections.

Taking place August 3-7 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., this professional development event will provide educators with tools and resources to effectively integrate primary sources into K-12 classroom teaching, with an emphasis on student engagement, critical thinking, and construction of knowledge. The Institute is open to teachers and school librarians across grade and content areas with teaching responsibilities related to civil rights. (Previous participants in a Library of Congress Summer Institute are not eligible.)

Tuition and materials are provided at no cost. Selected participants are responsible for transportation to and from Washington, D.C. and any required overnight accommodations.  However, through a special grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Civil Rights Institute participants may be eligible for partial funding to support personal expenses incurred as a result of attending.  Selected participants will be notified of the availability of funds at the time they are notified of their acceptance to the Institute.

Applications are due March 24^th and require a letter of recommendation.  Read more about the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes and apply now!

On Monday, the Intercept published a classified internal NSA document noting that Russian military intelligence mounted an operation to hack at least one US voting software supplier—which provided software related to voter registration files—in the months prior to last year's presidential contest. It has previously been reported that Russia attempted to hack into voter registration systems, but this NSA document provides details of how one such operation occurred.

According to the Intercept:

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed US government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying "raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document:

Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.

Go read the whole thing.

President Donald Trump began the week with a barrage of early-morning tweets blasting the courts for blocking his travel ban executive order. But in doing so, he may have just made it more likely that the courts will keep blocking the ban.

People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

The Justice Dept. should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered down Travel Ban before the Supreme Court - & seek much tougher version!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe. The courts are slow and political!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017

 

These tweets followed upon several from over the weekend about the ban and the terrorist attack in London, including this one from Saturday evening:

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017

In January, Trump signed an executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days, as well as halting the refugee resettlement program for 120 days (and indefinitely for Syrian refugees). When the courts blocked it, rather than appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump signed a modified version of the order. The new ban repealed the old one, reduced the number of banned countries from seven to six, and added exceptions and waivers. Still, federal courts in Maryland and Hawaii blocked it, and now the Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court to have this second version of the ban reinstated.

The biggest question in the litigation over the ban is whether the courts should focus solely on the text of the order or also consider Trump's comments from the campaign trail, and even during his presidency, to determine whether the order uses national security as a pretext for banning Muslims from the country. The president's lawyers argue that the courts should focus on the text of the order and defer to the president's authority over national security. Trump's tweets Monday morning and over the weekend make it harder for the courts to justify doing that.

The travel ban is supposed to be a temporary remedy until the government can review its vetting procedures. But Trump's tweets make it appear that the ban itself is his goal. Trump repeatedly and defiantly uses the word "ban" when his administration has instead sought to call it a pause. 

The tweets "undermine the government's best argument—that courts ought not look beyond the four corners of the Executive Order itself," Stephen Vladeck, an expert on national security and constitutional law at the University of Texas School of Law, says via email. "Whether or not then-Candidate Trump's statements should matter (a point on which reasonable folks will likely continue to disagree), the more President Trump says while the litigation is ongoing tending to suggest that the Order is pretextual, the harder it is to convince even sympathetic judges and justices that only the text of the Order matters." And once the courts start looking at the president's statements, it's not hard to find ones that raise questions about anti-Muslim motivations.

Even the president's allies acknowledge his tweets are a problem. George Conway, the husband of top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, responded to Trump on Twitter by pointing out that the work of the Office of the Solicitor General—which is defending the travel ban in court—just got harder.

These tweets may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won't help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad. https://t.co/zVhcyfm8Hr

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 5, 2017

Conway, who recently withdrew his name from consideration for a post at the Justice Department, then followed up to clarify his position.

2) ... and of course, my wonderful wife. Which is why I said what I said this morning. Every sensible lawyer in WHCO and every political ...

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 5, 2017

3) ... appointee at DOJ wd agree with me (as some have already told me). The pt cannot be stressed enough that tweets on legal matters ...

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 5, 2017

4) ... seriously undermine Admin agenda and POTUS--and those who support him, as I do, need to reinforce that pt and not be shy about it.

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) June 5, 2017

Trump may soon see his tweets used against him in court. Omar Jadwat, the ACLU attorney who argued the case before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, told the Washington Post this morning that the ACLU's legal team is considering adding Trump's tweets to its arguments before the Supreme Court. "The tweets really undermine the factual narrative that the president's lawyers have been trying to put forth, which is that regardless of what the president has actually said in the past, the second ban is kosher if you look at it entirely on its own terms," Jadwat told the Post.

German magazine Der Spiegel has been given access to minutes from a contentious meeting of G7 leaders in Taormina, Sicily, at the end of May, in which they applied last-ditch pressure on President Donald Trump to stay in the Paris climate agreement.

The meeting came toward the end of Trump's first trip abroad as president—and became an opportunity for world leaders to intensely lobby the American president before Trump's final decision on whether the United States would leave the historic climate accord.

The leaders told Trump in no uncertain terms that if the United States abandoned the agreement, China would be the direct beneficiary.

"Climate change is real and it affects the poorest countries," said Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French president, at the outset of the private conversation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau then told Trump that the success of repairing the ozone layer proved that industry could be persuaded to act on harmful emissions, according to the account.

Then, German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up China: "If the world's largest economic power were to pull out, the field would be left to the Chinese," she said. According to Der Spiegel, Merkel added that Chinese President Xi Jinping was preparing to take advantage of the vacuum left by America's exit. Even Saudi Arabia, she added, was preparing for a world without oil.

Trump was unmoved. "For me," the president reportedly said, "it's easier to stay in than step out," adding that green regulations were killing American jobs.

As it became clear Trump would not budge, Macron admitted defeat, according to this account.

"Now China leads," he said.

The new Der Spiegel cover. pic.twitter.com/NJ0vKU5D3v

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) June 2, 2017

The account adds fresh details to the president's fraught European trip. Following the meeting, the G7 broke with tradition to release a statement where six nations reaffirmed the Paris climate agreement, without the United States. The president also caused a diplomatic scuffle in Italy after accusing Germany of being "very bad" on trade and appeared to literally shove aside a leader of a NATO ally.

In a Rose Garden ceremony last Thursday, Trump announced that the United States would leave the historic Paris climate agreement—promising to "begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."

In response to the president's announcement, President Macron of France released a video statement, saying, "If we do nothing, our children will know a world of migrations, of wars, of shortage. A dangerous world."

In response to the London terror attack, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) had an extreme proposal: kill anyone suspected of being an Islamic radical.

On his campaign Faceboook page, Higgins, a former police officer, posted this message:

The free world…all of Christendom…is at war with Islamic horror. Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

The post went up early on Sunday morning. On Saturday evening, suspected terrorists killed seven people during an attack on London Bridge. ISIS has claimed credit for these murders.

With his declaration that Christendom is "at war with Islamic horror," Higgins was embracing a theme of the far right: the fight against extremist jihadists is part of a fundamental clash between Christian society and Islam. And in this Facebook post, he was calling for killing not just terrorists found guilty of heinous actions, but anyone suspected of such an act. He did not explain how the United States could determine how to identify radicalized Islamists in order to deny them entry to the United States. It was unclear whether his proposal to deny any assistance to any nation that harbors "these heathen animals" would apply to England, France, Indonesia, Spain, and other nations where jihadist cells have committed horrific acts of violence.

Higgins office refused to allow a Mother Jones reporter to speak to a spokesman for the congressman. But in an email, his spokesman confirmed the Facebook post was authentic.

In late January, Higgins delivered a fiery floor speech attacking Democrats and the "liberal media" for opposing President Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. He declared that "radical Islamic horror has gripped the world and…unbelievably…been allowed into our own nation with wanton disregard."

Shortly before running for Congress, Higgins resigned from his post as the public information officer of the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office, where he had earned a reputation as the "Cajun John Wayne" for his tough-talking CrimeStopper videos. Higgins abruptly quit after his boss, the sheriff, ordered him to tone down his unprofessional comments. "I repeatedly told him to stop saying things like, 'You have no brain cells,' or making comments that were totally disrespectful and demeaning," the sheriff said.

"I don't do well reined in," Higgins noted at the time. "Although I love and respect my sheriff, I must resign."

Update: Higgins' campaign spokesman, Chris Comeaux, told Mother Jones in an email: "Rep. Higgins is referring to terrorists. He's advocating for hunting down and killing all of the terrorists. This is an idea all of America & Britain should be united behind."

The concept is straight from the Soviet playbook: Plant false information and use it to influence the attitudes of another country’s people and government. This “active measures” technique from the Cold War era appears to have been resurrected with alarming success by the Kremlin in its attack on the 2016 presidential election—and has been echoed in tactics used by President Donald Trump and his associates, according to Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this US election is because the commander in chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents,” Watts, a former FBI agent, recently testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Key to this equation have been RT and Sputnik international, two Russian state-sponsored news outlets. Both reach only relatively small audiences in the US (RT is estimated to reach about 8 million people via cable television), but their impact has been magnified greatly online, with their stories reposted on what Watts calls “gray” conspiracy sites like Breitbart News and InfoWars. Twitter bots and other social media accounts further amplify the stories. And in several cases, Trump or his associates have directly cited phony Russian propaganda in a speech or interview. Here are some examples:

A false report of a terrorist attack at a NATO base in Turkey: Last July, RT and Sputnik each reported on a fire at the Incirlik base, framing it as potential sabotage. Pro-Russian and pro-Trump Twitter accounts spread and magnified the false reports, but mainstream news organizations didn’t pick up the report because it wasn’t true, as Watts explained in a piece for the Daily Beast. Yet, in mid August, Paul Manafort—Trump’s campaign chairman at the time—escalated the story to a terrorist attack, complaining on CNN that US media outlets were not adequately covering it. Politifact debunked Manafort’s claims, noting that Turkish authorities had reported small, peaceful demonstrations outside the base, but no actual assault on the base.

The case of the phony Benghazi email: On October 10, Wikileaks released a batch of emails hacked from campaign chairman John Podesta’s email account. About 5 pm ET that day, Sputnik News published a story about leaked Clinton campaign emails with the headline “Hillary confidante: Benghazi was ‘preventable’; State Department negligent.” Roughly an hour later, Trump told supporters at a rally in Pennsylvania that Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal had called the Benghazi attack “almost certainly preventable.” “This just came out a little while ago,” Trump said. Those words weren’t actually Blumenthal’s and Sputnik later deleted the story – but by then the headline had spread far and wide.

False claims of pervasive voter fraud: RT has been attempting to delegitimize the American electoral process since 2012 by calling the U.S. voting system fraudulent, according to the declassified version of the report the Director of National Intelligence released this past January. In his Senate testimony, Watts called this the “number one theme" pushed by Russian outlets. In October 2016, a Kremlin-controlled think tank circulated a strategy document that said Russia should end its pro-Trump propaganda “and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency,” according to a Reuters investigation. 

That same month, Trump pushed hard on the theme that the election was rigged; on Oct. 17 Trump tweeted “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day.” The sources his campaign pointed to were all debunked by Politifact, which noted that Trump had also tweeted in 2012 about dead voters delivering Obama’s win.

The Swedish attack that wasn’t: Trump’s strategy of running with false information didn’t stop when he won the election – and hasn’t been limited to Russian-owned media properties: He’s also used Fox News reports in a similar way. In February, Trump appeared to imply at a Florida rally that a terrorist attack had occurred the previous night in Sweden. Sweden itself had no idea what he meant and the Swedish Embassy reached out to ask for clarification. Twitter users, including many Swedes, ridiculed Trump’s statement, with references ranging from IKEA to the Swedish Chef character from the “Muppets.” Trump later said that he was referring to a Fox News story on violence allegedly perpetrated by refugees. That report, which aired the night before Trump’s rally, did not mention a specific terror-related attack; it focused on reports that rape and gun violence had increased since Sweden began taking in a record number of refugees in 2015.

Wiretapping claims pushed by a Fox News personality: In March, even though Trump's claim about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower had been directly debunked by top US intelligence officials, the president seized on a baseless claim by Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano that British spies had wiretapped Trump at former President Obama’s request. Fox News later disavowed Napolitano’s statement. Trump continued to repeat his conviction that he’d been wiretapped, even though American and British intelligence officials insist there is no basis for the claims.

The murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich: Trump allies recently pushed another story that started as a conspiracy theory online and was fueled by Russian news outlets. Fox’s Sean Hannity aired several segments focusing on the unsubstantiated claim that Rich was behind the Clinton campaign email leaks and then murdered for his actions, even though police have said he was likely killed in a robbery attempt. When the claims were thoroughly debunked, Fox retracted the story from its website – but not before it had been spread by Trump ally and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Even after Fox pulled the story, Gingrich told the Washington Post, “I think it is worth looking at.”

In his Senate testimony, Watts noted that Trump is vulnerable to further manipulation by the Russians: He warned that Russian-linked Twitter accounts are actively trying to engage the president by sending him conspiracy theories. “Until we get a firm basis on fact and fiction in our own country, get some agreement about the facts,” Watts said, “we’re going to have a big problem.”

In 1994, Marcus Robinson, who is black, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the 1991 killing of Erik Tornblom, a white teenager, in Cumberland County, North Carolina. He spent nearly 20 years on death row, but in 2012 his sentence was changed to life without a chance of parole. He was one of four death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by a judge who found that racial discrimination had played a role in their trials.

The reason their cases were reviewed at all was because of a 2009 North Carolina law known as the Racial Justice Act, which allowed judges to reduce death sentences to life in prison without parole when defendants were able to prove racial bias in their charge, jury selection, or sentence.

"The Racial Justice Act ensures that when North Carolina hands down our state's harshest punishment to our most heinous criminals," former Gov. Bev Perdue said when she signed the bill into law, "the decision is based on the facts and the law, not racial prejudice."

At 21, Robinson was the youngest person sentenced to death in North Carolina. When he was three, he was hospitalized with severe seizures after being physically abused by his father and was diagnosed with permanent brain dysfunction. However, those weren't the only troubling aspects of his case.

Racial discrimination in jury selection has been prohibited since it was banned by the Supreme Court in its 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky, but Robinson's trial was infected with it. The prosecutor in the case, John Dickson, disproportionately refused eligible black potential jurors. For example, he struck one black potential juror because the man had been once charged with public drunkenness. However, he accepted two "nonblack" people with DWI convictions. Of the eligible members of the pool, he struck half the black people and only 14 percent of the nonblack members. In the end, Robinson was tried by a 12-person jury that included only three people of color—one Native American individual and two black people.

Racial discrimination in jury selection was not uncommon in the North Carolina criminal justice system. A comprehensive Michigan State University study looked at more than 7,400 potential jurors in 173 cases from 1990 to 2010. Researchers found that statewide prosecutors struck 52.6 percent of eligible potential black jurors and only 25.7 percent of all other potential jurors. This bias was reflected on death row. Of the 147 people on North Carolina's death row, 35 inmates were sentenced by all-white juries; 38 by juries with just one black member.

Under the Racial Justice Act, death row inmates had one year from when the bill became law to file a motion. Nearly all the state's 145 death row inmates filed claims, but only Robison and three others—Quintel Augustine, Tilmon Golphin, and Christina Walters—obtained hearings. In 2012, Robinson's was the first. At the Superior Court of Cumberland County, Judge Gregory Weeks ruled that race had played a significant role in the trial and Robinson was resentenced to life without parole. North Carolina appealed the decision to the state's Supreme Court.

An immediate outcry followed the decision. The North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys issued a statement saying, "Capital cases reflect the most brutal and heinous offenders in our society. Whether the death penalty is an appropriate sentence for murderers should be addressed by our lawmakers in the General Assembly, not masked as claims (of) racism in our courts."  

The ruling attracted lots of publicity from across the country and North Carolina lawmakers were outraged. "There are definitely signs in the legislative record that there were some [lawmakers] that really wanted to see executions move forward," Cassandra Stubbs, the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project who also represents Robinson, says. Legislative staffers circulated talking points for lawmakers with arguments that the RJA turns "district attorneys into racists and convicted murderers into victims," describing the law as "an end-run around the death penalty and an indefinite moratorium on capital punishment."

The day Judge Weeks resentenced Robinson, the Senate president pro tempore for the state Legislature, Phillip Berger, expressed concern that Robinson could be eligible for parole. He suggested Robinson—who had just turned 18 when he committed the crime and would not have been considered a juvenile—would be ineligible for life in prison without a chance of parole, citing a US Supreme Court ruling that prohibited juveniles from receiving life sentences without parole. "We cannot allow cold-blooded killers to be released into our community, and I expect the state to appeal this decision," he said. "Regardless of the outcome, we continue to believe the Racial Justice Act is an ill-conceived law that has very little to do with race and absolutely nothing to do with justice."

The state Legislature took on the challenge and voted to repeal the Racial Justice Act in 2013. This made it impossible for those on death row to even attempt to have their sentences reviewed for racial bias, but it left the fates of the four who had been moved to life imprisonment unclear. "The state's district attorneys are nearly unanimous in their bipartisan conclusion that the Racial Justice Act created a judicial loophole to avoid the death penalty and not a path to justice," Gov. Pat McCrory said in a statement at the time.

Even though the law was still in effect when the four inmates' sentences were reduced, they weren't safe from death row just yet. Robinson's sentenced had been legally reduced, but the legal battle was just beginning.

In 2015, after nearly two years from the initial hearing, the North Carolina Supreme Court ordered the Superior Court to reconsider the reduced sentences for Robinson, Augustine, Golphin, and Walters, saying the judge failed to give the state enough time to prepare for the "complex" proceedings.

This past January, Superior Court Judge Erwin Spainhour ruled that because the RJA had been repealed, the four defendants could no longer use the law to reduce their sentences. "North Carolina vowed to undertake an unprecedented look at the role of racial bias in capital sentencing," says Stubbs. But now, "the state Legislature explicitly turned from its commitment and repealed the law."

Robinson is back on death row at Central Prison in the state's capital of Raleigh. In the petition to the state Supreme Court, Robinson's lawyers point out that the Double Jeopardy Clause—the law that prevents someone from being tried twice for the same crime—bars North Carolina from trying to reimpose the death penalty because the 2012 RJA hearing acquitted him of capital punishment.

"He's never been resentenced to death," Stubbs says. "They have no basis to hold him on death row."

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Bob Keane has studied whitebark pine, a coniferous tree of the high country, for more than thirty years. Still, when asked to describe a whitebark to someone who's never seen one, he takes a breath and pauses for a moment. "Gosh," he says.

The shape of the tree is very distinctive, Keane says. Instead of growing cone-shaped like other conifers, whitebarks branch like hardwoods. "A lot of the undergrowth is very small, so you see these open park-like stands of beautiful spreading trees," he says. This shape is an adaptation that shows Clark's nutcrackers flying past that a tree below has many nutritious cones and might be worth a travel stop.

