Teachers familiar with the instructional power of primary sources might also be interested in the opportunity to teach using authentic data and activities from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The recently updated Statistics in Schools program offers free activities and resources that can help you bring statistics into any K-12 classroom.

Statistics in Schools activities use real-life census data to help students understand statistical concepts and gain data analysis skills.

The geography, history, math and sociology activities were created by teachers and correspond with relevant education standards.

Visit census.gov/schools to explore the program and download activities you can start using in your classroom.

Sign Up and Learn More

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!

Insert your message here and repeat the URL from the Header and from the Custom RSS Link in the linked text below.

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!

Our friendly neighbourhood arachnid is finally getting the attention he deserves among collectors – with a new issue shooting straight to No 1 and copies of the first series selling for hundreds of thousands

When, as a child, I was given my first chemistry set for Christmas, I started by mixing all of the chemicals together, dropped a small spider into the mixture and popped it on my arm, willing it to bite me. It didn’t – or if it did, I didn’t get any superpowers.

Devotion like that illustrates Spider-Man’s enduring appeal. According to Go Compare’s Comic Gains, the comic-book character whose average value has appreciated most is none other than our friendly neighbourhood arachnid, shooting up by 278%. An issue of his first appearance, from 1962, sold in 2016 for $275,000 (£211,000). His latest comic, Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, is doing, well, spectacularly: the first issue, out last month, went straight to No 1, with sales of almost 225,000, almost double the second bestseller (DC’s Dark Days: The Forge).

Chawton, home to Austen manuscripts and a library of early women writers, has launched a fundraising push to secure its place as a literary destination

As Jane Austen becomes the new face of the £10 note, Chawton House Library, the “Great House” where she whiled away many an hour, is hoping that at least some of the currency bearing her image will be directed its way. The charity is looking to raise around £150,000 over the next 18 months to stay afloat after its main backer withdrew support. It will also be applying for millions in capital grants over the next few years to transform its focus.

The Elizabethan residence in Hampshire, built by the Knight family in the 1580s, was inherited by Jane’s brother Edward centuries later. He offered the nearby bailiff’s residence, now the Jane Austen’s House Museum, to his mother and sisters Jane and Cassandra. But the author was a frequent visitor to her brother’s home, eating and reading there, and walking in its grounds. “I went up to the Great House between 3&4, & dawdled away an hour very comfortably,” she wrote in 1814.

A public poll to mark 30 years of the Royal Society book prizes sees The Selfish Gene declared the most significant – with women authors left on the margins

Debates about the most influential science book of all time habitually settle into a face-off between Darwin’s Origin of Species and Newton’s Principia Mathematica. But a poll to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Royal Society science book prize returned a more recent winner: Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.

Related: 'As long as we study life, it will be read': the Selfish Gene turns 40

Investigative journalists know that the way into a great story is to “follow the money”. In this vivid history of one of the world’s most celebrated gemstones, the Indian diamond known as the Koh-i-Noor, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple put an inventive twist on the old maxim. “Follow the diamond,” they realise, and it can lead into a dynamic, original and supremely readable history of empires.

Well before diamonds became a western synonym for wealth, Hindu scriptures endowed gems with magical, even divine, qualities, while central Asians – including 16th-century India’s Mughal rulers – prized rubies as tangible distillations of the light of the setting sun. On festive occasions the Mughal emperor would have himself weighed against offerings of gems, pearls and gold presented by his courtiers – and then distribute the treasure among the people. The imperial treasury of the 1600s, as described by a handful of gasping visitors, cascaded with gems of exceptional size, clarity and colour.

Maxwell Knight seemed unemployable, until he found his metier in the British Secret Service in the 1920s. He was a failure as a son, a husband – he was impotent, though his third wife didn’t mind – a naval rating, a civil servant, a paint seller, a prep school games teacher and a novelist. His abiding interest was in exotic animals, ranging from spiders, toads and snakes to parrots and a brown bear, which he kept in his rooms, living happily with the stench, filth and noise they brought with them. But that didn’t seem to offer him much of a career. He was also a jazz fiend, which was thought to be radical and even depraved in the 1920s; and a fascist, which probably helped him get into MI5.

MI5 has been much criticised for its upper-class, rightwing bias between the wars, which – it is claimed – caused it to lose sight of the German Nazi menace in its obsession with communism. Hemming’s book offers a different reading. Despite his eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, “Max” proved to be supremely good at his new job in countersubversion, earning Hemming’s accolade as “MI5’s greatest spymaster” – equally effective against both the major extremist threats of his day.

Global study finds Milton’s verse epic rendered in languages from Tamil to Tongan, and argues interest is linked to social turmoil and political revolutions

Three hundred and fifty years after it was first published, John Milton’s epic revolutionary poem about the fall of man, Paradise Lost, continues to find relevance around the world, with research revealing that new translations in the last 30 years outnumber the previous three centuries’ output combined.

More than 50 academics around the world collaborated to research a new book, Milton in Translation, discovering that the works of the 17th-century author have been translated more than 300 times and into 57 different languages. These range from Faroese and Manx to Tamil and Tongan, from Persian and Hebrew to Frisian and Welsh.

The likes of Jeanette Winterson, Mark Haddon and Sarah Perry have penned dark tales of ancient houses and hauntings, spanning the country from Audley End in Essex to York Cold War Bunker

Beneath Dover Castle, an imposing Gothic bulk atop the chalk hills of the English port, is a labyrinth of tunnels. Dug in the 18th century for troops garrisoned there as a first line of defence against revolutionary France, the tunnels have recently developed a ghostly reputation.

Once a month, English Heritage, which manages the site, evacuates the tunnels for staff to perform sweeps, searching for any of the mysterious figures that tourists have reported seeing. In one report, a heavy door slammed shut and a stretcher trolley, part of a wartime exhibit, raced along the corridor as if pushed by a violent force. In another, a stranger in wartime fatigues approached a small boy asking for his help to find “Helen” (neither man nor his quarry were found).

The Bank of England has chosen a contentious quote to adorn its Jane Austen note, joining a long tradition of misused and mangled citations. Do you know your lines?

The Bank of England is coming in for some stick over the quotation it has chosen for its new Jane Austen note: "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!" Which character in Pride and Prejudice says it?

Mr Darcy

Elizabeth Bennet

Mrs Bennet

Caroline Bingley

In 2013, Ireland’s Central Bank misquoted James Joyce on a commemorative coin intended to honour the author. Which is the correct quotation from Ulysses?

Ineluctable modality of the invisible: at least if no more, that is thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read

Irresistible modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things that I am here to read

Thanks to F Scott Fitzgerald scholar Anne Margaret Daniels for pointing out that Donald Trump misquoted Fitzgerald yesterday. The US president tweeted after the collapse of attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare that The Great Gatsby author wrote: “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” Which is the correct quotation?

“You mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.”

“You mustn’t confuse failure with success.”

“Wake up and smell the covfefe.”

The quotation “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” is widely attributed to Mark Twain, but to whom did Twain himself actually credit it?

Walt Whitman

Benjamin Disraeli

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Alexander Hamilton

And who has the site Quote Investigator pinpointed as the likely origin of “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”, which is usually attributed to Twain?

Jonathan Swift

Voltaire

Samuel Johnson

Mary Shelley

Twain is much misquoted. Which of the following lines did he actually say?

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“The only two certainties in life are death and taxes.”

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

“Ours is the 'land of the free'- nobody denies that - nobody challenges it. (maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)"

Which book retailer used George Orwell to support its argument that publishers were against cheap books by using the partial quotation: if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them” - rather than the full quote, which shows Orwell's support for the idea? "The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them."

Waterstones

Tesco

Amazon

Walmart

Which poet wrote “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, a line which is often misquoted as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”?

Alexander Pope

William Wordsworth

Emily Dickinson

Percy Shelley

Who first wrote the line “Elementary, my dear Watson”?

Arthur Conan Doyle

Benedict Cumberbatch

PG Wodehouse

Anthony Horowitz

Who wrote the line “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?

Voltaire

Voltaire’s biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall

JK Rowling

Plato

9 and above.

There's no fooling you! As Shakespeare once said: "You done good, kid!" Didn't he?

8 and above.

There's no fooling you! As Shakespeare once said: "You done good, kid!" Didn't he?

7 and above.

Not bad. Try again? Although, as Einstein never said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

6 and above.

Not bad. Try again? Although, as Einstein never said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

5 and above.

Not bad. Try again? Although, as Einstein never said: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

4 and above.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: "Jeez, go Google it or something."

2 and above.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: "Jeez, go Google it or something."

3 and above.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: "Jeez, go Google it or something."

0 and above.

As Abraham Lincoln once said: "Jeez, go Google it or something."

10 and above.

There's no fooling you! As Shakespeare once said: "You done good, kid!" Didn't he?

From Kazuo Ishiguro’s laconic intimatations to Mark Twain’s garrulous energy, these are masterclasses in the difficult art of beginning

Sometimes I want an opening to slap me in the face; other times I’d rather it come on like a creepy hand across my shoulder. There are millions of ways a voice can convince me to listen, but there are even more ways it can fail. I have little patience for the latter. Life is not long enough to ingest sub-par art.