Clark's nutcrackers cache thousands of whitebark seeds, dispersing the pine across the high country, where the tree is a keystone species. Whitebark pine is one of the first trees to break ground after a fire, thanks to those nutcrackers, and it stabilizes soil and snowpacks at timberline. Living a millennium or more, whitebarks shape the West's high mountain ecology in countless ways.

But the whitebark is going extinct and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the agency) hasn't given the species federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. In April 2017, two conservation organizations from Montana lost a lawsuit against the agency for its failure to list the pine. No one—not the plaintiffs, defendants, or panel of judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—questioned the precariousness of the tree's fate. At question was how the agency prioritized which species it protects. Species, the court ruled, could be passed over because the agency didn't have the necessary funds. As the story of whitebarks demonstrates, extinction has as much to do with politics as it does with biology.

The whitebark pine is an iconic tree of the West's high mountains, ranging from Wyoming's southern Wind Rivers to northern Alberta and British Columbia. In the fall, in a whitebark pine forest, "there are tons of cones and it is alive with animals, just alive," Keane says. "You don't see that with subalpine firs." Researchers have found that whitebark cones feed more than 100 animal species and, in Glacier National Park, 40 percent of the understory plants in whitebark pine communities grow only there. The tree's fatty, protein-rich seeds are an important food for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies; when the seeds run short, the bears eat more meat.

The whitebark pine faces intertwined threats that have killed the trees across much of their historic range. In 1910, Gifford Pinchot imported white pine blister rust, a fast-moving European fungal disease that kills whitebarks, to the West in a tree shipment.

And a century of fire suppression has imperiled whitebarks, too. The shade-intolerant trees rely on fire to open areas; without fires, trees such as subalpine firs shade out whitebarks. Often, Keane says, permanently stunted pines linger in the shadows of those new neighbors. "You'll see an overstory of subalpine fir, but an understory of tiny whitebark pine saplings that are probably older than the canopy," he says.

Meanwhile, native mountain pine beetles have taken out swaths of whitebark pines weakened by overcrowding and drought; a 2009 beetle outbreak killed whitebarks across more than 3,000 square miles. Exacerbating blister rust's spread, wildfire suppression, and pine beetle outbreaks is an ever more pervasive threat: "The fourth big one is climate change and how climate change is interacting with all of these things, " says Amy Nicholas, endangered species listing coordinator for the agency's Wyoming field office.

Conservationists have requested federal protection for whitebark pines under the ESA for more than 25 years, beginning in 1991. In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service found that the pine was likely to go extinct across much of its U.S. range in as little as 100 years, or less than two generations. Yet instead of listing whitebark pine as endangered, the agency listed the tree as a "candidate" species, essentially waitlisting the species for help.

The reason came down to a funding shortage: listing whitebark pine as endangered would have required the agency to devote resources to saving it. Without enough money to care for all disappearing species, the agency focuses on listing species that are part of legal settlements, for example.

As a candidate species, whitebark pine got a listing priority number, based on how likely it is to go extinct. In 2011, whitebark pine received one of the highest priority rankings, yet other species were being federally protected and whitebark pine was not.

Two Montana-based conservation organizations—WildWest Institute and Alliance for the Wild Rockies—sued the agency, arguing that by prioritizing candidate species ranked lower than whitebark pine, the Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't following its own guidelines for deciding which species to protect. The conservation groups felt species should be given help in order of biological need.

The court ruled in favor of the agency. While pointing out that current policies on listing seemed inadequate when "dealing with the potential life or death of an entire species," the court concluded that the agency was not required to make decisions based on its candidate species ranking system. "Scarce funds and limited staff resources may prevent FWS from taking immediate final action to list or delist a species," the presiding judge wrote.

According to Patrick Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor, the agency often makes listing decisions based on finances. "This is a systematic problem that the Fish and Wildlife Service has had for decades," Parenteau says. He points to persistent resistance from Congress and some Republican administrations to fully fund the service's endangered species listing program.

Financial considerations do not factor into whether a species gets listed, but rather in what order and when, agency biologist Craig Hansen says. "The listing budget is given to us by Congress and has an annual cap," Hansen says. "We can't pull funds from other programs to list." The service's funding woes have led to a backlog of organisms waiting to be listed, such as northern California's Sierra Nevada red fox, which in 2016 included just 29 remaining adults.

These rust-resistant baby whitebarks are part of the U.S. Forest Service's collaboration with NGOs trying to save the species. Bob Keane

In 2016, to stop the constant backlog of candidate species waiting to be listed as threatened or endangered, the Obama administration drafted a streamlined process that prioritized the most imperiled species backed by the best available science. It wasn't adopted by the Trump administration.

Matthew Koehler, executive director of plaintiff WildWest Institute, grows frustrated talking about the whitebark case. Koehler believes the funding shortage that stalled the whitebark's listing is part of a strategy by Congressional members in both parties to tie the service's hands. "Then, the same members of Congress complain that the ESA doesn't work or that it moves too slow," he says.

Indeed, this past February, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led a Senate hearing to "modernize the Endangered Species Act," arguing in a statement that the ESA has not been successful enough and causes economic harm.

Funding is only one of the ESA's difficulties, though. Court battles also stymie species' recoveries. For each species, a listing decision takes years, followed by litigation from whoever opposes the outcome. "It isn't just a bunch of scientists sitting around a table saying ‘let's list this species," says Parenteau. And still, species such as the whitebark disappear.

And then there's climate change. Congress wrote the ESA in the 1970s, long before scientists understood the profound ways in which greenhouse gases affect species and their homes. The ESA is designed to address discrete problems: overgrazing, point-source pollution, exurban development. In its revision of ESA listing guidelines, the Obama administration acknowledged as much: the agency could have put off working on species endangered by climate change, including whitebark pine, since it has less power to help them.

With our existing environmental laws, whitebarks may yet survive in the northernmost parts of their range in Canada, Parenteau says. "But in the southern part of its range, unless we get serious about climate mitigation, it's probably doomed anyway," he says.

In any case, listing isn't necessary for the feds to take action: Almost all whitebarks occur on federal public land, where the government can take steps to protect the species without listing, Parenteau says.

Indeed, having given up on the ESA for now, the WildWest Institute is seeking other pathways to whitebark protection. The organization is supporting a bill introduced to Congress to designate public lands in the northern Rockies where whitebarks live as wilderness. "We see wilderness designation as a way to protect that entire ecosystem," Koehler says.

When pressed to make predictions for the longterm, Keane says areas where whitebarks used to flourish will probably eventually burn. By then, though, there will be no source trees left for birds to find seeds to spread to freshly burned areas. Instead, he imagines, shrub herblands will grow.

Still, unlike Parenteau, Keane is optimistic about the climate extremes that whitebarks can survive, if the trees get help. He's part of a new collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and two NGOs – American Forests and the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation—that's working to restore whitebarks in the West. The group's even developing rust-resistant seedlings. "Whitebark pine doesn't even start optimum cone production until it's 200 years old," he says. "What we want to make sure is what we're doing now, 100 years from now we will see the fruits of our labors."

"If we do nothing," Keane says, "we are making sure that it will be so low on the landscape, we will probably name the ones we see, there will be so few of them."

People love to complain about the wastefulness of meal-kit delivery companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. The baggies that hold a single scallion! The thousands of miles of shipping! The endless cardboard boxes! Those problems are annoying, but ultimately they're not environmental catastrophes: The baggies don't take up all that much landfill space, the cardboard boxes are recyclable, and it's not clear whether shipping meal kits is less efficient than transporting food to grocery stores and then to homes.

But there is a much better reason to criticize meal-kit companies—and as far as I can tell, few people are talking much about it. That's surprising, because it's actually the biggest (or heaviest, at least) thing in every meal-kit box: the freezer packs that keep the perishables fresh while they're being shipped. Blue Apron now sends out 8 million meals a month. If you figure that each box contains about three meals and two six-pound ice packs, that's a staggering 192,000 tons of freezer-pack waste every year from Blue Apron alone. To put that in perspective, that's the weight of nearly 100,000 cars or 2 million adult men. When I shared those numbers with Jack Macy, a senior coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment's Commercial Zero Waste program, he could scarcely believe it. "That is an incredible waste," he said. The only reason he suspects he hasn't heard about it yet from the city's trash haulers is that the freezer packs end up hidden in garbage bags.

Given that many meal-kit companies claim to want to help the planet (by helping customers reduce food waste and buying products from environmentally responsible suppliers, for example), you'd think they would have come up with a plan for getting rid of this ever-growing glacier of freezer packs. Au contraire. Many blithely suggest that customers store old gel packs in their freezers for future use. Unless you happen to have your own meat locker, that's wildly impractical. I tried it, and in less than a month the packs—which are roughly the size of a photo album—had crowded practically everything else out of my freezer. Two personal organizers that I talked to reported that several clients had asked for a consult on what to do with all their accumulated freezer packs.

As Nathanael Johnson at Grist points out, Blue Apron has also suggested that customers donate used freezer packs to the Boy Scouts or other organizations. I asked my local Boy Scouts council whether they wanted my old meal-kit freezer packs. "What would we do with all those ice packs?" wondered the puzzled council executive. (Which is saying a lot for an organization whose motto is "be prepared.")

The meal-kit companies' online guides to recycling packaging are not especially helpful. (Blue Apron's is visible only to its customers.) Most of them instruct customers to thaw the freezer packs, cut open the plastic exterior, which is recyclable in some places, and then dump the thawed goo into the garbage. (Hello Fresh suggests flushing the goo down the toilet, which, experts told me, is a terrible idea because it can cause major clogs in your plumbing.) The problem with this advice is that it does not belong in a recycling guide—throwing 12 pounds of mystery goo into the garbage or toilet is not recycling.

To its credit, Blue Apron is the only major meal-kit service to offer a take-back program: Enterprising customers can mail freezer packs back to the company free of charge. But Blue Apron spokeswoman Allie Evarts refused to tell me how many of its customers actually do this. When I asked what the company does with all those used freezer packs, Evarts only told me, "We retain them for future use." So does that mean Blue Apron is actually reusing the packs in its meal kits, or is there an ever-growing mountain of them languishing in a big warehouse somewhere? Evarts wouldn't say. 

Now back to that mystery goo, which, in case you're curious, is whitish clear, with the consistency of applesauce. Its active ingredient is a substance called sodium polyacrylate, a powder that can absorb 300 times its weight in water. It's used in all kinds of products, from detergent to fertilizer to surgical sponges. One of its most common uses is in disposable diapers—it's what soaks up the pee and keeps babies' butts dry. When saturated with water and frozen, sodium polyacrylate thaws much more slowly than water—meaning it can stay cold for days at a time.

Meal-kit companies assure their customers that the freezer-pack goo is nontoxic. That's true. But while sodium polyacrylate poses little to no danger to meal-kit customers, it's a different story for the people who manufacture the substance. (Meal-kit companies typically contract with freezer-pack manufacturers rather than making their own.) In its powdered state, it can get into workers' lungs, where it can cause serious problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in 2011 that workers in a sodium polyacrylate plant in India developed severe lung disease after inhaling the powder. Animal studies have shown that exposure to high concentrations of sodium polyacrylate can harm the lungs. Because of these known risks, some European countries have set limits on workers' exposure to sodium polyacrylate. Here in the United States, some industry groups and manufacturers recommend such limits as well as safety precautions for workers like ventilation, respirators, and thick gloves. But on the federal level, neither the Occupational Safety and Health Administration nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have any rules at all. (The companies that supply freezer packs to Blue Apron and Hello Fresh did not return repeated requests for information on their manufacturing processes.)

Beyond the factory, sodium polyacrylate can also do a number on the environment. In part, that's because it's made from the same stuff as fossil fuels—meaning that making it produces significant greenhouse gas emissions, a team of Swedish researchers found in 2015 (PDF). It also doesn't biodegrade, so those mountains of freezer packs sitting in the garbage aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

So to review: Freezer packs create an epic mountain of garbage, and their goo is not as environmentally benign as meal-kit companies would have you believe. So what's to be done? One place to start might be a greener freezer pack. That same team of Swedish researchers also developed a sodium polyacrylate alternative using biodegradable plant materials instead of fossil fuels. A simpler idea: Companies could operate like milkmen used to, dropping off the new stuff and picking up the old packaging—including freezer packs—for reuse in one fell swoop.

A little creative thinking might go a long way—yet none of the companies that I talked to said they had any specific plans to change the freezer-pack system (though Hello Fresh did say it planned to reduce its freezer pack size from six pounds to five pounds). And when you think about it, why should they fix the problem? Heidi Sanborn, head of the recycling advocacy group California Product Stewardship Council, points out that the current arrangement suits the meal-kit providers just fine. "It's taxpayers that are paying for these old freezer packs to sit in the landfill forever," she says. "Companies are getting a total freebie."

One week after two men were stabbed to death while defending two girls from a racist and Islamophobic diatribe on a commuter train, Portland, Oregon, is bracing for more violence. On Sunday, over the mayor's objection, a right-wing group will hold a pro-Trump "free speech rally," while anti-fascist activists are preparing to protest the gathering.

It's a pattern that has played out across the country since the election: Pro-Trump events from Pikeville, Kentucky, to Berkeley, California, attract white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen along with other provocateurs from the so-called "alt-right." And, predictably, "antifa" counterprotesters mask up to oppose them—often physically.

Yet joining up with the well-established networks of antifascists and anarchists is a new generation of militant organizers. In Portland, Rose City Antifa's coalition at this weekend's pro-Trump rally will include the local chapter of Redneck Revolt, a national network whose outreach has targeted right-wing militia members.

Redneck Revolt is just one among a handful of left-wing groups that have pledged to resist emboldened white supremacists and right-wing extremists through "direct action" that sometimes goes beyond nonviolent protest—including picking up arms. Some see themselves as the heirs of '60s radicals like the Black Panthers, while others look to the antifa movement for inspiration. Here are a few:

Bastards Motorcycle Club: A couple of years ago, South Carolinians Steven "Chavez" Parker and Joseph Guinn organized an anti-racist, LGBT-friendly motorcycle gang. Traditional biker clubs, Parker thought, "were all going to think one thing: 'What a bunch of bastards.'" Since then, the Bastards Motorcycle Club has rolled up to oppose racist events across the South, sometimes armed and ready to rumble. In July 2015, the Bastards confronted a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Charleston, South Carolina, and in April 2016 they joined a small army of counterprotesters at a rally of white supremacists in Stone Mountain, Georgia, home of a rock carving honoring the Confederacy. They're now looking to set up new chapters—women need not apply. That's "not the way things work," says the group's president, who insists on being called by his biker name, Gigolo.

By Any Means Necessary: BAMN formed in 1995 to fight California's rollback of affirmative action. The group, which is led by civil rights lawyer Shanta Driver, has organized anti-Trump rallies and high school walkouts. But it also supports more aggressive tactics. "When we say 'by any means necessary,' we mean everything from doing legal cases to organizing more militant actions," Driver says. "We are not people who believe, in situations where we're under attack, that we should turn the other cheek." Last June, BAMN teamed up with antifas to confront a small group of white nationalists marching outside California's Capitol building in Sacramento. Anti-racist protesters, many in black clothing and masks, pelted marchers with water bottles and hit them with wooden bats. Several people from both camps were beaten or stabbed. "They are organizing to attack and kill us, so we have a right to self-defense," BAMN activist Yvette Felarca told a TV crew. "Anyone who's thinking about joining them, don't. Because it's not going to be a good day for you."

Redneck Revolt: This network, largely made up of anarchists and libertarians, is focused on anti-racist organizing among the white working class. Inspired by the Young Patriots—white Appalachian activists who allied with the Black Panthers in the late 1960s—the group now claims chapters in more than 30 regions. Redneck Revolt's members can speak to their neighbors more easily than ivory-tower liberals, says Lucas Kelly, a member of the Phoenix chapter. "'Privilege' means one thing to them. It means a different thing to working-class folks who put in 60, 80 hours a week to support their family." The group also runs firearms trainings. Last December, Kelly's chapter sent members to a gun show, where they handed out posters tagged with the slogan "Fighting Nazis Is an American Tradition: Stop the Alt-Right."

Huey P. Newton Gun Club: After a white Dallas police officer killed an unarmed black man in 2013, community organizers Yafeuh Balogun and Babu Omowale launched the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, a coalition of black self-defense groups named after the co-founder of the Black Panthers. "We're going to educate black, brown, and poor white people to arm up or at least get familiar with weapons," Balogun says. "So if a situation does arise, if they feel threatened, at least they can defend themselves." When an anti-Muslim group held an armed protest outside a Nation of Islam mosque in South Dallas in April 2016, armed Gun Club members showed up to counterprotest. Balogun says his group, which operates armed patrols in South Dallas, has drawn the attention of the FBI. But he also emphasizes that it's not just about guns: "What we advise people is to not necessarily be so quick, so fast, to pick up arms."

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump officially announced the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change on Thursday, framing the 2015 deal as a kind of global plot to sabotage America.

"The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country's expense," Trump said. "They don't put America first. I do, and I always will."

And if Paris was the symbol of that ideology, the alternative, a nation of miners and pipelines, belching smoke like a charcoal grill, was represented by…Pittsburgh? "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said.

It was a bad comparison, since citizens of both Pittsburgh and Paris share an interest in averting a minimum projected sea level rise of 2.4 feet by 2100, in the scenario in which the climate accord's goals aren't met.

But it was an especially bad comparison because Pittsburgh isn't the burned-out steel town Trump thinks it is. In fact, it's a pretty good example of how a city can recover and adapt to changing economic circumstances. Pittsburgh's doing OK.

Once again, Donald Trump has shown himself a man who has acquired little to no new knowledge since the 1980s. And during the 1980s, Pittsburgh was indeed having a very tough time. The city lost 30 percent of its population between 1970 and 1990; in 1983, unemployment in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area hit 17 percent. Neighboring counties fared even worse. Deindustrialization and globalization slammed the Monongahela Valley. But that was 35 years ago.

Today, Pittsburgh's biggest employer is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Its other university, Carnegie Mellon, is home to a world-renowned robotics laboratory. The Golden Triangle is a landmark of downtown renewal. And Homestead, site of the great American labor battle of the 19th century, is a mall.

Before Pittsburgh was the poster child for a midsized, postindustrial city, it was a symbol of the ills of pollution. The soot from the steel mills hung so thick in the air the streetlights had to be on during the day. In 1948, 25 miles south of the city, the town of Donora was enveloped in a thick yellow smog that killed 20 people and sickened half the town. It was the worst air pollution disaster in US history and led to the passage of the Clean Air Act.

There's no city in America that stands to benefit from climate change, whose enormous costs are and will continue to be borne mostly by the federal government (and hence distributed among us). But as a symbol for withdrawal from a global climate treaty, Pittsburgh is an especially poor choice.