Related: The Answers by Catherine Lacey review – how to solve the love problem

A brilliantly researched study explores the poet’s difficult relationship with his farmer father and his guilt-ridden need to conceal his sexuality

The American poet John Ashbery, who turns 90 this month, is often figured as the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication – as a refined but radical innovator whose open-ended lyrics and narrative-free long poems refract and dramatise the anxieties of postmodernity. Doyen of the avant garde Ashbery may have become, and yet, as Karin Roffman demonstrates in this illuminating account of his early life, the originality of his poetic idiom owes as much to his provincial rural upbringing, and to the compound of guilt and nostalgia that was its legacy, as it does to his embrace of the experimental in New York and Paris.

Ashbery’s parents, Chester and Helen, ran a fruit farm about a mile south of Lake Ontario, where winters are long and snowy. Chet, as his father was known, could be ill tempered. “He used to wallop me a great deal,” Ashbery recalled in an interview, “so I felt always as though I were living on the edge of a live volcano.” I’ve often wondered if the evasiveness of Ashbery’s poetry, its habit of tiptoeing or sliding around a crisis in states ranging from mild apprehension to ominous foreboding, reflects the simmering domestic tensions of these early years.

According to futurologists, a baby born today will live to 100. But what do they know? In her Plague Times trilogy, Louise Welsh trashes such blithe predictions, setting the grim reaper to work in a not unlikely near-future scenario: a flu-like epidemic ravaging the world’s population and leaving survivors plunged into chaos.

If the landscape is familiar, it’s because fiction has been conjuring disasters ever since The Epic of Gilgamesh. Welsh, who belongs to the generation scared witless by the threat of nuclear war, acknowledges her debt to Terry Nation’s iconic 1970s TV series Survivors, the solid Lego-base on which many a contemporary future-set drama has been constructed. The tidal wave of apoca-lit, led by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and TV dramas such as The Walking Dead, has added new bricks to the edifice, further honing our certain anticipation of food scarcity, gibbets, feudalism, child brides, rabid dogs, creepy population drives, religious maniacs and cannibalism.

A catalogue of horrors and public humiliations, Gay’s memoir responds to society’s condescension and disgust about her body size

This is a book its author Roxane Gay has, over many years, earned the right not to publish. Even though she has found great success as an essayist, writer of fiction and university teacher, and attracted a large, passionate online following, it’s clear from her account that her weight is still the first thing strangers notice about her, and that she must spend much of her time dealing with their unsolicited responses to it. These range from rude to abusive, encompassing all sorts of casual mockery, faux concern and outright aggression along the way.

Related: Roxane Gay: ‘My body is a cage of my own making’

Since the early 19th century, artists have depicted colourful – if sometimes fictional – dinosaurs and prehistoric environments, mingling science with unbridled fantasy. This art is the subject of a new book: Paleoart

Dante and Milton are recast through the eyes of a redneck Jesus in Gary Panter’s latest graphic novel. He opens up about the nightmare hallucinations and comic-book disasters that led him there

There’s a moment of horror on entering cartoonist Gary Panter’s studio, when I realise I’ve stepped on one of his canvases – a quite wonderful painting of a robot fighting a dinosaur.

“Don’t worry,” Panter reassures me, “it’s a doormat.” He’s not joking. It turns out the orange throw over the couch is a painted canvas too. In fact, Panter’s Brooklyn studio – which is also his apartment – is littered with all kinds of art: bulbous, home-made candy-coloured candles from a planned installation, bowls of beads and Godzilla toys, and of course his own complex, colourful, beautiful paintings.

The writer behind the much-hyped debut novel Final Girls is in fact called Todd Ritter – but he’s far from the first man to write under an ambiguous name

Riley Sager is a debut author whose book, Final Girls, has received the ultimate endorsement. “If you liked Gone Girl, you’ll love this,” Stephen King has said. But unlike Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, The Girls, Luckiest Girl Alive and others, Final Girls is written by a man – Todd Ritter. This detail is missing from Riley Sager’s website which, as the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, refers to the author only by name and without any gender-disclosing pronouns or photographs. (His Twitter avatar is Jamie Lee Curtis.)

Ritter is not the first man to deploy a gender-neutral pen name. JP Delaney (real name Tony Strong) is author of The Girl Before, SK Tremayne (Sean Thomas) wrote The Ice Twins and next year, The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn (AKA Daniel Mallory) is published. Before all of these was SJ (AKA Steve) Watson, the author of 2011’s Before I Go to Sleep.

After watching the destructive and unjust workings of international relations, former diplomat Carne Ross explains why direct democracy now makes more sense to him

I wrote Independent Diplomat shortly after resigning from the Foreign Office. I had worked on Iraq and WMD for more than four years at the UN security council, but resigned in 2004 after giving secret testimony to the Butler review on the Iraq war. It was a difficult time for me. My future was unclear; I had thought I would be a diplomat all my life.

Independent Diplomat is a short and precise little book and I wrote it quickly, fired up by my anger at the lies and the war, and my frustration with the system of diplomacy itself. I knew there was something very wrong about the way that diplomacy was practised. I had seen and felt it. But what was it, and how could I convey that to readers who might know nothing about an unnecessarily obscure, but crucial, function?

Leader of Commons refers to face of new £10 note as one of Britain’s greatest living authors, causing much mirth among MPs

A cabinet minister prompted laughs from MPs when she mistakenly praised Jane Austen as one of the UK’s “greatest living authors” just days after the 200th anniversary of the writer’s death.

Andrea Leadsom, leader of the Commons, was attempting to praise the Pride And Prejudice author, who will feature on the new £10 note, which is scheduled to go into circulation in September.

The author, who was promoting memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, reports that ‘spectacular’ haunting and depression have led him to cancel dates

Sherman Alexie has cancelled a tour promoting his new memoir about his relationship with his late mother, citing depression and his belief that his mother’s ghost has been haunting him since the book was published last month.

In an open letter to his readers, Alexie said that he would be cancelling all his appearances in August and “many, but not all” of his events for the rest of the year. The tour was intended to promote You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, about his mother Lillian Alexie, a woman the award-winning Native American author describes as “brilliant, funny, beautiful, generous, vindictive, deceitful, tender, manipulative, abusive, loving, and intimidating”, and who died in 2015.

In the first ranking of its kind, the Public Lending Right showed Ross clocking up more than 1m loans last year

Tony Ross, whose images of the naughty prankster Horrid Henry and the ragamuffin Little Princess are instantly recognisable to children up and down the country, has been named as the most borrowed illustrator from the UK’s public libraries.

Ross, who illustrates Francesca Simon’s Horrid Henry books and writes the Little Princess titles, came in ahead of names including Quentin Blake and Lauren Child and The Gruffalo’s Axel Scheffler to top the first ever ranking of illustrators from Public Lending Right (PLR). Ross, who also illustrates David Walliams’s bestselling titles and estimates that he has written or illustrated at least 1,000 books, saw his titles borrowed more than 1m times from the UK’s public libraries over the last year. He described himself as “surprised, proud, and delighted” at the result.

Exhibition features author’s deposit ledger as well as other writers preoccupied with money including Charles Dickens

Jane Austen is not just the heroine of the new £10 note, to be unveiled on Tuesday on the 200th anniversary of her death, but also the star of an exhibition on the literary connections of the Bank of England.

“Jane Austen’s novels are not taken up with chit-chat about bonnets in carriages, as some people who haven’t read them think. She was very well aware of the value of money, and it is a major theme in her work,” the exhibition’s curator, Jenni Adam, said.

The writer’s 10th novel has won the £15,000 Hawthornden prize, sponsored by arts patron Drue Heinz

Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift’s 10th novel, is a jewel of a book, a subtle, erotically charged novella suspended between past and future. It is set on one day in 1924 in the life of a young housemaid, a foundling brought up in an orphanage and put into service at 14, who is in love with the upper-class son of a neighbouring family. Their long, secret day together, one he was supposed to be spending with his fiancee, is told like a spellbound dream. There’s an erotic precision and intensity that is new in Swift’s work. The long, leisurely scene in which the naked girl walks alone round the house, observing herself in this unlikely setting and taking possession of it, is an entrancing set-piece.

Swift always writes strongly about English class, war losses, local detail. One of his inspirations, Conrad’s Youth, begins: “This could have occurred nowhere but in England.” Similarly, Swift makes you understand, in this small, magically eloquent book, a hundred years of English life. Jane’s long life’s progression from orphan to author is beautifully tracked. The day we are reading about ends in tragedy, but is the moment that will turn her into a writer. As for Conrad’s narrator, what was “only a moment: a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth” will transform her. The book came out early in 2016 to very good reviews and rather little subsequent attention. Now it is this year’s winner of the Hawthornden prize (which chooses its winner from the last year’s publications). It’s apt that Swift should win this prize, as it was founded in 1919, in the same post-war period as his novel – and, like him, it’s a quietly distinctive prize that doesn’t show off.

£1,000 award supported by the Guardian and publisher 4th Estate goes to Auld Lang Syne, which saw off a ‘startlingly strong shortlist’

• Read the story below

A short story about an elderly man behind bars on New Year’s Eve, which takes a subtle and sly look at ageing and masculinity, has beaten a strong field to take the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize.