It’s a particularly fruitful year for the bestselling author, with big and small screen adaptations on the way – but what makes his work so consistently popular?

To say that Stephen King is “back” would be an absurd statement. The man never really goes anywhere, permanently inhabiting his sliver of the spotlight with a steady stream of novels, short story collections, loose magazine pieces, and less formally, his alternately bemused and biting tweets. King topped the New York Times’ bestseller list last year with his latest novel, End of Watch, and he collaborated with his son Owen on a prison-set thriller titled Sleeping Beauties that’s set for a release in the fall. But because print is, arguably, dead and for many, relevance can only be measured on screens big and small, it’s true that King’s public profile is currently enjoying something of a surge.

Related: The Dark Tower trailer: Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey go to war in the fantasy epic

The author and pop-culture theorist talks to Lanre Bakare about peak TV, Taylor Swift, why everything is political – and how he inadvertently predicted Trump

In the introduction to your new book, you say reading your old work is the ‘worst kind of time machine.’ Is it that awful, looking back at these pieces?

Yes, because I’m just compelled to want to rewrite everything I’ve ever written. My dream life would have been if I could have written my first book forever and never have it come out … but be rich. Every time I go back and I read something that I’ve written before, I see things that could have been different.

Little Richard putting one of his bowel movements into a shoebox and presenting it to an elderly neighbour as a birthday present; the already married Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin; the Rolling Stones on their legendarily debauched 1972 US tour; Michael Jackson’s terrified scream after accidentally dropping one of his signature white gloves into the lavatory – it must have been tempting for David Hepworth to turn Uncommon People into a rock version of Kenneth Anger’s still notorious Hollywood Babylon.

Mercifully, he resists the lure of an all-singing, all-dancing, scandal-ridden anthology. Instead, he has come up with a neat, more purposeful framework for his colourful, richly marinated survey of the phenomenon of the rock star between the mid-1950s and mid-1990s: one chapter per year, with each chapter having as its focus one particular day when something significant or emblematic happened. On 6 July 1957, for instance, those two Liverpool teenagers John and Paul meet for the first time; on 1 October 1967, Jimmy (not yet Jimi) Hendricks (not yet Hendrix) unveils his talent to Eric Clapton and other guitar aristocracy; on 16 August 1977, Elvis checks out; on 1 August 1987, a film is shot at a Greyhound bus station recreating the arrival in Hollywood five years earlier of Axl Rose (Guns N’ Roses). By 1997, it is all over.

Roistering tale of New York in its infancy adds £10,000 Desmond Elliott prize to the Costa first novel and Ondaatje awards it has already clinched

Francis Spufford’s “extraordinarily accomplished” Golden Hill has scored a hat-trick, winning the Desmond Elliott prize for debut novels. It is the book’s third major award this year, after scooping the Costa first novel award and the Ondaatje prize for books with a sense of place.

Announcing the winner of the £10,000 award, chair of judges and literary editor Sam Leith said: “It is an extraordinarily accomplished book. A work of technical virtuosity that ranges from being astoundingly well-structured right down to its wonderful sentences.” He also praised Spufford for “the ability he displays of having in mind a 21st-century reader while keeping true to the 18th-century idiom. That is incredible.”

The prestigious win, for A General Theory of Oblivion, will allow the novelist to fulfil a dream of building a public library, he says

When Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa was told he had won one of the world’s richest book prizes, it realised a dream. The author, whose novel A General Theory of Oblivion has scooped the €100,000 (£88,000) International Dublin literary award – formerly known as the Impac prize – has long desired to build a library in his adopted home on the Island of Mozambique.

“What we really need is a public library, because people don’t have access to books, so if I can do something to help that, it will be great,” Agualusa says. “We have already found a place and I can put my own personal library in there and open it to the people of the island. It’s been a dream for a long time.”

You’ll need to watch who you believe in these books by writers from James Baldwin to Anita Brookner and Thomas Hardy to Toni Morrison

I fell in love with these books for reasons other than their lies, reading them with a guileless pleasure. They invited me into worlds that I believed in utterly.

Worlds rather like the fictional one that my father had built, which I believed in completely, too. My memoir A Book of Untruths explores his storytelling, and mine – and how memory can deceive us, while remaining one of the most precious things that we own. The untruths I tell cover every gradation of duplicity – from illegitimacy and rape, to beefeaters woken too early and lino burned by mistake.

This engaging book links the ‘self-esteem’ industry to Ayn Rand and neoliberalism. But is the selfie-taking generation unusually narcissistic?

Self-love is a tricky issue, and the right amount of it has always depended on perspective. I have healthy self-esteem; you’re a bit full of yourself; he’s a total narcissist. But in a world where you can buy a stick to hold your phone at the approved distance to take a photograph of yourself, has it all gone a bit too far? And if so, how did that happen?

Will Storr’s thoughtful and engaging book comes at the idea of the human self’s relationship with itself from many angles. Early on, he stays in a Scottish monastery and decides that spending one’s time this way in the hope of heavenly reward constitutes “a lifetime of self-obsession”, which seems fair enough – at least for these monks who don’t do anything useful in the community, such as brewing beer.

This absorbing study of Britain’s fastest land mammal lacks the epiphanies of some nature writing but is replete with leporine lore

A couple of years ago, two nature writers carried out a polite but pointed exchange in the pages of the New Statesman. They were Mark Cocker and Robert Macfarlane, and the argument – which came first in an essay by Cocker, then in a lucid response by Macfarlane – was about “the new nature writing”. Cocker’s contention was that the successful books published by the likes of Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald and Kathleen Jamie were products of the library rather than the field – they privileged poetry over hard science. Macfarlane’s riposte spoke of the transformational power of good nature writing, of the way a well-turned sentence can “revise our ethical relations with the natural world”.

I thought of this reanimation of CP Snow and FR Leavis’s old “Two Cultures” argument as I was reading Marianne Taylor’s The Way of the Hare. It’s a beautiful book, with a striking woodcut cover, gorgeously illustrated with Taylor’s own sketches and photographs. The whole package summoned a certain expectation, that here was another chapter in the development of “the new nature writing”, an H is for Hare, if you will. I expected the book to do what this modern genre does best – to deliver ecstatic encounters with the natural world, each of them filtered through centuries of literature, each of them effecting some profound change on the author.

St Lucia National Trust says government funding cut forced closure of museum, housed in reconstruction of Nobel-winning poet’s former home

A museum on the site of the boyhood home of the poet and playwright Derek Walcott has closed amid a funding shortfall that has been linked to disputes over controversial tourist developments on St Lucia.

The Nobel laureate, who died in March, attended a ceremony last year to mark the opening of the museum, housed in a reconstruction of his former house in the Caribbean island’s capital, Castries.

In his first short story collection, the Man Booker-shortlisted American author Joshua Ferris presents a bouquet of egregious male doofuses. Behind a deadpan title – “Fragments”, “The Breeze”, “A Fair Price”, “The Stepchild” – each of the 11 tales in The Dinner Party anatomises a particular variant of 21st-century masculine folly.

The stories are constructed with great care, combining beady-eyed observation with farce, black comedy and occasional moments of lyricism. Ferris never tells us in so many words that his protagonists are awful – except in an acknowledgments page, where he’s careful to let us know that they don’t resemble him – but their selfishness, narcissism, neediness and moral idiocy are the recurring notes of the collection.

Firms including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins have spoken out about timber company’s ‘dangerous’ moves to quash campaigners’ claims

The world’s biggest book publishers have been dragged into a bitter dispute between a US logging company and environmental campaigners Greenpeace. It follows legal action taken by the logging company, Resolute Forest Products, which campaigners and publishers fear has implications for freedom of speech.

The dispute centres on claims by Greenpeace about the company’s logging practices in sections of Canada’s boreal forest, which are home to indigenous peoples as well as endangered wildlife. Greenpeace alleges that Resolute: “Is responsible for the destruction of vast areas of Canada’s magnificent boreal forest, damaging critical woodland caribou habitat and logging without the consent of impacted First Nations.”

The latest offering from the former House speaker parses the rise of the president, but ultimately says more about author than subject

When Kellyanne Conway used the term “alternative facts” in an interview with NBC, the statement went viral not just because of its brazen insincerity, but because there was a measure of transparency to it: in our current political climate, there seems to be, as Newton’s third law would dictate, an equal and opposite alternative for every fact, each weaponized by talking heads to bolster their a priori convictions.

Related: From 'covfefe' to 'the Bushkrieg': Daily Show displays Trump's best tweets

Story of a ‘perfectly ordinary cat with a not-so-ordinary tail’, based on beloved children’s author’s ninth pet feline, is due out this autumn

Almost 50 years after the appearance of one of the most famous felines in children’s books, Mog creator Judith Kerr is to publish a book inspired by her latest pet cat, Katinka. The much-loved author and illustrator, who celebrated her 94th birthday last week, is to publish Katinka’s Tail in the autumn.

The story of a “perfectly ordinary cat with a not-so-ordinary tail” was inspired by Kerr’s observations of her cat, the ninth in an inspirational line. “She is a ridiculous-looking white cat with a tabby tail that looks as though it belonged to somebody else,” she said. It was watching the “bizarre” behaviour of her first family pet, Mog – which included licking her sleeping daughter’s hair – that inspired the eponymous stories beloved by generations of children.

The author’s lecture to a large audience of Catholic clergy in Malta is to be reprinted, along with a ‘punchy counterpoint’ response by Germaine Greer

A lecture about pornography, which landed the author of A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess in hot water with the Maltese authorities in 1970, is to be published for the first time, alongside previously unseen photographs. The talk, given to a packed audience of priests and government officials, so upset the Mediterranean island’s authorities that they seized Burgess’s house.

The book, to be published as Obscenity and the Arts, will also include a provocative response to Burgess’s essay by academic and feminist Germaine Greer, who knew him personally, and an essay about his years on the island. It will be the first new work by the author, who died in 1993, to appear in 20 years.

John Kennedy Toole’s novel has been scolded for its ‘reactionary satire’ of an unchanging world, which seems to get things wrong twice over

Now that I’ve reached the end of A Confederacy of Dunces, I have to admit to some confusion. Not with the book so much as some of the things I’ve read about it. I’ve already discussed editor Robert Gottlieb’s famous complaint that John Kennedy Toole’s novel doesn’t have “a reason”. Plenty of other reviewers have also said that Ignatius J Reilly’s lack of development is a problem – but I don’t get it.

With forceful eloquence, Jonathan Rosenbaum was one of the first critics to put forward this idea in the Soho News when the book was first published in 1980. A Confederacy of Dunces, he said, was a “reactionary satire” and:

Graphic novelist Kate Evans travelled to the Calais Jungle to document life in the impromptu city near the French port town. While living there, Evans met Iraqi refugee Hoshyar. Here is part of his story told in Threads, published to mark UN World Refugee Day on 20 June

We discuss race, gender and identity with activist Reni Eddo-Lodge and the writer Juno Dawson

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Juno Dawson is the author of six novels for young adults, as well as the young person’s introduction to LGBTQ issues, This Book Is Gay. In 2015, she announced the beginning of her transition from male to female – a journey she charts in her memoir The Gender Games.

Ruta Sepetys’ novel Salt to the Sea and illustrator Lane Smith’s There Is a Tribe of Kids win their American creators the venerable British awards

A former “punk” illustrator and a refugee’s daughter have performed an American double, taking two of the UK’s most prestigious children’s literary awards. Lane Smith’s There Is a Tribe of Kids won the 2017 Kate Greenaway medal for illustration and Ruta Sepetys’ Salt to the Sea received the Carnegie medal for best children’s writing.

Chair of judges Tricia Adams described the winning books as demonstrating “the vitally important role that literature and illustration play in helping children and young people to understand the world around them, be that through a historical lens or through the natural world around them”.

Days Without End takes £25,000 honour, the second time the author has won the award for historical fiction

Sebastian Barry has become the first double winner of the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction – just seven years after the honour was first presented. Barry’s “glorious and unusual” Days Without End beat a strong shortlist to take the prestigious £25,000 award. He previously won the award in 2012 with his novel On Canaan’s Side.

The Walter Scott prize judges included journalists James Naughtie and Kate Figes, writers Katharine Grant and Elizabeth Laird. They were joined by prize co-founder Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway of the Abbotsford Trust – which manages Scott’s grand home in the Scottish Borders – and historian Alistair Moffat. Moffat, who served as chair, said: “Days Without End took the lead, for the glorious and unusual story; the seamlessly interwoven period research; and above all for the unfaltering power and authenticity of the narrative voice, a voice no reader is likely to forget.”

Australia’s most prestigious literary prize recognises stories of women, outsiders, ageing and satire for $60,000 award

Five first-time nominees – including an author with a title inspired by the award’s founder – have been announced on the shortlist for the 2017 Miles Franklin literary award.

Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, established in 1957 by the estate of My Brilliant Career author Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, recognises a novel which reflects “Australian life in any of its phases”.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar, his novel about a standup comedian’s public breakdown, scoops £50,000 prize to be shared with translator Jessica Cohen

David Grossman’s “ambitious high-wire act of a novel”, A Horse Walks into a Bar, set around a standup comic’s rambling and confessional routine in an Israeli comedy club, has won the Man Booker International prize for the year’s best fiction in translation.

Set in a small Israeli town, the novel is focused entirely on the act of comedian Dovaleh Greenstein. Taking to the stage to needle his audience with vulgar and aggressive jokes, Greenstein’s repellent performance begins to crumble as he reveals a fateful and gruesome decision he once made, which has haunted him ever since.

The Belfast poet is nominated for the prestigious honour alongside a diverse selection of writers including Tara Bergin, Nick Makoha and Malika Booker

A former banker who burned his suits to keep himself from returning to the day job and a poet who funded her way through university by cleaning toilets and working in a call centre join the acclaimed poet Michael Longley on the shortlists for the Forward prizes for poetry, announced on Monday.

Announcing the shortlists – for best collection, best single poem and best first collection – the chair of judges, broadcaster Andrew Marr, said: “I came away more than ever convinced that if you read journalism alone, or history alone and yet you omit contemporary poetry, then you cannot properly understand the world you live in.”

Falling Awake, already a much acclaimed collection, was cheered by 1,000-strong crowd at readings connected with the Canadian award

Alice Oswald has won one of the world’s richest poetry prizes with her latest collection, Falling Awake.

This dreamlike vision of the West Country carried off the 2017 International Griffin poetry prize, worth C$65,000 (£37,725). The same sum was also presented to the Vancouver poet Jordan Abel, who took home the Canadian prize with his long poem about cultural appropriation and racism, Injun.

Agent to everyone from David Cameron to Nigella Lawson, Eric Clapton to Lily Cole, Victor was colourful and well-connected, and dearly loved a party

Ed Victor, agent to the great and the good of the literary and political worlds on both sides of the Atlantic, has died at the age of 77, his agency has announced.

New York-born Victor was one of publishing’s most colourful and well-connected figures, with a client list that ranged from showbusiness stars such as Eric Clapton, Lily Cole and Roman Polanski to political heavyweights like David Cameron and David Blunkett. One of his most recent high-profile deals was the sale of Cameron’s autobiography to William Collins last autumn.

Speaking at Vivid Sydney debate, Australian novelist says artists can ‘enter other cultures as long as we don’t rip them off’

In an old and now-converted cell of Darlinghurst jail, Thomas Keneally had come to make peace. Speaking at Borrowed Voices: Freedom of Expression vs Cultural Appropriation – a debate hosted by Vivid Sydney – the author of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith told the audience he was sorry for “assuming an Aboriginal voice” in his 1972 novel, while standing metres from where the real-life basis for his protagonist, Jimmy Governor, was hanged.

“I have apologised before this for writing The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith from the point of view of an Aboriginal,” he said. “I am here to make peace with the ghost of Jimmy Governor, who was imprisoned in this jail and hanged within a short walk from here.”

The Power, a dystopian novel about a future where women can kill men with a touch, acclaimed by judges of the women’s fiction award for ‘urgency and resonance’

Naomi Alderman’s The Power has become the first science fiction novel to scoop the Baileys prize for women’s fiction. The thriller, set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.

The chair of judges, film and TV producer Tessa Ross, said that the book was a clear winner of the £30,000 prize, despite at times passionate debate among the judges. “This prize celebrates great writing and great ideas and The Power had that, but it also had urgency and resonance,” she said. The judges, she added, had been impressed by Alderman’s handling of the big issues that affect all humanity, from greed to power, and predicted the novel would be “a classic of the future”.

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Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

There, PartingShot was enjoying some post election blues:

In this week’s choice, academic and critical discourse – and indeed poetry itself – come in for some elegant ribbing

But Those Unheard

The next poem we can’t actually see.
In fact it may not be there at all.
But if it was there it would solve several problems
In the poems that we can see. We infer its existence
From what we believe to be its effects.
It may be a completely new kind of poem
Or something similar, that has leverage
On existing poems, being itself unreadable
And extremely heavy, and moving at a high speed.
Heavy invisible rapid poem-like entities
Which may never be seen or felt, almost certainly underlie
Existing poems, and may outweigh them
As the dead outnumber the living.
And they have an activity, as the dead
Can bend existing poems and hold them together.
But these are not dead poems
(We haven’t got a name for them yet).
They may explain shivering, wrinkles or otherwise unexplained anomalies
In poems we thought we understood. Lacunas,
Leanings, hesitations, small lapses in grammar, odd coinings,
Unexplained dashes or ashes where commas might be expected,
A wandering semicolon. Misspellings we pretended to ignore.
Two instances of hapax legomena in seventeeth century Siamese poems
Could be explained by a heavy unwritten poem-like entity (about the size of
Denmark)
Passing rapidly very close to them or through them.
In fact the whole field of textual criticism
Has become much more exciting
As we study here underground in darkness and close to absolute silence
Poems we thought we remembered.

The director of Internal Affairs and Leaving Las Vegas shared his secrets to making great films, musings on the ‘sublime poetry’ of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the truth about his relationship with Nic Cage

2.18pm BST

This has been very interesting for me. I enjoy this format - it gives me time to think. The questions have been very interesting, thank you. Bye!
Just a reminder - The 36 Dramatic Situations is out now and available everywhere. The cards Kickstart on Monday!

2.16pm BST

Kamatron asks:

How much rewriting went into Joe Eszterhas’s One Night Stand script, which he allegedly got paid $4m for, and how did it differ from the finished product?

My version of One Night Stand is so different from Mr Eszterhas's that he asked to have his name taken off the project. I think New Line felt they'd been landed with an expensive turkey and I was hot that week, just after Leaving Las Vegas. They offered it to me, I read it, didn't like it, they said I could do what I liked with it. One of my favourite films is Truffault's The Woman Next Door - I think it is his best film. And I always wanted to do an English language version of it, so this was a big influence on my rewrite. I originally offered it to Nicholas Cage, but I couldn't see him for dust, and I was very happy with Wesley Snipes's amazing performance. It is one of my favourite films, of my own. It got a terrible critical pasting in the states, but fared much better in Europe.