Auld Lang Syne by Lisa Smith scooped the award from a shortlist of six that was “startlingly strong”, according to Sian Cain, judge and Guardian books site editor. The story, which follows septuagenarian Rufus Samuels during an evening in jail after a fight with his much younger girlfriend, was, said Cain: “A perfect example of what the short story can do when the form is at its best: containing as much of an emotional blow as that of a 800-page novel, regardless of its brevity.”

Rightwinger said his book – self-published after he was dropped by Simon & Schuster – had sold 100,000 copies, but data shows fewer than 20,000 sales

Rightwing controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos has branded reported low sales of his new book “fake news” after official figures revealed the writer has failed to rock the book charts on either side of the Atlantic, despite his claims to the contrary.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, which monitors book sales through almost all outlets, including Amazon, the former Breitbart technology editor has sold only 18,268 copies of his book in the US and 152 in the UK since its launch on 4 July.

Correspondence with Billy Collins, going on display this month, reveal a partnership that was extremely lucrative, if sometimes scratchy

Despite her global fame and being feted in the tabloids as “the richest woman writer in the world”, Agatha Christie was no more immune from disputes with her publisher than less successful rivals, according to private correspondence revealed for the first time.

The letters, which are going on show at the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival from 20 July as part of an exhibition to mark the bicentenary of Christie’s publisher Harper Collins, reveal that like her famous creation Hercule Poirot, the author was not without vanity.

Harry Potter author says theme for her 50th birthday party was ‘private nightmare’ – in her case a lost manuscript that she composed on the costume

JK Rowling may have created the most valuable 50th birthday dress in history, with the Harry Potter writer revealing that she wrote an exclusive children’s fairytale on a party dress, worn to celebrate her half-century in 2015.

In an interview with Christiane Amanpour for CNN, the bestselling author said: “The theme of my 50th birthday, which I held at Halloween, even though that’s not really my birthday, was come as your own private nightmare. And I went as a lost manuscript. And I wrote [most of it] over a dress.”

The beleaguered FTSE 100 firm strengthens balance sheet by selling a 22% stake to Bertelsmann in deal valuing the publishing giant at $3.55bn

Pearson has sold a 22% stake in Penguin Random House, the world’s biggest publisher, with titles ranging from Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Oliver and The Girl on the Train. The deal values Penguin at $3.55bn (£2.75bn).

Pearson put its holding in PRH up for sale in January after issuing a string of profit warnings in its educational publishing business, and has sold the stake to partner Bertelsmann.

Lancashire county council is planning to reopen 14 of the 26 libraries it closed in 2016, while Shropshire is set to withdraw funding for eight of its branches

Fourteen libraries closed by Lancashire county council as part of a controversial money-saving plan could reopen, if a draft proposal by the local authority’s new administration gets the go-ahead.

The libraries were among 26 shut last year in a package of cuts worth £65m, imposed by the council’s Labour administration, which was later ousted in local elections. Before the cuts, the county was home to 73 libraries.

Rightwing provocateur seeks damages from Simon & Schuster after it dropped memoir Dangerous over contentious remarks – but imprint says suit is ‘without merit’

A $10m (£7.7m) lawsuit announced by far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been dismissed by his former publisher as “publicity-driven and entirely without merit”. The rightwinger chose to self-publish his memoir Dangerous after being publicly dumped by Simon & Schuster in February after a video clip in which he appeared to defend sexual relationships between men and boys as young as 13.

Yiannopoulos announced the legal action at a protest outside S&S’s New York head office on Friday. In the complaint, filed in the New York supreme court the same day, the former Breitbart editor claims breach of contract, saying that Dangerous, published on 4 July, would have sold more copies if it had been supported by the publishing giant, which dropped out despite paying a reported $250,000 advance.

Contenders for this year’s Diagram prize also include An Ape’s View of Evolution and a must-have volume for ‘Australian coin error collectors’

Nipples on My Knee by Graham and Debra Robertson, a memoir of “25 years in the sheep business”, is the fleecy frontrunner for the the 2017 Diagram prize for oddest book title of the year.

It leads a modest flock of five titles contending for the annual prize run by trade magazine the Bookseller. Without giving away the origins of the title, the Robertsons invite readers to “sit back in front of the fireplace on a cold, snowy evening, perhaps with a glass of sherry, while we relate to you our experiences”.

For all the gentility, the characters in Austen’s last novel face real peril, and contend with dramatic reversals and bruising verbal blows

A couple of weeks ago, I confidently predicted it would be easy enough to find new things to say about Jane Austen for this month’s reading group. But now I’ve read Persuasion I want to repeat everything everyone has been saying for the past 200 years. It’s superb. I loved it. It swept me up.

Harold Bloom once called Persuasion “the perfect novel”, and generations before and since have agreed. In the first biography of Jane, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh quoted his brother-in-law Sir Denis le Marchant telling him:

The literary award decided by readers is back for another year of compelling contention. Please use your vote in the comments below

The Not the Booker prize is back and it’s nine years old – old enough now that I really should stop expressing surprise at its continuing development. If it were a child, it would be safely past the stage of sighing heavily when I remark how much it’s grown. It would simply roll its eyes and walk off. And we don’t want that, because the award remains a source of fascination, intrigue and – best of all – unexpected and wonderful novels.

This year’s search starts right here. You can nominate any book eligible for for this year’s Man Booker prize – that is to say basically any novel originally written in English, by a writer of any nationality, published in the UK between 1 October 2016 and 30 September 2017. (As with the Man Booker, US authors are now allowed). All you have to do is post a comment naming the book and author (and publisher too, if you want to be really helpful) below the line.

When life is tumbling out of control, I go to my happy place, where I can dream, remember and find order in chaos: I gaze upon my bookshelves.

Bookshelves are back, with sales up by more than 10% in John Lewis. There’s the rise of the “shelfie” – a photo of one’s library; bookshelves are a cool way to divide open-plan living, and e-readers are falling from fashion because we prefer the beautiful-looking objects produced by contemporary publishers.

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

• Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooks
• Scroll down for our favourite literary links
• Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

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

First, a wonderful tribute, as described by storm46:

The sometimes frightening mythological figure allows the poet to portray real heartbreak with a winning light touch

Chimera

Une seconde fois perdue! Nerval

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of the greatest English novelists. On the 200th anniversary of her death, writers make the case for the novel closest to their hearts

Jack and Alice and other juvenilia
Charlotte Brontë did not like Jane Austen because she thought she was mimsy, with a fenced-in imagination. But the teenage Jane was ruthless, well read, exuberant and scathing. She understood the cult of sensibility, and sniggered at it. She parodied the gothic, long before she wrote Northanger Abbey: horrid secrets, fulminating infatuations, astonishing coincidences, catastrophic lapses of memory, road traffic accidents and the theft of £50 notes. Every “coroneted carriage” contains a long-lost relation. Orphaned babies – perfectly able to relate their sensational histories – are discovered in haystacks. In Henry and Eliza, two hungry children bite off their mother’s fingers.

Wordsworth’s daffodils, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons – Cumbria has been fertile ground for countless writers

The Lake District has just become the first UK national park to be listed as a Unesco World Heritage site, alongside global wonders such as the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canyon. It has been honoured for its culture as well as its landscape. William Wordsworth, perhaps the most celebrated local writer, called the area “a sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy”. He was born in Cockermouth, lived in Grasmere and Rydal Mount, and found his daffodils on the shore of Ullswater.

Beatrix Potter is another famous chronicler of the Lakes, though she found her inspiration for Squirrel Nutkin and other characters on her childhood holidays there. She was also crucial to saving the local Herdwick sheep from extinction when she bought Hill Top farm.

The Yes Minister writer explains how his horror at how the US – and potentially the UK – treats the sick grew into the tale of a hospital run by a casino manager

American politicians can’t help bragging: everything they have is the best in the world. Every state, no matter how backward, racist or decrepit, is introduced as “the great state of X”; the essential prefix when schmoozing politicians on a visit to any part of the country is “I am so proud to be here in the great state of Y”. Flattery, in the US, is as important as bragging.

It is this attitude that, until recently, had most of their politicians insisting that US healthcare was the best in the world. In reality, the World Health Organisation ranks it 38th, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th) and just above Cuba. The No 1 cause of bankruptcy in the US? Medical debt. And with more than 250,000 deaths a year, medical errors are the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. Obamacare has made things somewhat better, but there are still 27 million people without health insurance because they can’t afford it, and millions more who can’t afford the co-payment on prescriptions.

What is at stake here is human life and the dream of an honest government

We all know this about faces: that they reveal more than they should; that they portray and betray us. And there must be a reason for this. For as it is true that we are “fortunate”, as a character in one of Christa Wolf’s novels puts it, “that our thoughts do not dance in visible letters above our heads”, we are equally blessed that nature has given us faces that fail to perfectly conceal our emotions and intentions. Yet throughout human history we have tried to control the faces, or expressions, we show to others.