Talking of writing (cheap segue into my new book), The 36 Dramatic Situations is a rewrite of a French theatre classic written in the late 19th century. I thought it was vital to update this interesting concept for cinema. In a way, I could describe it as 36 essays on the differences between film and theatre; something that aspiring screenwriters need to be aware of. Also the book examines cliched attitudes, particularly towards gender (the dominate male, the submissive female), as well as race and religion. The book clearly reminds us that "drama comes directly from the original Greek drama and biblical morality". The family is a huge deal in the book. Given the fact that there are supposedly 36 dramatic situations, I developed a pack of cards which enable the writer to use the element of chance in the creative process - take three cards, and then place them in a sequence and let your imagination run wild. I've used the cards extensively over the last year, and what is fascinating is that I find myself in areas of drama that I would never normally choose, and it has opened up so many possibilities in terms of pure storytelling.
The book comes out this week, but I've had to develop the cards myself via Kickstarter and the campaign begins next Monday.

Writers thrive on privacy, not on Twitter. What does a world in which our interior lives are played out online mean for the novel? It is a call to action, argues the novelist

The day was always coming when science fiction would seem like nostalgia. It wasn’t that everything became true but that everything became fake. Who knew, when reading William Gibson in the simple 1980s, or old paperbacks of Frank Herbert, that these writers were common realists, no less faithful than Charles Dickens to life’s essential changes. I still remember the ritual of turning off the TV at the end of the night when I was a child. There was always a scramble to do it, because the Queen was on and everybody hated the Queen. No remote control, so you had to go over and press the button – and there it was, the final exhalation of static as the mounted Queen hyperspaced into a single white dot. It meant the world was now at a distance, a veil of finality descended over Britain, unless you could read novels under the covers with a torch. I grew up that way, between the TV and the library book, and it described a perfect circle of private experience. Robert Louis Stevenson might have been spying on us in a moral sense, and so might our Catholic God – “only He knows what’s inside your heart,” Father McLaughlin told me – but we persisted in feeling that privacy was a personal possession and a first principle.

Related: Is the internet killing our brains?

A proof of the first Harry Potter novel, which got the author’s name wrong, is only the latest example of an ungainly tradition stretching back centuries

Proofreaders may be worth their weight in gold to authors, but their oversights have proved lucrative for some lucky readers of JK Rowling. On Thursday, an uncorrected proof of her debut novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, with the writer’s name was misspelled as “JA Rowling”, became the latest muddled copy to fetch four figures at auction.

It sold for just under £10,000, which means it is not the most valuable mistake in the boy wizard’s canon. That honour goes to a rare first edition with the word “philosopher” misspelled on the back cover, which was snapped up in 2016 by a London-based businessman for £43,750.

In a series to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the author declares that it’s high time British politicans stopped muddling and meddling

Patriotic Britons of all stripes often praise the excellence of our “unwritten constitution”. When I was at university, the key text we studied if we wanted to learn about this amazing thing-that-was-not-a-thing was a book by Walter Bagehot called The English Constitution, first published in 1867. In Bagehot’s view, it was the very provisional nature of our constitutional arrangements that made them fit for purpose: unlike those absurdly codified Americans, strapped into the rigid straitjacket of their Puritan forefathers, we muddle along in our inimitable English way. The legal foundation to our state is a strange mixture of common law and custom, together with various agreements struck to deal with historical contingencies – such as the imposition of inequitable taxes by self-deluding crypto-Catholic monarchs, or the millenarian views of our own, um, Puritan forefathers.

Related: Why Britain needs a written constitution | Anthony Barnett

With slow-brewed, writerly rancour, Ford has reiterated his urge to spit on Whitehead over a 2001 notice. In the age of social media, he should be more careful

With the possible exception of those involved, everyone enjoys a good literary feud. So it was diverting when Richard Ford took to the pages of Esquire to remind us about one of the juicier spats of the new millennium.

It started in 2001, when African American writer Colson Whitehead reviewed Ford’s short-story collection A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times.

Stephen King and Margaret Atwood are among the stars obviously suited to writing these dark satires. But lesser-known names might do just as well

After three seasons of satirical, speculative storytelling on the small screen, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is making the jump to the written word. Brooker will edit three volumes of novellas – in “high-tech ‘paper’ format”, as he quipped – that will be written by different authors, with the first due in February 2018, the second later that year and the third in 2019.

All-new stories from different authors, yeah?

Britain’s poet laureate responds to the general election result in a work written for the Guardian

In which her body was a question-mark

querying her lies; her mouth a ballot-box that bit the hand that fed. Her eyes? They swivelled for a jackpot win. Her heart was a stolen purse;

EL James’s battles with director Sam Taylor-Johnson are part of a long tradition of conflicting ‘visions’. She is one of a small elite to beat the studios

Ever since Joe Gillis ended up face down in a swimming pool in the opening credits of Sunset Boulevard, it’s been clear that, Hollywood prefers its writers silent.

It’s a rule that Sam Taylor-Johnson clearly wishes EL James had heeded when she directed James’s lashing love story Fifty Shades of Grey. This week, Taylor-Johnson told trade magazine Hollywood Reporter that clashes between the two saw her unceremoniously dumped from the franchise. Likening the experience to “wading uphill through sticky tar”, the director stuck the knife in. “Every scene was fought over. It was tough,” she said of their clash. “Her thing was: ‘This is what the fans expect.’ I’d be like: ‘Well, let’s try and hit those marks but create a new universe at the same time.’”

Fifty years after her death, this master of the one-liner has survived better than the rest of her New Yorker set, but everything you know about her is liable to be wrong

A bestselling poet who moved on to fiction, Dorothy Parker, who died 50 years ago this month, single-handedly invented “the New Yorker short story”, the kind of debonair but melancholy tale later associated with JD Salinger and John Cheever. She was equally innovative as a critic, pioneering a first‑person style and busting the taboo on hatchet jobs by women when reviewing theatre – she was fired under pressure from Broadway managers after three plays that she had slated closed – and books (as “Constant Reader”, best remembered for her one-liner on AA Milne, “Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up”).

Related: Dorothy Parker showed me that it was possible to live the life I wanted | Mary Kenny

The editor who turned down John Kennedy Toole might seem myopic in hindsight, but some of his questions about the novel remain hard to answer

Humility is something you learn quickly as an editor. If you have the good fortune to find and publish excellent novels, you are sure to miss plenty of fine work. As a co-founder and editor at independent press Galley Beggar, I wake up in sweats with the certain knowledge that somewhere in my email inbox lies a stone cold classic. Perhaps I won’t even find the time to read it, let alone mistakenly turn it down. I’ve had to refuse perfectly good books in the past and will do it again. The hard truth is that you can’t publish everything – and that every publisher is human and correspondingly flawed.

But at least I can console myself that I haven’t yet said no to a Pulitzer winner like A Confederacy of Dunces. I am yet to attain the unenviable fame of Robert Gottlieb, marked by history as the man who didn’t publish John Kennedy Toole’s cult masterpiece.

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Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

I have to admit that I’ve been knocked sideways by last week’s election here in the UK. I might have even started to feel a little bit of hope for a better future. Luckily, this post from TheCourtOfOwls, who has been reading You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney, set me straight again:

In the last of three original podcasts based on William Langland’s poem, our hero goes in search of an ideal Truth. But what does that mean?

Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

In the last of three original podcasts produced for the Guardian, neurotic dreamer Piers Plowman sets off to find essential Truth. But what can that mean in a society driven by division and competing viewpoints?

In need of a comforting meal, Kate Young cooks up this dish from Fforde’s comedic romp The Eyre Affair

• Scroll down to read the recipe

“You’re at Ferndean, Miss Next,” replied Mary soothingly, “one of Mr Rochester’s other properties. You will be weak; I’ll bring some broth.”

I grabbed her arm.

The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde

The author of Spoils recalls his troubling time serving with the US army, and the uneasy process of translating his experience into fiction

Fourteen years since the US invaded Iraq, and 13 since he served there with the US army, soldier-turned-author Brian Van Reet remains conflicted about the war.

“On the one hand, I view the war as a whole as an evil thing,” he says. “It was unnecessary, it caused a massive amount of suffering and there’s something evil about that. I don’t think of myself as evil, but I participated in a bigger event that could be considered evil. I haven’t figured out how to resolve that.”

Ever since Alexander Pope’s liberating declaration that “the proper study of mankind is man”, there’s been a strong thread of intimate life-writing braided into the catalogue of English prose. Today, no bookshop is complete without its table of memoirs, reminiscences or confessional autobiographies, each owing something to Rousseau (Les Confessions) and, possibly, to Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit), but perhaps most immediately, above all, to De Quincey.

There is something so wonderfully modern and provisional about Thomas De Quincey that, of all the 19th-century writers in this series, he’s a figure you could imagine seeing but perhaps not conversing with – in Covent Garden (where much of Confessions was written) or on a stagecoach to London (he was incurably nomadic). The back-story to this classic memoir is simple enough.

The Ted Hughes prize winner explains why she does not wish to be squeezed into a ‘performance poet’ box and why you can love hip-hop and Paradise Lost

Hollie McNish has stopped talking for a moment; this doesn’t happen much during the interview. I have just asked her why she thinks her “poetic memoir”, Nobody Told Me, recently won the Poetry Society’s Ted Hughes award (previous recipients include Kate Tempest and Alice Oswald). “I really don’t know,” she says after a brief pause, shrugging and pulling awkwardly at the sleeves of her jumper. “I don’t think it’s because those experts in poetry [the judging panel] think the poetry in that book is good.”

But obviously they think it’s good – they would hardly have given you the prize if they didn’t. She shrugs again. “It’s because it has reached a wide audience,” she explains. “It’s because of where the poetry has gone, not for the quality of the writing.”

The author explains how an uneasy fascination with the shifting, treacherous coastal sands led her to write Fell, a story of sickness and healing

Writing has become my best and most persistent way of attending to the world. Fell took me four years and, while it is a novel about sickness and healing, it is also a diary of looking – of what I paid attention to during that time. But when I try to think about what started the work of attention that writing the novel involved, it is tempting to mythologise its untidy beginnings and, in the telling, to neaten them.

I can say that Fell grew from a particular place. The unbiddable, uncanny, shifting sand of Morecambe Bay intrigued me because I was frightened of it. I had been taught to be frightened of it, to watch the sands, to never walk there alone. The bay holds its own dark histories of flux and danger. It is a place of work and leisure and rest and peril. It demanded its place not as a mere backdrop for action, but one of the novel’s most shifty characters.

‘Use the Swedish concept of lagom and you will live 10 years longer – if you don’t die first’

Here in Sweden we’re getting a bit fed up with our neighbours. For the last few years, it’s been Danish hygge this and hygge that, or Norwegian “back to the land culture” and, “Sorry we are so much richer than you because we’ve got huge oil reserves.” So my publishers and I thought we should try to put Sweden back on the map – and earn ourselves a few krona into the bargain.

Related: Fancy a beer outside? There's a Scandi word for that – and so much else

I have two quite different writing routines depending on whether I’m actually putting pen to paper or not. I sit down to write a book once every four or five years, and it normally takes a year to get the thing written: the shortest was nine months for Nine Lives; the longest and most difficult was From the Holy Mountain, which took 18.

Writing up one these big non-fiction books is like a final year of a four-year university course. The first year is the easiest: I’m on a book tour for the previous title – to Rome or Karachi or wherever – doing readings from that book, and while I’m doing that I try to finalise what the next book is really about. It’s the least hard-working year: I’m mainly popping into libraries, and sending emails to other historians in the same fields. Year two is reading the secondary sources from all the previous books on the subject. Year three is about archives, so I sit in the Delhi National Archive or the Punjab archives in Lahore, or the wonderful state archives in Kabul as I did for Return of a King, with my nose in a laptop.

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy’s gripping history of the terrorist network, from 2001 to the present, reveals a dark web of familial and political machinations

In the days following the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, there was a surge of interest in the family of the al-Qaida founder and leader. One son had been shot dead during the raid on the high-walled house in the northern garrison town of Abbottabad, while confused reports described at least a dozen children or grandchildren, and between two and four wives, left stunned and bloodied by the US special forces when they left.

But the story moved on. Three years later, al-Qaida was pushed into the shadows by a breakaway faction, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis). The centre of gravity of Islamic militancy seemed to have shifted decisively to the Levant. The family of bin Laden were forgotten.

Once again, after 8 June, all is up in the air. Britain is unlikely to have five more years of strong and stable leadership from Theresa May. Uncertainty has become the new normal. Far less understood, beyond the easy rhetoric, is what lies behind the dismantling of predictable politics. Why now? Why not a decade ago, when the financial system crashed?

Thankfully, I have Steve Richards’s latest musings to turn to as I, like everyone, seek to make sense of it all. There is no more insightful observer of the British scene than this reasoned pundit turned standup. His latest book seeks to explain the rise of the maverick. More presciently, it seeks to explain how the so-called mainstream lost its way. First, the world before 8 June: Richards argues that the rot set in long ago. Politicians, so the saying goes, always fight the previous election. They are always behind the times. Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in the 1970s believed that only an incomes policy would be bearable for a public that still bore the scars of the prewar depression. They failed to see the societal impulses that would lead to the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

The United States, a German ambassador to London once told me with half a smile, should really be known as “Neues Deutschland”. German migrants gave the country the hot dog, the hamburger and the Trump family. As Erica Wagner sets out in this compelling and elegant book, their country also sent over the family that built the most striking structure to rise in New York before the skyscraper.

German manners and German culture are central to Wagner’s exploration of the life of Washington Roebling, the engineer whose energy and ideas got the Brooklyn Bridge built. He did not learn to speak English until after his 10th birthday and he often worked through his calculations in his mother tongue. He shared an alternative American identity to the Anglophone one that smothered everything after the US went to war with Germany in 1917.

Size, as we know, is not everything. You might only be the 90th largest, but you can still emerge with a sizable reputation. This is one of several lessons to be learned from the story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, way down the list in terms of size but, as this new book’s subtitle suggests, looming large in the imagination. It is probably also the world’s most dangerous diamond, described here as being “like a living, dangerous bird of prey” because so many have lost their lives over it.

The origins of the Koh-i-Noor, the “mountain of light”, are unknown, beyond the reach even of this book’s two accomplished authors, but it seems safe to assume that it emerged out of alluvial deposit somewhere in India. It may have been known in antiquity and it may have been referred to in many a romantic tale, but its first verifiable appearance isn’t until the 18th century, where it decorated the Mughal emperor’s Peacock Throne in Delhi and where it stimulated envy and greed in the emperor’s rivals. Over the following 100 years, it brought torment and tragedy to a range of people in Delhi, Kabul and Lahore.

Aunts, like monsters, are a staple of literature, and in this memoir, the two combine in the extraordinary figure of Harriet Frank Jr, aka Auntie Hankie, a childless screenwriter whose antic devotion to its author, her nephew Michael, begins as a crisp, life-giving brook, and ends as a brackish, stagnant pond out of which he finds it hard to climb. Basically, she turns before the reader’s eyes from Auntie Mame into a version of Mommie Dearest. But if such a transformation sounds enticing, a story to rival such vivid Hollywood memoirs as Brooke Hayward’s Haywire or Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life, Like Any Other, wait a moment. What a horrible taste it leaves in the mouth: metallic, like blood.

“More is more!” she shouts, urging another sweetmeat on her protege

This is an invaluable account, by Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, of their role in the revolution that is genome editing

It began with the kind of research the Trump administration wants to unfund: fiddling about with tiny obscure creatures. And there had been US Republican hostility to science before Trump, of course, when Sarah Palin objected to federal funding of fruit fly research (“Fruit flies – I kid you not,” she said). The fruit fly has been a vital workhorse of genetics for 100 years. Jennifer Doudna’s work began with organisms even further out on the Palin scale: bacteriophages, tiny viruses that prey on bacteria.

Yoghurt manufacturers knew they were important, not least because bacteriophages can destroy yoghurt cultures. Research on the mechanism of this process began in the labs of Danisco (now part of the giant DuPont) in the early 2000s, before spreading through the university biotech labs. In 2012 Doudna and Samuel Sternberg’s team at Berkeley (they are co-authors of the book but it’s written solely in Doudna’s voice) came up with probably the greatest biological breakthrough since that of Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin.

The life of Vladimir Lenin undoubtedly lends itself to the “great man” approach to history. When, a month after the February Revolution, Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland, power was divided in an uneasy alliance between a provisional government dominated by liberals on the one hand and Soviets of socialists and anarchists on the other. In the face of opposition from the other leftwing parties and from many members of his own, Lenin argued relentlessly and effectively for an immediate end to “dual power” and for “all power to the soviets!”. As the government floundered, undone by a disastrous war and a collapsing economy, his position won increasing support within the party and among growing numbers of disaffected and radicalised workers and soldiers. Without his resolve and leadership, there would have been no October; the Bolshevik party might today have been little more than a historical footnote. It is no surprise then, that amid the welter of new histories of the Russian Revolution to emerge in this centenary year, there are also new biographies of the Bolshevik leader that promise to re-examine his life and thought.

The “personal is political”, Victor Sebestyen claims in his engagingly written biography. The author ably tracks Lenin’s career as conspirator and exile in the decades before 1917, but his story hits its stride in the years of revolutionary upheaval; it captures all the drama of Lenin’s leadership against a background of imperial collapse, the ravages of war and the building of a dictatorship.

There was nothing too small, too big, too fast or too odd for Hans Sloane not to want to put it under glass and attach a label. Setting out to collect the world in the late 17th century, Sloane packed his cabinets with gnats’ blood, Inuit sun visors, a stick to put down your throat to make yourself sick, a cyclops pig, a silver penis protector and a bit of coral that looked just like someone’s hand. Out of this jumble of natural and manmade scraps he fashioned a legacy for the nation. In 1759 the British Museum was opened for the purpose of letting plebeians, patricians and everyone in between gawp at the world as refracted through one man’s roving eye and sticky fingers.

It was more than personal pathology that made Sloane nab everything that crossed his sightline. Born in 1660 a child of the Enlightenment, he really thought it might be possible to sample all that the world had to offer. Far from being anyone’s idea of a secular radical, he always insisted that this desire to build a universal knowledge bank was to better understand God’s intentions and design. More than anything, Sloane hoped that his being-sick-stick and beaver glands would tend to “the confutation of atheism and its consequences”. It was, after all, gearing up to be the age of Voltaire.