We will all end up, as Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, with the faces we deserve. And perhaps the same goes for our architecture and schools and hospitals and libraries and museums. Grenfell Tower is a 15-minute walk from my front door. I woke up on that Wednesday morning a month ago yesterday, Wednesday 14 June, to the strong smell of burnt plastic. Walking towards the tower, the blackened figure peaked and rose through the surrounding buildings like the charred skeleton of a whale. Here the odour is unmistakable and relentless; a smell as vicious as a mask pushed on to your face.

Some claim it’s Shakespearean, some Chaucerian – but in reality it’s more like the Decameron, a 14th-century collection of often bawdy tales

Over the last fortnight, brainy authors with columns have been explaining the appeal of Love Island. The novelist Rachel Johnson perhaps initiated the fad, justifying her addiction to the titillating Majorca-based dating showbecause it enables her to bond with her student-age son, and because it is “actually about relationships”.

In the Times, Ben Macintyre took time out from promoting SAS: Rogue Heroes and recommended the series as a “quite remarkable ... anthropological experiment” (an argument others deployed in relation to Big Brother when it made its UK debut 17 years ago): it reflects how “isolated communities swiftly evolve unique forms of behaviour”, such as the contestants’ distinctive language – mug off, sack off, melt and so on – and mating rituals. His colleague Caitlin Moran, meanwhile, saw it as a parenting resource, since what she expected to be “shallow, exploitative and pornographic” is simply the “gamification” of how love works “in real life”, and “all the people your kids are going to meet are here”, from the alpha male to the love-them-and-leave-them flirt.

Jane’s last completed novel won the vote. We can debate whether or not it reveals the author’s intimate life, but we should be able to agree on its greatness

Persuasion has won our popular vote and will be the subject of this month’s Jane Austen reading group.

Initially, I was surprised that Persuasion beat novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma. But then I read the comments that accompanied the votes, and it quickly started to make sense. Persuasion seems to be the Jane Austen novel that has most touched our readers’ hearts. “Even thinking about it has tears pricking in my eyes,” wrote barmierhensnob. “Persuasion, of course,” said themeda, “all about second chances, and loving the longest, when all hope is gone.” Nordicanna2014, meanwhile, identified with Austen’s most mature protagonist, Anne Elliott: “Such a well-portrayed, sympathetic character.” Like many a scholar before, Nordicanna2014 also wondered whether Jane Austen “represented some of her own personality in Anne?”

Brian Cox, Garry Kasparov, Gaia Vince and other stars of science writing pick the books that fired their imaginations

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

• Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooks
• Scroll down for our favourite literary links
• Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

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

Let’s start with a classic. A re-reading of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift has impressed conedison:

Precise observations of this humble creature provide a droll allegorical critique of style

To a Snail

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it. Contractility is a virtue
as modesty is a virtue.
It is not the acquisition of any one thing
that is able to adorn,
or the incidental quality that occurs
as a concomitant of something well said,
that we value in style,
but the principle that is hid:
in the absence of feet, “a method of conclusions”;
“a knowledge of principles,”
in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn.

Legislation that restricted smoking at work and in public in the UK now alters how readers and viewers perceive the fictional tobacco habit

In July 2007, it became illegal to smoke in enclosed public spaces and shared workplaces in the UK. That, as they say in Doctor Who, is a fixed point in time. You can now tell in an instant whether a book, film or a TV show made in this country is set before or after that date, simply by noticing whether the characters, if they smoke, go outside to do so.

Smoking used to be significant, especially on film and TV. It is now even more so. At first, it was a prop; famously, or so it was said, a way of giving actors something to do with their hands. I prefer to think that it is a way of expressing, or evading, some deep inner turbulence. It signifies nonchalance and its opposite, while providing for the camera and our gaze a curling backdrop of smoke with which the cinematographer can make play.

In a series to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh calls for a royal commission on the funding of healthcare

There is a paradox in healthcare: the more you spend on it, the more it costs. It seems hopelessly naive in retrospect but, when the NHS was founded in 1948, it was thought it would actually reduce the country’s healthcare costs by making everybody healthier. The reverse, of course, has proved to be the case.

There are two principal reasons for this. First, if people live longer, their health costs rise because they will develop the diseases of old age – cancer and dementia. By the age of 70 the risk of cancer is 1,000 times greater than at the age of 20 (although all the cancer charity advertisements show children and young people). One in six people over the age of 80 has dementia. Second, medical technology is always advancing. Treatment becomes simpler and safer – so that people who were previously deemed unfit for treatment can now be treated. Diagnosis becomes ever more sensitive so that we increasingly treat diseases in their earlier stages when they are still asymptomatic (and perhaps do not need treating).