Two books, one by Elizabeth Drayson and one by Matthew Carr, investigate the harsh fate of the Moors and their heirs from the 15th to 17th centuries

For centuries, visitors from the rest of Europe were disgusted by Spain. The problem was not that city streets remained unpaved, or that its rough mountain roads could not accept wheeled carriages. What turned visitors’ stomachs was the way Spain tolerated religious minorities. Until the end of the 15th century, thriving populations of Jews and Muslims – almost 10% of the population – practised their religion openly and proudly. “We Germans call them rats,” scoffed one visitor.

The insinuation was that Spain was not a proper European country. How could it be, if it put up with such people? Europeans were meant to be Christians. So when Isabella of Castile – the remarkable queen who helped shape Spain’s identity – and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon expelled “their” Jews in 1492, they did so to loud applause from elsewhere. England, for example, had done the same thing two centuries earlier. The conquest of the last Muslim kingdom of Spain in Granada – whose king, Boabdil, is the subject of Elizabeth Drayson’s charming and eye-opening The Moor’s Last Stand – provoked even wilder joy that same year. Isabella and her husband followed this up with forcible conversions of Spanish Muslims. Yet even that was not enough for purists such as Martin Luther or the supposedly saintly Thomas More, who damned Spaniards as “faithless Jews and baptised Moors”. As if in reply, Philip III expelled 300,000 descendants of Spain’s Muslim population who had converted to Christianity, the “moriscos”, early in the 17th century. The human cost was ghastly. But, it was thought, Spain was finally pure.

Living in a housing estate on the very edge of London formed the writer in many ways. But what is the future of the buffer between city and countryside?

John Grindrod used to tell friends: “I live in the last road in London.” He grew up on the fringes of the capital, in a council estate near Croydon. His parents’ 1950s house was on the edge of the estate, facing woodland which was part of London’s green belt. It was at the edge of town and country, “the outskirts of the outskirts”. He spent the first 30 years of his life in this “intermediate nowhere”, a liminal space that profoundly shaped him: “so much of my head has been formed by it, from the outskirts, looking both ways”. Growing up, Grindrod was a loner who was bullied at school, “secretly gay and obviously gay at the same time”. The green belt became a sanctuary, a place of refuge where he could be himself: “lost in my imagination, talking to the trees and hawthorn bushes and hearing their replies”.

The humorist’s material includes drug addiction, crazy jobs, his eccentric family and homophobic abuse – but much is achingly funny

In his introduction to the first instalment of his diaries, the humorist David Sedaris outlines the difference between the diary a person imagines they will keep, in which they rail against political and social injustice, and the one in which they find themselves “questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford”. The latter is more entertaining, of course, and, in keeping with the waspish tone of his essays, it’s these types of reflection that make up the first volume.

Aside from the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, which he watches in Paris on TV with one hand on the remote and the other on the phone, political events rarely figure, with Sedaris preferring to record unusual or surprising things that he has seen, overheard, or that people have told him.

How bad is the London housing crisis? Very, very bad. It’s not some la-di-da first world problem of privileged southerners moaning about living in Zone 3 of the London underground, or that they can’t afford, as Mummy and Daddy did when newlyweds, to live in Chelsea or Islington. It’s not about the streets where Paddington Bear might have lived getting sold to oligarchs and sheikhs and then left half-empty. It is about mothers sharing single-room flats with their children in satellite towns, unable to afford the train fares to see their relatives, go to work or make hospital appointments. It is about victims of people-trafficking getting moved from one illegal garden shed to another.

Related: The great London property squeeze

In this wide-ranging and thoughtful history of Britain’s relationship with continental Europe, Brendan Simms argues that Brexit is “neither inevitable nor an accident”. It was Churchill who suggested that Europe was “where the weather came from”. Across a thousand years of our history, from the pan-European “bonds of Christendom” and the growth of an English identity during the Viking invasions, to the 19th century, when British liberalism was seen as a bulwark against autocratic aggression, events in Europe have played a profound role in shaping the destiny of first England and then Britain. What we are today is the result of experiences shared across the continent, from the Reformation to the industrial revolution. But as Simms notes: “If Europe made Britain, then Britain also made Europe.” It is a symbiotic relationship and he writes that Europe has much to learn from Britain: a union of nations modelled on the UK could help resolve the euro crisis and bring long-term stability. This is a timely and important study that places Brexit and the difficulties of the EU in an illuminating historical context.

• Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

A government uses teen stars to spin the message in this timely satire on pop and politics

Imagine – and to be honest, it shouldn’t be too hard – a world in which teenage pop singers are run not by rapacious Simon Cowell types, but by political spin doctors who sign them up to this or that party, with benefits for both sides. The stars get what we might call some free content, even if they don’t wholly understand the causes they’re taught to espouse at award ceremonies and on TV shows, while the political parties are provided with an almost endless source of distraction from scandal. Worried about what that minister said in an unguarded moment? Well, put it from your mind, and listen to the gossip. Last night at the Twannies, someone had an embarrassing “nip slip”.

The Twannies are the creation of Hannah Berry (Britten & Brülightly, Adamtine), whose new graphic novel Livestock is a satire set in a not-very-distant future (think tomorrow, or possibly the day after). When the book begins, the government is worried about a leak that may imperil its plans for human cloning: the public now knows what part a dodgy corporation called Marjorie Industries played in getting the so-called Frankenstein bill on to the statute books, and opposition is mounting. But with the Twannies on the horizon, all is not lost: step forward Clementine Darling, hotly tipped to win the award for best female singer and political spokesperson yet again.

Fans of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette will be pleased to hear that Today Will Be Different presents us with another slice of Seattle life, otherwise known, in the words of Semple’s heroine, Eleanor Flood, as “one normal day of white-people problems”. It’s a story of white-people problems, for sure – and wealthy, privileged ones at that. Not that I’m judging. This is the world Semple writes about and nobody depicts it better, with tongue-in-cheek humour and genuine warmth – but normal?

Related: Maria Semple: ‘Why aren’t I a better version of myself?’

The essence of humanity is captured by one of the finest poets of his generation through the Troubles, the first world war and the beauty of wilderness

Angel Hill, or Cnoc nan Aingeal in Gaelic, is a burial ground in the Scottish Highlands, a “soul landscape” that lends its name to Longley’s 11th collection, which this week was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize. A final resting place among the clouds, Angel Hill is close to the home of his daughter, the painter Sarah Longley, who with “easel and brushes”, “big sheets and charcoal for drawing” is “looking after the headstones”. In Longley’s “Snowdrops”, the hill is peopled by ghosts who are themselves visiting the dead: “Murdo, Alistair, / Duncan, home from the trenches, / Back in Balmacara and Kyle, / Cameronians, Gordon Highlanders / Clambering on hands and knees / Up the steep path to this graveyard.”

Like Yeats before him, Longley is the elegist and self-elegist par excellence of his generation. The Stairwell (2014) commemorated his late twin brother, Peter. In Angel Hill, Seamus Heaney is another kind of lost brother for Longley, the poet with whom he gave a reading tour of Northern Ireland in 1968 – a tour that Heaney described as the “beginnings of pluralism”, despite the Troubles that followed – and with whom he read in Lisdoonvarna two weeks before Heaney’s death. The friendship, with its “pilgrimages around the North” in Heaney’s muddy Volkswagen, is commemorated in “Room to Rhyme”, a powerful and intimate elegy in which the poet grieves for his subject and remembers his subject’s own grief: “When Oisin Ferran was burned to death, you / Stood helpless in the morgue and wept and wept.” In “Storm”, the “mighty beech” in the poet’s garden, a longstanding symbol in Longley’s work, has “lost an arm”; it is “Wind-wounded, lopsided now”. Where once they “Gazed up through cathedral / Branches at constellations”, now he and Heaney are “Together…counting tree-rings”.

Lottie and Quentin are, in Lottie’s words, members of the luckiest generation in British history, having come of age in an era of student grants and affordable housing. In middle age, however, their marriage has begun to fall apart.

Lottie is an architect who understands that nothing is ever built without compromise, “and yet she had expected better of marriage”. Her husband Quentin – a journalist and minor literary celebrity – has turned out to be a serial philanderer. To make matters worse, since the credit crunch both have lost their jobs and now can’t afford a divorce. Lottie’s solution is to rent a cheap cottage in Devon and let out their London house.

Claire North, the pseudonym of Catherine Webb, has earned a reputation for tackling serious subjects with a lightness of touch, enviable readability and an assured narrative control. The End of the Day (Orbit, £16.99) is her most ambitious novel, taking on a plethora of major issues and offering hope. Charlie is the Harbinger of Death – whose office is based, prosaically, in Milton Keynes – and he travels the world meeting those about to be visited or merely brushed by Death, and observing events and cultures about to pass from existence. His fellow Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, War and Famine, are normal men and women like Charlie who also jet around on business. It’s a surreal, whimsical conceit that allows North to examine bigotry, global warming, humanity’s propensity for violence – and the big one, the meaning of life and death. Every one of the short 110 chapters is shaped with philosophical panache.

A young woman discovers the difference between life and literature in a warm, funny portrayal of university life in the 90s

Do events matter more when witnessed in real life than in books? Does language necessarily render experience second-hand? In her first book, The Possessed, New Yorker journalist Elif Batuman complained that as an incipient novelist she was always being told to eschew books and focus on life. Literature since Don Quixote had been seen as false and sterile; disconnected from lived experience. After years as a graduate student of Russian literature, she decided to challenge this by writing an account of her own haphazard attempt to live with and through books. Now she’s continued this project in a long and enjoyably literary novel, The Idiot.

At the start of the book, the autobiographical heroine Selin has just arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard and is worrying about how to live. How does she make friends? How does she fall in love? How does she come to understand the relationship between art and life, words and world? Taking a linguistics class, she disagrees with her teacher, who believes that people think in the same way whatever language they think in. Selin is sure that she’s formed by her languages – English and Turkish.

As the vector of time is deathward, time as such is tragic, at least for mortal beings like you and me. It follows from this that stories about overcoming time tend towards the comic, because at root they are fantasies of escape from mortality. The most obvious current example is Doctor Who, with a hero who evades death by the magic of “regeneration”.

Of course, there are counterexamples. The original time travel tale, HG Wells’s The Time Machine, takes a gloriously gloomy turn as its hero travels to the far future, where the monstrous crab-like descendants of humanity occupy the terminal beach beneath a dying sun. Wells is wiser than Who in this regard: no matter what technological marvels we deploy, we cannot escape death. So I propose the following rule of thumb: stories that involve going into the future will tend to be more tragic, running as they do along the vector of our own mortality; whereas stories that involve going into the past will tend to be more comic, powered by the levity and liberation we feel as we put distance between ourselves and our own deaths.

Flying bears and diagnostic beetles: a thrilling vision of life in its most radical forms explores the question of non-human sentience

Jeff VanderMeer’s deeply strange and brilliant new novel extends the meditation on the central question of non-human sentience in his earlier work. The alien intelligence that infected Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy was capable of such a profound biochemical mimicry that it shone a harsh light on the primitive nature of human cognition. Now, splicing together the DNAs of Godzilla and Frankenstein, VanderMeer gives us Borne.

In a world laid waste by a biotech company called, simply, “Company”, Mord, a massive flying bear more than five storeys high, is terrorising survivors. These include humans, mutants, animals and hybrid creatures which are revealed to be failed or aborted biotech experiments. Biotech spans a huge spectrum. Diagnostic beetles can enter a human system and heal illnesses and wounds. There are artificial living creatures such as feral children with wings and poisoned claws, and transgenic species that can morph from human to bear. Only three named humans inhabit this world. Our protagonist, Rachel, is a scavenger in the dangerous post-Company landscape. Her lover, Wick, is an ex-Company employee who makes biotech in his swimming pool laboratory. And “the Magician” is a shadowy creature who, it is rumoured, is collecting ammunition and soldiers to fight Mord and wrest control of the land from him. Then there are the “Mord proxies”, hundreds of smaller Mords who see the flying bear as their god and are impelled only by a ferocious bloodlust. Details slowly emerge of the kind of depredation wrought upon the world by the Company, along with a deliberately undersketched strand on the pre-Company world, disintegrating under unnamed political upheavals and wars that turn millions into refugees.

Joan is at the zoo with her four-year-old son, Lincoln. It’s close to closing time and they are in the Dinosaur Discovery Pit, Lincoln playing a game with his superhero toys, when she hears a series of loud cracks. “She tries to imagine what anyone could be doing in a zoo that would sound like small explosions... they could not have been gunshots.” But as Joan and Lincoln meander towards the exit, she sees bodies, and a man with a gun. They’re in the middle of a mass shooting. Joan picks up Lincoln and runs.

Fierce Kingdom is the Alabama writer Gin Phillips’s fifth novel, her imagining of how a mother would react in this blackest of nightmares. It is panic-inducingly gripping as Joan dashes in her flip-flops for a hiding place while negotiating the questions and concerns of a four-year-old. “She can imagine clamping a hand over his mouth, holding him tight, ordering him to be perfectly still and perfectly quiet. She desperately wants that, but she cannot imagine a scenario where it is possible. If she scared him badly enough for him to stop talking, he would probably start sobbing.”

The drama of the unforthcoming second novel is often a great deal more intense and traumatic to literary onlookers than it is to their putative creators. Marilynne Robinson, for example, whose output as a novelist paused for nearly 25 years after her brilliant debut Housekeeping, published in 1980; when it recommenced, with Gilead, it did so in Pulitzer prize-winning fashion, and two subsequent novels. But this was not writer’s block, it was a writer making choices; the academic work and essays that Robinson undertakes as well as her fiction writing are just as much a part of her creative and intellectual identity. Even when there seems to be a more straightforward matter of a writer moving slowly – as in, for example, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, which took a decade to write – it is revealed to be more a case of endeavour and precision rather than existential crisis (it took him five years to get the opening chapter right).

In the case of Arundhati Roy, whose debut novel The God of Small Things won the Booker prize in 1997, her life as a political activist more than explains what she has been doing in the intervening two decades: protesting against ecological depredations, on behalf of Kashmir independence and against Hindu nationalism, as well as fighting charges of sedition laid against her by the Indian government, left her little free time. Her prolific career as a writer of nonfiction, from 2002’s The Algebra of Infinite Justice to books on capitalism, globalisation and democracy, has brought her to the fore as a polemicist and political philosopher.

In 1993, David Gunn became the first US abortion doctor to be murdered. He was shot to death in Pensacola, Florida. Since that time there have been 11 more murders and 26 attempted killings due to anti-abortion violence – the most recent in 2015, when police officer Garrett Swasey, Jennifer Markovsky, and Ke’Arre Stewart were shot and killed at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Perhaps it was that 2015 assault that prompted the prolific Joyce Carol Oates to turn her gaze to the conflict between the pro-choice and “pro-life” movements. This expansive novel – nearly 750 pages long – explores two sides of the same story. In November 1999 a doctor in Ohio, Gus Voorhees, is murdered by Luther Amos Dunphy, a roofer and lay preacher, a man who has come to believe himself a soldier of God. The book’s virtuoso opening is narrated by Dunphy himself in the run-up to the murder, pinning the reader close to his fear of the “godless atheistical state”, his belief that “in a woman, the weaknesses of a man are doubled, or trebled”. He trains to be a minister, but finds the study required too difficult: it is then that he turns to find salvation with a shotgun.

Adam Thorpe’s previous novel, Flight (2012), was a globe-trotting comic thriller about a cuckolded middle-aged pilot caught up in gun-running; before that, he published Hodd (2009), a metatextual reworking of the Robin Hood myth. You can never be sure what he’ll do next, which might explain why he still doesn’t have the name recognition he deserves. In 1992, the year of his debut, Ulverton, he was apparently an “obvious choice” for Granta’s best of young British novelists, according to AS Byatt, one of the judges; so obvious, she later said, that she actually didn’t nominate him, assuming others would; they didn’t.

His new novel is a vibrant ensemble piece unfolding around the disappearance of a teenage girl, Fay, from a Lincolnshire council estate. Jon McGregor’s recent Reservoir 13 also uses a missing teenage girl as a pretext for portraying the life of a small English community. Thorpe’s​ setting​ is urban, McGregor’s rural, but the bigger difference is that the all-seeing narration of Reservoir 13, austerely above the fray, pays as much heed to the passing of the seasons as to the villagers for whom life plods on. Missing Fay, by contrast, inhabits each of its characters one chapter at a time – a more traditional but arguably more vivid approach that affords a steady pulse of dramatic irony as well as a measure of suspense, not least because Thorpe’s carousel of perspectives includes that of Fay herself.

Although Christ equivocally declared that some men “have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake”, nowhere in the New Testament is celibacy enjoined on priests. St Paul, while advocating chastity as an ideal, assumed that most church leaders would be married, and St Peter, traditionally regarded as the first pope, had one of the most prominent mothers-in-law in the Bible.

Priestly celibacy, which was only enshrined in law in medieval times, emerged less for spiritual than for practical reasons. The church was determined to consolidate its property and its power: in the first case, by preventing priests from leaving their possessions to their children, and in the second by controlling their most powerful human instincts. Carnal passion was denigrated as animalistic and women as the instigators of their downfall. Priests should strive to emulate the sinless, sexless Christ.

When it comes to listening to pop music, there are two types of people: those who pay attention to the lyrics and those who don’t notice them. The former are drawn to artists such as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen; the latter end up choosing a song about breaking up as the first dance at their wedding. Greatest Hits is a novel for music lovers who pay attention to the words.

Now in her 60s, Cass Wheeler is an “ex-musician. Ex-mother. Ex-daughter. Ex-wife.” She is at home, in the remote farmhouse where she lives alone after huge personal loss and a spell in rehab. Spending one day forcing herself to listen to her entire back catalogue, she compiles “a very particular kind of retrospective. Her life, reflected in the songs she had written; in the songs that she, and only she, could choose.”

Problems of sexual politics, bisexuality and authorship are explored in this sequel to the cult romance Pages for You

^‘How many loves in a lifetime? One? Three? None? Nine? Flannery was pretty sure she knew her number ... One was plenty.” Pages for Her is Sylvia Brownrigg’s sequel to her 2001 lesbian romance, Pages for You, in which a 17-year-old student at Yale University falls passionately in love with a 28-year-old teaching assistant, Anne Arden. In the sequel, set 20 years on, Flannery is a novelist, married woman and mother to a daughter, Willa. Invited to speak at a writers’ conference at Yale, Flannery realises that Anne will be the chairperson. Under the spell of kindled nostalgia, she begins to struggle in the bonds of her family situation: “What Flannery felt for Anne, and had with Anne, was unique. A one-off ... a jewelled, irreproducible masterpiece.”

Composed in tiny chapters, bubbles of intense emotion, the earlier novel is light on plot and heady with young eroticism, evoking the sensuality of Flannery’s responsiveness to the world. Sometimes overwritten, often fresh and zestful, it is a rite of passage, celebrating the joys and pains of early love, sexual discovery and loss. But it tends to skirt moral issues raised by the age gap between the teacher-pupil partners. And in the sequel, Anne still believes that, when they met, “the cute, crushed-out freshman” had been “an adult, not a child”.

In Adam Thorpe’s new novel, the story of a Lincoln schoolgirl’s disappearance is subtly enmeshed with the lives of six other characters, whose paths she crosses over several months in 2012. Seeking an escape from her chaotic home life, 14-year-old Fay is taken under the wing of Sheena, the manager of a chic childrenswear shop, who supervises her work experience and takes a shine to her feistiness. To most of the other characters, though, she is someone only half seen. 

Retired steel worker Howard glimpses her in the January mist of a local park and thinks she is the ghost of a girl who went missing years before. Cosmina, a Romanian healthcare assistant, finds Fay’s discarded coat in woodland, mistaking it for “a sheep torn apart by a wolf”. A television producer turned postulant Trappist monk, Chris, encounters the girl in a vision as he tries to adjust to his new life of contemplation and prayer. 

Rachel Seiffert’s debut novel, The Dark Room, explored the impact of the Holocaust not on its victims but on Germans struggling to understand how such atrocities occurred. In her third novel, A Boy in Winter, she returns to similar territory, addressing ideas of passive culpability, complicity and the role individuals play in history. Her setting is a small town in Ukraine in 1941, recently overtaken by the Nazis. Seiffert uses several voices to narrate events over three days as the SS round up and murder the Jewish inhabitants. There is Pohl, a German engineer, whose conscience prohibits his collusion; Jewish teenager Yankel desperately trying to save his brother’s life; and Yasia who inadvertently becomes their saviour. Seiffert is a master at creating tension and empathy in a novel that turns on the nuances of human behaviour.

• A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert is published by Virago (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Megan Hunter uses words sparingly. In her startlingly poetic debut, The End We Start From (Picador £9.99), she even rations her letters. She calls her characters R and Z and each paragraph is only a sentence or two long. Hunter tangles the delight and disorientation of new motherhood with scenes of societal collapse. As everything seems to be ending, as London floods, a new life begins, hot and pink and hungry. Hunter writes with delicacy and precision; her imagery is pearlescent in places. It’s a sliver of a novel, but it shimmers.

New motherhood is also central to Polly Clark’s elegant debut, Larchfield (Quercus £14.99). Set in Helensburgh, where Clark now lives, the novel intertwines the story of WH Auden’s time as a teacher at a boys’ school with the story of Dora, living in a new house with a new baby, who begins to feel the world closing in on her. She falls out with their religious upstairs neighbours, and with the health visitor too. Though the scenes in which Dora’s storyline finally collides with Auden’s don’t quite gel, Clark has written a measured and graceful novel; this is particularly true of the way she handles Dora’s gradual unravelling.

Little Daisy is enchanted when she finds a band of little dinosaurs in her back garden – but her beloved sausage dog is less keen

Neatly twisting the stereotype that all girls long to find fairies at the bottom of the garden, this sweet tale stars dino-loving Daisy, who uncovers a tiny T rex and friends in the undergrowth of her back yard. With her bouncy bob and big grin, Daisy resembles the French film heroine Amélie, and she’s joined on her quest to find dinosaurs by her best friend and the story’s narrator, a perky sausage dog called Rex.

After criticism was levelled at Marks & Spencer and the Natural History Museum two years ago for their boys-only dinosaur-themed clothing range, it’s heartening to find more and more publishers and retailers reflecting the fact that many girls love these prehistoric beasts too.

Capturing young people’s language is impossible. Slang is wildly outdated before it hits the keyboard, let alone the page. Instead, Alex Wheatle captures the rhythm and movement of language though simile, humour and redefinitions of meaning.

He puts his words into the mouths of young people living in Crongton, a run-down series of neighbourhoods that comprise failing schools, high-rise estates and “slab” blocks. It is split between north and south, with each area contested by territorial gangs who are caught in a cycle of death and revenge.

An unhappy 17-year-old takes strength from the spirit of a murdered girl in this passionate and disturbing novel for young adults

The turbulent Saturday chronicled in Patrick Ness’s passionate and disturbing novel is like a day spent by many 17-year-olds in semi-rural America: going for a run, working in a superstore, feeling nervous about meeting their ex at a party, grabbing opportunities for clandestine afternoon sex.

But for Adam, nothing is simple. His home life as the son of an insecure and unsuccessful evangelist preacher colours all his experience. His parents would rather share their house with a herd of pink elephants than accept that he is gay and the family rule (“the Yoke”, as father Brian calls it) is built on denial and hypocrisy.

Appointed to the role of national champion of children’s books on Wednesday, Child follows an illustrious line of laureates, including Malorie Blackman and Chris Riddell. Take a look

The US actor, standup and author on her new film, Gifted, rescuing her career after being fired from Saturday Night Live, inspirational women and the terrifying situation in the White House

Jenny Slate, 35, is an American comedian, actor and author. The middle of three sisters, with a ceramicist mother and poet father, she was raised in Milton, Massachusetts. While at Columbia University, Slate performed standup and improv. Moving to Los Angeles with then-husband, director Dean Fleischer-Camp (they’ve since amicably divorced), Slate joined Saturday Night Live in 2009, but accidentally swore in her first episode and was fired after one season. A stop-motion short animation made with Fleischer-Camp, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, became a viral hit, leading to New York Times bestseller children’s books and plans for a feature-length movie.

With her distinctive voice, Slate featured in Zootopia and The Secret Life of Pets. On television, she appeared in Parks and Recreation, Married and Girls. Her performance in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, playing a comic navigating a pregnancy termination, won her awards including the Critics’ Choice award for best actress in a comedy. Slate stars in another Robespierre film, Landline, due out in the summer. In her latest film, Gifted, she plays a teacher who becomes involved with a man (Chris Evans) caring for his maths prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace).

Bet Ayer talks about her mother, Jacqueline Ayer, an artist whose books were first published in the 1950s when it was unusual to see diverse cultures authentically portrayed

“I remember once coming home from school crying because I’d lost my coat. I thought my mother would be angry but instead she said: ‘Stop there, that’s perfect!’ and started to draw me.”

Bet Ayer, daughter of the illustrator and artist Jacqueline Ayer, remembers being the unwitting model for her mother’s beautiful children’s picture books, documenting their life in Thailand. The books were groundbreaking when they were published in Britain and the US in 1959, when it was unusual to see diverse cultures authentically portrayed, particularly for children. Despite their early impact, they have been out of print since the early 60s, but now two of the four books are being republished this summer.

Prince Ibrahim’s Nordic bride yearns for the snow-covered fields of home. But they live in the Algarve. What can the prince do?

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The Algarve is famed for its golden beaches, sandy islands and white houses nestling on the rolling hillsides. But did you notice the trees?

The creator of Charlie and Lola and Clarice Bean discusses the importance of reading for pleasure

Two days before her coronation as the 10th children’s laureate, Lauren Child sits beneath an exhibition of drawings by one of her predecessors in the role, Quentin Blake, at London’s House of Illustration, looking like a biker princess. She’s wearing a canvas jacket over a glamorously ruched dress, with a skirt cut away in two deep curves at the back so that it looks as if she might be about to open up into a flower or spread her wings and fly away.

But there is no room for flightiness in her new role. Her investiture in Hull, the UK City of Culture, this week marked the start of a demanding two-year stint as champion of children and reading. She is the fourth illustrator to take the role, following on from Blake, Anthony Browne and the outgoing laureate, Chris Riddell. “I’m really keen to discuss creativity, because I feel it’s vital for all of us to be able to create and explore our world in a different way,” she says, “but there’s so much micromanagement of children today.”

The much loved author and illustrator will succeed Chris Riddell as a national champion of books for youngsters

Lauren Child, the author-illustrator of the much loved Charlie and Lola books, has been named the new Waterstones children’s laureate, succeeding fellow author and illustrator Chris Riddell to the two-year post.

In the lead-up to the announcement of her appointment on Wednesday, Child took the opportunity to criticise the pressure on parents to oversee all of their children’s time.

The writer Helen Dunmore, who has died aged 64 of cancer, seldom made herself her subject. The author of 12 novels, three books of short stories, numerous books for young adults and children and 11 collections of poetry, she was remarkable in that, although she made an impression from the start, her career evolved in unexpected ways.

As she grew older, she knew what to shed, how to travel light, how to pursue questions that occupied her single-mindedly – as if sweeping a room clear of dust. In her 20s, she had written a couple of unpublished autobiographical novels and would imply that these belonged in the bottom drawer – mere staging posts on the road to becoming a novelist, a way of getting herself out of the picture.

The novelist, recently diagnosed with cancer, considers the question of legacy and how a wander through a graveyard inspired her latest novel Birdcage Walk

What is left behind by a life? Avoiding this question can be as much of an art as answering it. Philip Larkin wrote of ambulances, inexorable as plague carts, extracting those who are about to die from the commerce of the living. In his poem “Aubade” he describes the blank horror of extinction, the mind caught in the glare of it, the poet half-drunk and paralysed by dread of death. In this poem the living leave no legacy, unless it is self-delusion.

I have been thinking about this question of legacy over the past few months, for one reason because my new novel deals with memory, historical record, what remains, what is saved and what is lost. The question has become more acute because a few months ago I was diagnosed with a cancer that has a very poor prognosis. The ground beneath my feet has never been more uncertain, but what is sure is that the ambulance has already called and there is no vagueness about my mortality.

Art doesn’t have to come out of chaos, as it did for Van Gogh. Former Monsoon star Sheila Chandra and Stik explain how they learned to defeat disorder

When the singer Sheila Chandra and the street artist Stik first met they didn’t say a word. It was at a club night at Glastonbury Assembly Rooms in 2008. Chandra had a concert the next day and needed to preserve her voice so she communicated with handwritten notes, which most people found uncomfortable. Stik, however, was happy to reply with drawings of his trademark stick men. When they next met, they were able to actually talk. Nine years later, their conversations have led to a book.

Organizing for Creative People is a brisk and bracing handbook for people who want to become professional artists, covering everything from tidying your workspace to understanding contracts. There is even a section on how to prepare for interviews. Have they done their homework? “Let me grill you,” says Chandra. “Length of piece? Angle? Tone?”

Amanda Craig is a novelist, journalist and literary critic. Her eighth novel, The Lie of the Land, is a sharp social comedy about divorce, family and the difficulties of life in rural Britain.

The divorcing couple in your new novel move to Devon together because they can’t afford to buy separate homes in London. Where did that idea come from?
My husband and I bought this bolthole in Devon and it was a revelation. As a result, this book is absolutely not about people moving to the country and having a lovely time. It’s about the difficult aspects of living in the countryside as well as its beauty, and how it’s really not helped by the metropolitan elite.

As the film of Alone in Berlin opens, German historians say facts were kept out of Hans Fallada’s original novel

Vincent Pérez’s film Alone in Berlin, which premieres with a grand live event at the Imperial War Museum in London on 26 June, hopes to be a summer hit in British cinemas. Starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, the film tells the story of a working-class German couple who embark on a propaganda campaign against Hitler’s regime after learning of the death of their son.

Based on the 1947 novel by the German writer Hans Fallada – a surprise bestseller after Penguin commissioned a new translation in 2009 – it has been hailed as a “redemptive” tale and a “story of resistance and hope”.

On Father’s Day a parent and novelist asks if the ‘pram in the hall’ is quite the obstacle to literary success it used to be

When I became a father, a number of people made some half-joking reference to me about the “pram in the hall”. By that stage I had published two novels, and the point of the joke was to ask me, sympathetically, if I was worried that having kids would get in the way of writing more. It’s amazing how the line has stuck, how – with the garret and the Olivetti – it has become a part of the myth of the writer in the public imagination. So that even people who don’t know the rest of the quote, or who wrote it, or haven’t read the book he wrote it in, remember that phrase and what it stands for, or seems to stand for.

Recently, I read Cyril Connolly’s 1938 Enemies of Promise (it seems to be out of print), from which the infamous phrase comes, in an old Penguin edition from 1961. It’s a very smart, entertaining, deeply weird and often offensive book that Connolly wrote partly to explain why he himself had not yet produced his masterpiece … but it’s also true that by that point in his life (he was 35), he had not produced any kids, either. The artist he’s talking about isn’t someone who works while the baby is napping, or changes nappies, or prepares formula in steam-sterilised bottles several times a day. Or, for that matter, breastfeeds. The writers he’s talking about are probably men, and the danger of the pram in the hall isn’t that they have to look after the child sleeping in it, but that they’ll find some boring job to pay for the middle-class life the pram symbolises and which they’ve signed up to:

The novelist recalls how he began imagining a future Tory home secretary’s life while the Tories were still in opposition

I began to sketch the novel that became The Knives in late 2009 (I was calling it Homeland then, but someone beat me to that punch). My interest had been stirred by news coverage of certain moral-political dilemmas facing the then home secretary Alan Johnson, who seemed to me an honest man trying to do a near-impossible job.

Reading up on previous incumbents, I was struck by Douglas Hurd’s lament of being confronted daily by “wickedness of all kinds”. David Blunkett, a bit less fire-and-brimstone, remembered “the most intractable problems”. I did wonder – idly at first, then avidly – what it would mean to wake up to that job ever day.

The stories in Boundless, her latest collection, show the Canadian author-illustrator pushing the boundaries of the graphic form to reflect a changing world

In one of Jillian Tamaki’s comic-book stories, entitled 1. Jenny, a “mirror Facebook” appears on the internet. At first, it looks like it is merely a duplicate of the familiar social network – until small changes begin to appear on everyone’s profiles. Like most internet phenomena, it is “all anyone could talk about for two weeks”, considered “playful at best, mischievous at worst”. But as Jenny watches the mysterious mirror-Jenny’s life diverge from her own in tiny ways – growing her hair long, watching Top Gun – she grows increasingly obsessed with the life that could be hers; wishing, all the same, that “she had followed through with her threats to quit Facebook. (Threatening to whom?)”

As in many of Tamaki’s stories in her delicate new collection Boundless, 1. Jenny is unpredictable and wry, focusing on women struggling with societal expectations, both online and in reality. Technology and social media are front and centre in most of the stories, but the Canadian writer and artist isn’t moralising. “I try to be more observational about it, and think about its sensory aspects or people’s different connections to it,” she says from Toronto.

‘I can’t write something relentlessly awful – I’m not robust enough,’ Australian author says of gripping, grim second novel shot through with warmth and humour

Anna Spargo-Ryan’s debut novel, The Paper House, was an honest look at mental illness and grief – but it came at a cost. “[The book] was about a nervous breakdown and, when I finished writing it, I essentially had a nervous breakdown,” she says.

In the Australian writer’s second book, she turns the lens on the insidious nature of family violence – but readers should not be deterred by the subject matter. The Gulf is a warmhearted novel through which Spargo-Ryan proves again to be a sharp observer of human emotion.

The US has a president who embodies many of the things Naomi Klein has been warning about for years. She says her new book had to be written before things got worse

The fact that Naomi Klein predicted the forces that explain the rise to power of Donald Trump gives her no pleasure at all. It is 17 years since Klein, then aged 30, published her first book, No Logo – a seductive rage against the branding of public life by globalising corporations – and made herself, in the words of the New Yorker, “the most visible and influential figure on the American left” almost overnight. She ended the book with what sounded then like “this crazy idea that you could become your own personal global brand”.

Speaking about that idea now, she can only laugh at her former innocence. No Logo was written before social media made personal branding second nature. Trump, she suggests in her new book, No Is Not Enough, exploited that phenomenon to become the first incarnation of president as a brand, doing to the US nation and to the planet what he had first practised on his big gold towers: plastering his name and everything it stands for all over them.

The Booker-winning author of The Sellout on difficult interviews, the joy and pain of writing, and why he shies away from big questions

Paul Beatty was born in Los Angeles in 1962. He studied psychology at Boston University and received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. He started his writing career as a poet and has edited Hokum, a study in African American humour. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Booker prize with his fourth novel, The Sellout, a coruscating bestseller about race relations in the US. He lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

When you started The Sellout, to what extent did you know where you were going with it?
I started with the idea of rendering segregation in a contemporary context. I was asking myself: how do you segregate something without having any power? I was intrigued to try to figure it out. I have a pretty good sense of direction, although I don’t know how I’m going to get there. But the real seed for the book was the character of Hominy [former child actor and latter-day, self-appointed slave]. I tend to like underappreciated characters: you think you see one thing, you might be seeing something else.

We investigate the murky world of tartan noir, and look into this week’s headline honours, the Baileys and children’s laureate

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It seems like all the best crime writing in the UK at the moment comes from north of the border. In this week’s podcast we’re joined by Ann Cleeves and Chris Brookmyre to investigate.

The Pulitzer prize-winning author talks to Sarah Churchwell about his new memoir, Between Them: Remembering my Parents

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Richard Ford is best known for his quartet of novels charting the life of sportswriter and estate agent Frank Bascombe, including 1995’s Pulitzer prize-winning Independence Day. His latest book couldn’t be more different. Between Them: Remembering My Parents is a memoir that combines accounts of his parents, written more than 30 years apart.

We gaze uneasily to the future with Doctorow, look back on the history of the British Raj with Tharoor, and some comic relief comes from Fielding’s hapless heroine Bridget Jones

In this week’s podcast, we tune in to some of the big hitters at the Hay literary festival, in the tiny, bookish town of Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Politician Shashi Tharoor tells us about the inglorious history of British rule in India and novelist Cory Doctorow imagines a world plunged into climate disaster.

We also drop in to a children’s storytelling session to meet the picture-book hero Sir Charlie Stinky Socks. And we eavesdrop on Helen Fielding, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, as she makes a surprising revelation about Bridget Jones.

In the second of three original podcasts, William Langland’s 14th-century poem is brought into focus against a contemporary backdrop of precarious labour

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In the second of three original podcasts for the Guardian, the dream-vision of Piers Plowman, is reflected against a contemporary backdrop of precarious labour and shifting working practices.

In episode one of a three-part series, the medieval ‘poem of crisis’ reveals a world of inequality, corruption and spiritual malaise that is all too familiar

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Welcome to a world where money matters. Where the gap between rich and poor has grown to a chasm. Where the moral certainties of the past are slipping away and the threat of apocalypse is never far from your mind. But this is not 2017. It is the world conjured by the 14h century poet William Langland in his surreal, hypnotic masterwork Piers Plowman.

Modern Toss – AKA Jon Link and Mick Bunnage – are back with The Weekend, a colouring book featuring the joys of Saturday supermarket shopping, botched DIY, binge drinking and more

The Spanish island city is terrorised by a fearsome dragon. But is it really a dragon, or something else?

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Mallorca’s beautiful beaches and stunning mountain landscapes are world famous. Less well known, is the Dragon of Palma de Mallorca, a beastly reptile said to live in the city sewers during the 17th Century. This mythical monster crawled through the twisting streets of the neighbourhood, eating naughty children.

If she hadn’t moved to New York, the Pulitzer prize winner doubts she would have become a writer

Many years ago I sat in a cafe in New York City with my friend Kathy, and I asked her why she had a small house two hours away in a small town, rather than just her apartment in the city. She answered calmly, “Well, I came from a small town in the midwest and I imagine a part of me is very comfortable there.”

I thought about this, and then I said, “Kathy, if I ever return to a small town, I want you to kill me.”

Her bold tale The Power, set in a world where women can electrocute men at will, has won the prestigious prize. Alderman talks about the book’s impact, crying at Wonder Woman and why female solidarity is more vital than running water

Naomi Alderman writes novels and video games, teaches, makes radio programmes about science, art, fantasy and culture for the BBC. “I don’t watch a lot of Ready Steady Cook,” she deadpans.

This morning, she has been editing the second half of the latest season of Zombies, Run!, her bestselling mobile fitness and adventure game, on the train. Now, she has been whisked off to a supposedly quiet room in London’s Royal Festival Hall to talk to me about The Power, the novel that has just won the Baileys prize for women’s fiction, worth £30,000 and a considerable boost to sales.

Each year around the anniversary of 4 June 1989, the Beijing massacre, words vanish from the Chinese internet. A comprehensive list of blocked words is published by China Digital Times, which keeps an extensive database. Digital censorship has pushed Chinese citizens to create an irreverent, ingenious and hilarious counter-language of puns, gifs, memes, nicknames and more, to fill in the spaces otherwise left blank. I turned to those missing words to record the events of 1989 and the aftermath.

1. The demonstrations, which daily brought up to a million people to Tiananmen Square, began when Beijing students tried to mourn the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist leader who had been removed from office.

They sell millions of books, but you rarely see them in bookshops – three successful novelists on working under the radar of the book charts

When Keith Houghton bought his four-bedroom detached house earlier this year, he did a rare thing for an author: he paid cash, with earnings from his books.

Keith who, you may ask? Houghton is one of a handful of so-called “hidden” bestsellers: his self-published crime thrillers are ebooks, sales of which are not monitored by the UK’s official book charts (if they don’t have ISBNs, which self-published titles often don’t).

‘Is this story true?’ readers invevitably ask. In the first of her BBC Reith Lectures, the double Man Booker prize-winning author explores the complicated relationship between history, fact and fiction

Saint Augustine says, the dead are invisible, they are not absent. You needn’t believe in ghosts to see that’s true. We carry the genes and the culture of our ancestors, and what we think about them shapes what we think of ourselves, and how we make sense of our time and place. Are these good times, bad times, interesting times? We rely on history to tell us. History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context. But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.

There is a poem by WH Auden, called “As I Walked Out One Evening”:

David Sedaris’s partner of 25 years, Hugh Hamrick, calls the first chunk of the essayist’s diaries, published under the title Theft By Finding, “David Copperfield Sedaris”. And it’s true, Sedaris concedes, the book – which covers the years from 1977, when he scribbled his first entries on the backs of coffee shop placemats while travelling around, to 2002 – has a certain rags-to-riches quality. In the second volume, on the other hand, “I just go from shopping at Paul Smith to shopping at Comme des Garçons, and I’m on airplanes all the time”. The thought prompts a memory of a recent plane trip, first class from Hawaii to Portland, Oregon. “This woman said, you are so lucky to be seated up front, it’s a great spot for people-watching. And I said, hmm, it could be, but we don’t really count you as people.” He bursts out laughing, and so do I, even though I know I oughtn’t. What on earth did she say? “She laughed, she knew I was kidding. Hugh was horrified. Horrified.”

There’s something about that one-liner that characterises Sedaris’s writing: a flash of directness, even brutality, that threatens the social veneer (especially in first class); the reassuring feeling that of course he’s kidding, with the faint background feeling, “but not entirely”; the spreading realisation that he’s getting at something far more complex about human nature, absurdity and awkwardness. “He’s like an American Alan Bennett,” says the quote (from this newspaper) on the back cover of Theft By Finding. Both writers occupy that space in which their subversiveness and caustic records of daily life run up against the foam blanket of “humour”, as if we can maximise the cuddliness and minimise the edge by focusing on the laughs.

From Hans Fallada to Vladimir Nabokov, a novelist recommends fiction from a city moving through its darkest years

My novel The Butchers of Berlin is ostensibly a thriller set in that city during wartime. It begins with the discovery of flayed corpses as the last of the city’s Jews are rounded up for deportation at the beginning of 1943. There was austerity, the mobilisation of the civilian reserve, shopkeepers and waiters, and an anti-corruption campaign against the top echelon. Very little was written about the city at this pivotal time, for the obvious reason that its best writers and artists had either fled or been reduced to silence

But the real point of The Butchers of Berlin was to try and reconnect to a strong, and suppressed, genre of cinematic writing about the city. I also wanted to touch on its art, particularly the forensic cartoons of George Grosz, and the expressionist films of the 1920s and early 30s where the sets imposed themselves on the human drama – the Third Reich was nothing if not an expressionist nightmare. To write about Berlin in 1943, it was necessary to look at what went before – the much freer and artistically productive period of Weimar Germany. The background reading and viewing I did underpins the novel in terms of what is missing.

Tunglið is a tiny imprint that defies conventional business models, incinerating work that doesn’t sell immediately. Its creators explain their ‘poetic act’

For Tunglið, how you publish is as important as what you publish. Named after the Icelandic word for the moon, the tiny publisher prints its books in batches of 69 on the night of a full moon. So far, so weird. But keen readers must also buy their books that same night, as the publisher burns all unsold copies. Weirder still.

Why? While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – “uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.”

Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey, sold 1.4 million copies. Here, she tells how Instagram helped her find her young, female audience

Ordinarily, the illustration adorning the cover of a new book is not a big story, but such is the hype around the young Canadian poet Rupi Kaur that her plan to release the picture to her 1.3 million Instagram followers on 1 June is generating great excitement.

Kaur, 24, came from nowhere to sell 1.4 million copies of her first book, Milk and Honey. That is almost unheard of for a first-time writer, let alone a first-time poet. First self-published in 2014 and then by a publishing house the following year, the poetry collection became a New York Times bestseller. Now Kaur is building up anticipation on social media for her new anthology, which is due out in September. And here, the Observer publishes an exclusive extract.

The author of The God Of Small Things talks about political activism – and why she fled India to finish her new book

• Exclusive extract from The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness

When Arundhati Roy completed her new novel, her first in 20 years, she told her literary agent, “I don’t want all this bidding and vulgarity, you know.” She wanted interested publishers to write her a letter instead, describing “how they understood” her book. She then convened a meeting with them. “OK,” her agent prompted afterwards. “You know what they think. You’ve met them. Now decide.”

“Oh no,” she told him. “Not yet. First I’ll have to consult.” He was puzzled. “You consult me, right?” “No, I have to consult these folks. You know, the folks in my book.” So the author and her agent sat together in silence while she asked the characters in her novel which publisher they liked the best. When Roy announced their choice, her agent pointed out that his bid was half what other publishers were offering. “Yes,” she shrugged. “But they like him.”

We live in interesting times. Let us hope, for all our sakes, they do not get too much more so.

In Britain, we have had the luxury of peace for so long now any other condition has all but passed out of living memory. Even during the second world war, for all the loss and sacrifice involved, we escaped the terror of occupation, the ignominy of collaboration, the horror of the deportations; we were spared the wholesale destruction of our towns and cities and the years of hunger that came afterwards. By comparison with large swaths of continental Europe and beyond, we came off lightly – and of course, we were victorious.

Christopher Hitchens on God, Margaret Atwood on The Handmaid’s Tale, Hilary Mantel on Wolf Hall … highlights from Hay’s most memorable interviews

FS: Is the element of self-deception that characterises a number of the figures in your novels always to do with that discrepancy between the way life really is and the way that they rather hoped it might be?

In an extract from his forthcoming novel, The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman returns to the magical world of Northern Lights

Eleven-year-old Malcolm lives with his parents at the Trout Inn near Oxford, across the river Thames from Godstow Priory, where the nuns are looking after a special guest. One night his father comes to Malcolm’s bedroom.

“Malcolm, you en’t in bed yet—good. Come downstairs for a minute. There’s a gentleman wants a word with you.”

After two years of careful consideration, Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English. Take a look at his list

• Robert McCrum reflects on his choices
• One in five doesn’t represent over 300 years of women in literature: a response
• What is missing: readers’ alternative list
• The world’s 100 greatest novels of all time (2003)

1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

A story of a man in search of truth told with the simple clarity and beauty of Bunyan’s prose make this the ultimate English classic.

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
• Harold Bloom on Don Quixote – the first modern novel

2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: The Pilgrim's Progress

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

Du Maurier’s novel is a tightly plotted, sinuous and undeniably feral piece of work that puts power in the hands of women

At first sight, the scene could not be more romantic. Philip Ashley, on the verge of coming into his inheritance, intends, in just a few hours, to tip the lot – vast Cornish estate, family jewels and his entire fortune – into the lap of his dead cousin’s widow Rachel, the older woman with whom he is besotted. He takes a euphoric late-night dip in the sea and strides back to the house where – though he does not know it yet – she is about to make him the happiest man alive. As he makes his way through the eerily moonlit woods and chooses the path which will lead him to his lover (and, it turns out, a lot more besides), an odour reaches his nostrils – a “rank vixen smell” which for a moment or two seems to stop him in his tracks.

Rank vixen smell.

It’s a shame that Cary Fukunaga has pulled out of his planned adaptation – but it’s not surprising, given the challenges involved in doing justice to this landmark novel

Cary Fukunaga, the man responsible for directing the brilliant first season of True Detective, recently announced he has dropped out of directing a new film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel, IT, claiming creative differences with the studio, New Line, were to blame for him abandoning his two-film adaptation. “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film … They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares,’’ he told Variety.

This isn’t the first time writers or directors have been signed to adapt King’s novel only to quit. Warner Bros was first to try and fail, hiring David Kajganich, a screenwriter whose credits include mediocre horror movies such as Joel Schumacher’s Blood Creek. This might look like a case of disaster averted, but Cary Fukunaga’s exit is a real blow. The director has both the talent and the appreciation of the source material to make a decent fist of adapting what is arguably Stephen King’s greatest work.

I was very touched by the wise and kindly words of Judith Kerr, author of so many delightful children’s books, as she contemplated death and old age: “I just wanted to say: Remember. Remember me. But do get on with your lives” (Mog author to publish Katinka’s Tail - 50 years after her first cat creation, 21 June).

I would like to assure Judith Kerr that she will certainly be well remembered in our cat-loving family. One powerful memory is of my mother, Margaret, a couple of days before she died, sitting on the sofa reading Mog books to my daughter Katherine, then nearly two. Kat’s other much-loved and doting grandmother, Ada, was a Jewish refugee from Berlin at the age of 14, much like Ms Kerr. There is a certain obligation not to forget the lives of such people, who were profoundly affected by the Holocaust, and it’s lovely to think that part of that process is entwined with memories of reading Mog stories or The Tiger Who Came To Tea. And who could forget the charming pictures, so lovingly crafted by Judith Kerr, so full of insight into the behavior of humans. And cats.
Giles Oakley
London

A series of films released in the seventh year of the decade, ranging from silent romantic comedy “Breakfast at Sunrise” (1927) to the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic,” will be screened the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in July. Many National Film Registry titles are featured in the lineup including “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), and Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937).

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The Library of Congress will host a special outdoor film festival this summer to showcase several modern classics that have been added to the Library’s National Film Registry. The six-film series will be presented on Thursday evenings at 8 p.m. from July 13 through August 17 on the north lawn of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the U.S. Capitol.

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“Resistance and Rights: Civil Liberties during World War I” will take place from 2:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 8, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.  The event is free and open to the public.

The symposium is hosted by the Law Library of Congress and the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.  It is made possible by the James Madison Council, the Library’s private-sector advisory council.

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The Library of Congress today announced that Lynda Carter, the famed actress known for her role as Wonder Woman, will appear at Library festivities celebrating the world of comics. 

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Between August 1914 and November 1918, World War I eradicated empires, ignited the Russian Revolution, reconfigured the world map and marked a turning point for the United States. A new book available today commemorates the centennial of that decisive moment in American history.

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The Library of Congress announces “Pride in the Library,” a pop-up display that will feature items from the Library’s extensive LGBTQ+ collections and will be on view June 8-10, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. plus a series of related programs.

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Nearly 100 comic-book collection items will be on display for “Library of Awesome,” a pop-up exhibit featuring items from the Library’s comic-book collections presented in conjunction with Awesome-Con, Washington, D.C.’s annual convention of comics, cosplay and pop culture.

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The Law Library of Congress will present a live performance titled, “Justice for Shylock: A Mock Appeal Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Venice Ghetto” on Wednesday, June 21. The event is free, but tickets are required.

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The American family comedy team known as The Marx Brothers was successful in vaudeville, on Broadway and in motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Three films that feature appearances from the brothers will open this month’s screenings at the Packard Campus Theater.

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The Library of Congress has an extensive collection of these maps in its Geography and Map Division. Many of the maps reproduced in “Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps” by Stephen J. Hornsby are from the division’s collections. Hornsby will discuss and sign his book at the Library on Wednesday, May 24.

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The African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress (AMED), in cooperation with the Iranian-American Alumni of the Alborz High School will present a symposium on the legacy of the ancient Persian Sasanian empire (224–651 AD). The event is part of an annual series of symposia on the ancient civilizations of the Near East organized by AMED at the Library of Congress.

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Artist Mirta Kupferminc and psychoanalyst Tova Shvartzman will discuss art, Judaism and psychoanalysis in conversations with University of Maryland professor Saul Sosnowski, at the Library of Congress on June 2.

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced that the Library will host a series of pop-up displays in its Thomas Jefferson Building to showcase a wider variety of its vast collections.

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Distinguished legal scholars will examine the challenges to civil liberties during World War I, in “Resistance and Rights: Civil Liberties during World War I," a symposium at the Library of Congress on June 8.

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Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov.

The Library of Congress today opened “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustrations,” a new exhibition featuring 98 works of art that capture the drama of high-profile court cases in the last 50 years.

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The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress will host a panel discussion on the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) within the veteran community.

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All Events Are Free and Open to the Public

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Patricia Hruby Powell will speak about her new book, “Loving vs. Virginia,”  a book for young people about a famous legal case that cleared the way for interracial marriage in the United States on May 3, as this year’s Jonah S. Eskin Memorial Program.

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The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress will host a panel discussion in May that will take a historical look at religious belief in America. From 3 to 5 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, three noted historians—John Witte, Sarah Barringer Gordon and Peter Manseau—will participate in a panel discussion on “Religion in American History: Moments of Crisis and Opportunity.”  The program will be moderated by Kluge Center Director Ted Widmer.

NOTE: An accompanying workshop event on the Bible and its influence in public life previously announced for May 5 has been canceled.

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The Library of Congress and the Philip Lee Phillips Map Society will present “Mapping the Great War,” a program on May 25 featuring two lectures on the maps of World War I.

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Swann Foundation Fellow Elizabeth (Biz) Nijdam, in a lecture at the Library of Congress, will discuss on April 28 the comic art of the East German-born artist Anke Feuchtenberger in the context of her artistic training and the political climate in which she developed.

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Three lectures at the John W. Kluge Center this April and May will consider the distinctive role of public-school libraries; new perspectives on the American Revolution; and globalization through the prism of religion.  The lectures will feature the work of senior scholars who have spent time in residence at the Library of Congress during the spring.

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Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao, a former director of the Peace Corps, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, a former Peace Corps volunteer, will reflect on their experiences as leaders in government and business and discuss the need for a spirit of service and idealism. The talk will be moderated by Ann Compton, former White House correspondent for ABC News.

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The Library of Congress will mark the centennial of John F. Kennedy’s birthday with special programming, including a film, lectures and a three-month display of the former president’s biographical materials and books.

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The Library of Congress has announced two new born-digital collections are now available on loc.gov – the Webcomics Web Archive and the Web Cultures Web Archive.

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The Veterans History Project (VHP) has launched a web exhibit that complements the Library of Congress’s major exhibition “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I.”  The three-part web companion, “Experiencing War,” will help tell the larger story of the war from the perspective of those who served in it. 

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The Library of Congress has placed online nearly 25,000 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which depict the structure and use of buildings in U.S. cities and towns. Maps will be added monthly until 2020, for a total of approximately 500,000.

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Produced by the Japanese-Americans interned at assembly centers and relocation centers around the country during World War II, these newspapers provide a unique look into the daily lives of the people who were held in these camps. They include articles written in English and Japanese, typed, handwritten and drawn. They advertise community events, provide logistical information about the camps and relocation, report on news from the community, and include editorials. Included in this collection are 4600+ issues of 29 newspaper titles (in English, Japanese, or both) from camps in seven states.

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Or read this blog post about the collection.

The papers of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), author and leader in Washington, D.C., social and political circles during the first decades of the nineteenth century, span the years 1789-1874. Topics covered include Washington, D.C., social life, presidential elections, the British occupation of Washington in 1814, and visits to the Virginia homes of Thomas Jefferson and James and Dolley Madison.

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May is both Asian Pacific Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month. The Library of Congress and other federal agencies join in paying tribute to the Asian and Pacific Americans and the Jewish Americans who have enriched America's history and are instrumental to its future success.

Click here for more information on Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Click here for more information on Jewish American Heritage Month.

This exhibition showcases the Library’s extensive collections of original art by talented artists hired by both newspapers and television to capture the personal dynamics of legal trials.

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The renowned Eastern Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai was constructed by the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, in the late sixth century AD over the relics of the martyred saint and the place of the biblical burning bush as identified by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. It is home to reputedly the oldest continuously run library in existence today. Its holdings of religious and secular manuscripts are legendary and allegedly second only in number to the collection held by the Vatican: from bibles, to patristic works, to liturgies and prayers books, and on to legal documents such as deeds, court cases, Fatwahs (legal opinions). The greater proportion of the manuscripts were copied in Greek, and then in Syriac, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Ethiopic, as well as Old Church Slavonic.

In 1949, Kenneth W. Clark, led an expedition to the Middle East under the Auspices of the Library of Congress and its partners, to microfilm old manuscripts in various libraries of the Middle East, the largest and most isolated of which was that at St. Catherine’s. His group evaluated the 3,300 manuscripts held there and chose 1,687 for filming. Finally, the group also prepared under his direction a Checklist of Manuscripts in St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai Microfilmed for the Library of Congress (1950), which gave researchers access to both the manuscripts microfilms and the black and white transparencies.

Since its appearance, this set has been so widely consulted by scholars around the globe that the Library has now digitized the microfilms to facilitate their use by scholars worldwide. At the same time the descriptions of the manuscripts as found in the Checklist have also been edited and updated.

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50 new items and biographies, added for National Poetry Month. Read Anne Holmes’ blog post about this collection.

Click here to visit the collection.

Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I examines the upheaval of world war as Americans confronted it— both at home and abroad. The exhibition considers the debates and struggles that surrounded U.S. engagement; explores U.S. military and home front mobilization and the immensity of industrialized warfare; and touches on the war’s effects, as an international peace settlement was negotiated, national borders were redrawn, and soldiers returned to reintegrate into American society.

here for more information.

The South-Central Georgia Folklife Project collection was an ethnographic field project conducted in the summer of 1977 by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress and the Arts Experiment Station of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. The eight-county area chosen for the study is in the center of the "Wiregrass" region of Georgia. The collection consists of approximately 376 sound recordings, 14,300 photographs, 13 containers of manuscripts, 8 videocassettes, and 31 pen-and-ink drawings that document the folklife of south-central Georgia from July-August 1977. Topics of research were hymn singing, vernacular architecture, occupations, foodways, jokes, and stories from the region. Approximately 300 hours of audio and various local events were recorded.

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The papers of Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), educator, U.S. representative from New York, vice president, and thirteenth president of the United States, contain approximately thirty-five items spanning the years 1839-1925, with the bulk dating from 1839 to 1870. The collection includes correspondence relating primarily to political issues such as slavery, Compromise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and congressional politics. Individuals mentioned in the correspondence include Thomas Hart Benton, John C. Calhoun, and William Henry Harrison. Fillmore's correspondents include Philip Ricard Fendall, Solomon G. Haven, and Humphrey Marshall.

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The Library of Congress has established a channel on the Medium online publishing platform.

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The Nation's Forum recordings were made between 1918 and 1920 in an effort to preserve the voices of prominent Americans; in most cases, they are the only surviving recordings of a speaker. The project originated with St. Louis attorney Guy Golterman (1879-1967), an active supporter of the opera and other performing arts. With the endorsement of the Department of State's Committee on Public Information -- a governmental propaganda ministry -- the Nation's Forum sought speakers, and the Columbia Graphophone Company pressed and distributed the recordings under the Nation's Forum label.

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Annual update with 2016 additions to Recording Registry. Includes audio montage.

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World War I Primary Source set for classroom use. Includes Teacher's guide. Also available in Student Discovery Set format for iPad via Apple iBooks.

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The seven volumes of diaries and notebooks, 1793-1861, of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca.1775-1865) document her position at the center of a Washington, D.C., social circle that included George and Martha Washington, James and Dolley Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Bayard Smith and the cabinet members, congressmen and diplomats who constituted the city's entwined social and political worlds. Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton's papers consist of diaries and commonplace books, 1793-1861, which she began when she was 18 and ended at 86, a period of 68 years. These volumes document the operation of her household, including the management of slaves; travel, including visits to the Virginia homes of George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James and Dolley Madison; the construction of Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Capitol; the city under attack during the War of 1812; visits of the Count de Volney, 1796, and Alexander von Humboldt, 1804; an attempt on her life by Arthur, a slave, in 1835; the 1844 shipboard explosion that killed Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Treasury Secretary Thomas Gilmer; the inauguration of president James K. Polk in 1845; and the start of the Civil War.

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The papers of Union soldier Samuel J. Gibson (1833-1878) consist of a diary kept by Gibson in 1864 while serving with Company B, 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, and a letter to his wife while held as a prisoner at Camp Sumter in Georgia, the Confederate prisoner of war camp commonly known as Andersonville Prison. The diary documents the capture of the Federal garrison at Plymouth, North Carolina, in April 1864, and Gibson’s experiences as a prisoner of war at Andersonville, Georgia, and Florence, South Carolina. Gibson records war news and rumors received by the prisoners, the state of his physical and emotional health, the deaths of fellow prisoners, and the importance of his diary in maintaining a sense of time.

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The papers of Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), army officer, representative and senator from New Hampshire, and fourteenth president of the United States, contain approximately 2,350 items dating from 1820 to 1869. They include correspondence, a photostatic copy of a diary kept by Pierce while serving in the Mexican War, drafts of Pierce’s messages to Congress, and an engraved portrait. Pierce’s correspondence relates chiefly to his service in the Mexican War, public affairs, and national politics.

Click here for more information.

A preview of the Library of Congress' comprehensive exhibition set to open in the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C., on April 4. Featuring the Library's unparalleled collections related to the conflict, "Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I" examines the upheaval of world war as Americans confronted it—both at home and abroad. 

Click here for more information.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) today launched “PTSD: A Lasting Impact of War,” the latest installment in its online “Experiencing War” website series.

Click here for more information.

March is Women's History Month  - The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.

Click here for more information.

This exhibition features baseball sheet music from the collections of the Library of Congress. Most of these works are original copyright deposits and represent only a small fraction of the more than 400 published songs about baseball in the Library’s custody. They illustrate the remarkable congruence between the evolution of the sport from before the Civil War to the present, and the musical counterparts that have chronicled in song baseball’s greatest moments.

Click here to view the exhibition.

The Sigmund Freud Collection at the Library of Congress has been digitized and is now online. The collection, with more than 20,000 items, contains the personal papers of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis whose ideas of the unconscious and theories on sex, repression, transference and religion profoundly influenced 20th-century Western thought. His theories still generate controversy.

Click here for more information.

These documents, letters, telegrams, drawings and photo albums bear testament to the Totenberg family in Poland before and during the Holocaust and to Roman Totenberg’s unwavering efforts to rescue those left behind.

Click here for more information.

A poem by Dorianne Laux from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

This is the final Poetry 180 poem of the season. This service will resume distributing Poetry 180 poems on Tuesday, September 5, 2017.

A poem by Laura Kasischke from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Phillis Levin from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Robert Francis from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Anna Denise from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem Andrea Hollander from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Jeffrey Harrison from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Lisel Mueller from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Major Jackson from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Dana Gioia from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Linda Gregg from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by William Matthews from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Richard Brautigan from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Mary TallMountain from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Tomas Transtromer from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Julie Lechevsky from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Timothy Murphy from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by William Matthews from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Mark Halliday from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Doug Dorph from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by William Matthews from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Doug Dorph from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Michael Chitwood from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

A poem by Julie Lechevsky from the Library's Poetry 180 Project.

Wednesday, April 26, 12:00 PM; 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
POET LAUREATE'S CLOSING EVENTS: SPEAK THE PEOPLE/THE SPARK/EL POEMA

A host of acclaimed scholars, musicians, and community organizers join Juan Felipe Herrera to close his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate. All events are free and open to the public. 

• 12:00 PM: Fresno State Chamber Singers Concert | Tickets available
  The Fresno State Chamber Singers, under the direction of Dr. Cari Earnhart, perform newly commissioned pieces created with Juan Felipe Herrera.
  
  Location: Room 119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
  
  

• 7:00 PM: Panel Discussion and Quetzal Concert | Tickets required
  Panel discussion between Juan Felipe Herrera and Martha Gonzalez, Hugo Morales, and Louie Pérez, moderated by Rafael Pérez-Torres.  To close out the evening, Grammy Award-winning band Quetzal gives a concert
  
  Location: Coolidge Auditorium, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>

Book sales to follow panel discussion. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Music Division, Hispanic Division, and American Folklife Center. Presented in partnership with California State University, Fresno, and the Fresno State Chamber Singers.

Contact: (202) 707-5394, poetry@loc.gov

These events will be livecast via YouTube and Facebook.

Thursday, April 20, 6:30 PM
BOBBITT PRIZE READING: NATHANIEL MACKEY AND CLAUDIA RANKINE

The co-winners of the 14th Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry—Nathaniel Mackey for Lifetime Achievement and Claudia Rankine for her book Citizen—read selections of their work. Book sales and signing to follow. This event is free and open to the public. Tickets available here.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Wednesday, April 26, 12:00 PM; 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
POET LAUREATE CLOSING EVENTS: SPEAK THE PEOPLE/THE SPARK/EL POEMA

A host of acclaimed scholars, musicians, and community organizers join Juan Felipe Herrera to close his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate. All events are free and open to the public. 

• 12:00 PM: Fresno State Chamber Singers Concert | Tickets available
  The Fresno State Chamber Singers, under the direction of Dr. Cari Earnhart, perform newly commissioned pieces created with Juan Felipe Herrera.
  
  Location: Room 119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
  
  

• 7:00 PM: Panel Discussion and Quetzal Concert | Tickets required
  Panel discussion between Juan Felipe Herrera and Martha Gonzalez, Hugo Morales, and Louie Pérez, moderated by Rafael Pérez-Torres.  To close out the evening, Grammy Award-winning band Quetzal gives a concert
  
  Location: Coolidge Auditorium, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>

Book sales to follow panel discussion. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Music Division, Hispanic Division, and American Folklife Center. Presented in partnership with California State University, Fresno, and the Fresno State Chamber Singers.

Contact: (202) 707-5394, poetry@loc.gov

These events will be livecast via YouTube and Facebook.

Thursday, April 20, 6:30 PM
BOBBITT PRIZE READING: NATHANIEL MACKEY AND CLAUDIA RANKINE

The co-winners of the 14th Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry—Nathaniel Mackey for Lifetime Achievement and Claudia Rankine for her book Citizen—read selections of their work. Book sales and signing to follow. This event is free and open to the public. Tickets available here.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Thursday, April 20, 6:30 PM
BOBBITT PRIZE READING: NATHANIEL MACKEY AND CLAUDIA RANKINE

The co-winners of the 14th Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry—Nathaniel Mackey for Lifetime Achievement and Claudia Rankine for her book Citizen—read selections of their work. Book sales and signing to follow. This event is free and open to the public. Tickets available here.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Wednesday, April 26, 12:00 PM; 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
POET LAUREATE CLOSING EVENTS: SPEAK THE PEOPLE/THE SPARK/EL POEMA

A host of acclaimed scholars, musicians, and community organizers join Juan Felipe Herrera to close his second term as U.S. Poet Laureate. All events are free and open to the public. 

• 12:00 PM: Fresno State Chamber Singers Concert | Tickets available
  The Fresno State Chamber Singers, under the direction of Dr. Cari Earnhart, perform newly commissioned pieces created with Juan Felipe Herrera.
  
  Location: Room 119, First Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
  
  

• 7:00 PM: Panel Discussion and Quetzal Concert | Tickets required
  Panel discussion with Juan Felipe Herrera and Martha Gonzalez, Hugo Morales, and Louie Pérez, moderated by Rafael Pérez-Torres.  To close out the evening, Grammy Award-winning band Quetzal gives a concert
  
  Location: Coolidge Auditorium, Ground Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>

Book sales to follow panel discussion. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress Music Division, Hispanic Division, and American Folklife Center. Presented in partnership with California State University, Fresno, and the Fresno State Chamber Singers.

Contact: (202) 707-5394, poetry@loc.gov

These events will be livecast via YouTube and Facebook.

Wednesday, April 12, 12:00 PM
CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN POETS AND WRITERS: LIDUDUMALINGANI MQOMBOTHI

South African author and 2016 Caine Prize winner Lidudumalingani Mqombothi will read from his prize-winning short story “Memories We Lost” and participate in a moderated discussion with Laverne Page, Africa Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division, Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, and The Caine Prize for African Writing.

Location: African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, LJ-220, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Tuesday, April 4, 7:00 PM
THE LIFE OF A POET: DANA LEVIN

Poet Dana Levin will discuss her work with Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post's Book World. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and the Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Monday, April 3, 7:00 PM
FICTION, FAITH, AND THE IMAGINATION

Authors/scholars Geraldine Brooks, Paul Harding, Steven Knapp, and Alan Lightman join 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction winner Marilynne Robinson in a panel discussion centered on intersections of fiction, faith, and the imagination. This event is free and open to the public with book sales and signing to follow. Tickets are required. Co-sponsored by the Kluge Center. The event will also be livestreamed on the Library’s YouTube channel.

Location: Coolidge Auditorium, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Thursday, March 30, 4:00 PM
US/CA CAPITAL POETRY EXCHANGE

Canadian poets Suzanne Buffam, Liz Howard, and David O’Meara share and discuss selections of their work with Monty Reid, director of VERSeFest. The event is free and open to the public. Book sales and signing will follow. Co-sponsored by VERSeFest and the Embassy of Canada, Washington, D.C.  

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 2:00 PM
LIVE INTERVIEW WITH POET LAUREATE JUAN FELIPE HERRERA

Tune in with us tomorrow, Tuesday, March 21, at 2:00 PM, for a live event with NPR and Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Herrera will read from his work, discuss his path as a poet, talk about his process, and offer advice for young poets. He will take two questions from the audience via Facebook.

Location: The Library of Congress on Facebook

Thursday, February 16, 6:30 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: IMMANUEL MIFSUD

Maltese poet and fiction writer, Immanuel Mifsud, will read and discuss his work with Lucia Wolf, Reference Librarian in the European Division. This event is free and open to the public. Co-Sponsored by Library of Congress European Division and presented in partnership with Embassy of the Republic of Malta supported by the Arts Council of Malta, New York. 

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394; lwolf@loc.gov

Please click here for more information.

Monday, February 13 - Tuesday, February 14, 4:00 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: PABLO NERUDA
Two events celebrating Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda.

• Monday, February 13, 4:00 PM: (Mary Pickford Theater) Special advanced screening of Neruda, internationally co-produced biographical film directed by Pablo Larraín starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Co-sponsored by the Hispanic Division and presented in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Theatre and the Embassy of Chile, Washington, D.C.
  
  
• Tuesday, February 14, 4:00 PM: (Mumford Room) Poet and translator Forrest Gander will read from his new book, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda, and participate in a discussion with Chilean-born author Marjorie Agosín and Georgette Dorn, chief of the Hispanic Division. Co-sponsored by the Hispanic Division and presented in partnership with the Folger Shakespeare Theatre.

Location: Mary Pickford Theater, third floor, James Madison Building <view map>
                     Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact:  (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Friday, February 10, 1:00 PM
CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN POETS AND WRITERS: AFRICAN POETRY BOOK FUND SPOTLIGHT

During the annual AWP Conference, African Poetry Book Fund board members Chris Abani, Matthew Shenoda, and Aracelis Girmay discuss contemporary African poetry with Mary Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division. Immediately following, Kwame Dawes will introduce African poets Yasmin Belkhyr, Chekwube O. Danladi, Safia Elhillo, Tsitsi Jaji, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Ladan Osman, Hope Wabuke, and Patricia Jabbeh Wesley who will read from their work. This event is free and open to the public with book sales and signing to follow. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division and presented in partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa and Prairie Schooner.

Location: Whittall Pavilion, ground floor, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Tuesday, February 7, 7:00 PM
THE LIFE OF A POET: BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

Poet Brenda Shaughnessy will discuss her work with Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post's Book World. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016 – 6:30 PM
WITH BORGES: A CONVERSATION WITH MARÍA KODAMA

Jorge Luis Borges' widow, María Kodama, will be in conversation with professor of Spanish Saul Sosnowski (University of Maryland). This year marks the 30th anniversary of the author's death and this event will be part of a series of events coordinated by the Embassy of Argentine in Washington, DC. 

This event will be primarily in Spanish, though some translation will be available. Cosponsored by the Hispanic Division and the Poetry and Literature Center, in collaboration with the Embassy of the Republic of Argentina. Event is free and open to the public.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: cgom@loc.gov

Please click here for more information.

Friday, December 2, 12:00 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

William Egginton, Andrew W. Mellon Professor at Johns Hopkins University, will discuss his new book The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World. Co-sponsored by the Hispanic Division.  

Location: Mary Pickford Theater, Madison Building (3rd floor) <view map>
Contact: tguz@loc.gov

Please click here for more information.

Friday, November 18, 12:00 PM
CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN POETS AND WRITERS: KWAME DAWES

Ghanaian writer Kwame Dawes will read selections of his work and participate in a moderated discussion with Angel Batiste, Africa Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division. This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division, and presented in partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa.

Location: African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, LJ-220, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Friday, November 4, 12:00 PM
CONVERSATIONS WITH AFRICAN POETS AND WRITERS: SHENAZ PATEL

Mauritian writer Shenaz Patel will read selections of her work and participate in a moderated discussion with Eve Ferguson, Africa Area Specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division. This event is free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by the Library of Congress African and Middle Eastern Division, and presented in partnership with the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State.

Location: African and Middle Eastern Division Reading Room, LJ-220, Thomas Jefferson Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Thursday, November 3, 4:00 PM
INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT

Program residents Khaled Alkhamissi (Egypt), Ukamaka Olisakwe (Nigeria), Yaroslava Pulinovich (Russia), and Zhou Jianing (China) read selections of their work and participate in a moderated discussion with Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Presented in partnership with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State, and PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building <view map>
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Thursday, October 20, 6:30 PM
LAW & LITERATURE

Lawyer and poet Monica Youn reads from her new book, Blackacre, and participates in a discussion with Martha Dragich, Professor Emerita of Law at the University of Missouri. Co-sponsored by the Law Library of Congress.

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building
Contact:  (202) 707-5394; (202) 707-6462

Please click here for more information.

Tuesday, October 18, 4:00 PM
POETRY, PUBLISHING AND RACE

Rob Casper, head of the Poetry and Literature Center, will lead a discussion with poets/editors Cathy Park Hong (New Republic), Don Share (Poetry Magazine), Evie Shockley (Feminist Studies), and Carmen Giménez Smith (Puerto del Sol/Noemi Press) on the ways poetry helps us navigate race in contemporary American culture.   

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Wednesday, October 12, 6:30 PM
ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE TODAY: KUNDIMAN SPOTLIGHT

Poets Janine Joseph and Aimee Nezhukumatathil read and discuss their work with Kundiman Advisory Board Co-Chair Jennifer Chang. Presented in partnership with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center; The Asian American Literary Review; and the Asian American Studies Program, University of Maryland.

Location: Montpelier Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Thursday, September 29, 7:00 PM
THE LIFE OF A POET: TERRANCE HAYES

Poet Terrance Hayes will discuss his work with Ron Charles, editor of The Washington Post's Book World. This event is free and open to the public. Reservations are required. Co-sponsored by the Hill Center and The Washington Post.

Location: Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital (921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE)
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.

Monday, September 19, 6:30 PM
INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE: KO UN

Korean poet Ko Un and his translator, Brother Anthony, give a bi-lingual reading of Ko’s work, followed by a brief moderated discussion with Frank Stewart, writer and editor of MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. Co-sponsored by Asian Division of the Library of Congress, MANOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

Location: Mumford Room, sixth floor, James Madison Building
Contact: (202) 707-5394

Please click here for more information.