Women have long been marginalised in the world of ancient texts, but female scholars and translators are finally having their say

If you look up the subject heading “female classicists” in the large research library catalogue at the university where I teach, a grand total of five books pop up – of which two are separate editions of It’s a Don’s Life by Mary Beard. Next up, alphabetically, is “female cleaning personnel”, which has a larger number of volumes devoted to it: six, with no duplicates, none by Beard. Predictably, there are no entries for “male classicists”. Male classical scholars are represented by the heading “classicists” – which counts more than 200 volumes. Like “female scientists” (42 volumes, as opposed to 303 for “scientists”) or “male nurses” (three to 377), “female classicists” is a category that has been assumed not to exist. (In fact, a handful of women are buried among the “classicists”; one can find here several studies of Victorian classical scholar Jane Harrison, including a fine one by Beard.)

For hundreds of years, the study of ancient Greece and Rome was largely the domain of elite white men and their bored sons. One might assume optimistically that things have changed. After all, women from a wide variety of backgrounds are now able to enrol at prestigious universities and colleges and learn Latin and Greek from scratch; knowledge of the ancient languages is no longer open only to men. But the legacy of male domination is still with us – inside the discipline of classics itself and in how non-specialist general readers gain access to the history and literature of the ancient world.

A scantily-clad white woman ruling over black men titillated Victorian readers – and minted an archetype still used in comics, novels and movies. But should it be?

When H Rider Haggard’s novel She was published in 1887, not even Haggard could have suspected it would remain in print for the next 130 years; nor that it would also spark a trope that has remained in pop culture – with occasional peak and trough – ever since: the jungle queen.

Haggard’s She was classic Victorian adventure to the Dark Continent of Africa; Horace Jolley and Leo Vincey undertake a perilous journey in search of a lost kingdom, eventually finding the Amahaggar, a native tribe ruled over by the 2,000-year-old white beauty Ayesha, or She-who-must-be-obeyed.

Image Comics is only the latest publisher to withdraw tasteless material. All publishers must sharpen their editorial oversight to pre-empt such scandals

A cartoon of a lynched Pakistani man hanging with mutilated genitals and a racial slur on his name tag might seem obviously incendiary, and to put it on the cover of a comic book the epitome of poor decision-making. But Image Comics did just that with the fourth issue of The Divided States of Hysteria, a new comic by industry legend Howard Chaykin – and then undid it a day later.

An official apology was quickly released and the cover whisked away from the web. Which leaves the question: who the hell thought it was a good idea? And with so many recent examples of studios having to retract and apologise for their comics, how could such an image have made it all the way to print?

A new book argues that witchcraft’s proponents were among the first to champion the cause and compares their treatment with that of Hillary Clinton

Men have always feared powerful women, Kristin J Sollee argues in her new book, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, and the witch is the ultimate personification of that terror. “Witches, sluts, and feminists are the trifecta of terror for the patriarchy,” Sollee explains. “To me, the primal impulse behind each of these contested identities is self-sovereignty … witches, sluts, and feminists embody the potential for self-directed feminine power, and sexual and intellectual freedom.”

Sollee’s book positions itself as a whirlwind history of the witch in America and her shared history with sexually liberated women and radical liberationary politics. It’s a bite-sized grimoire than spans centuries, name-checking mythological menaces like Hecate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, alongside historical heroines such as Joan of Arc and modern-day figures such as Malala Yousafzai. There’s also plenty of space for midwives, satanists, sex workers and the wise brujas holding court at local botánicas. Sollee guides the reader through centuries of mania, magic and malice. She also unreservedly dives into the thornier political issues of intersectionality, sex workers’ rights and the unique oppression faced by witches of color.

Didion-esque, Didion-like, Didion-ish: the shorthand for anything insightful written by a white, female author is turning Joan Didion’s perspective into a prescription and stifling literature’s diversity

“Writers are always selling someone out,” wrote the young Joan Didion in the preface of her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

This is the phrase, as the New Yorker once put it, that “everyone knows her by”. It is also a founding principle of the matrilineal branch of the “new journalism”, which, among its edicts of faith, were just the sorts of things that Didion modelled in that 1968 book of essays: an “immersion” in the lives of her subjects, a preference for “truth” over facts, and a diffident sidelining of the objectivity that defined the “old journalism”.

A plagiarist in a kitchen and a horse walking into a bar; Dublin crimes and Washington misdemeanours; relationships, revolutions and relaxations ... leading writers reveal their summer recommendations

• And if you only have time for one book... the best of the best

A book I absolutely loved was Margo Jefferson’s Negroland (Granta), a memoir of her life as part of the African American economically privileged class. It is a sharply honest, biting, reflective look at America, and a useful guide on how race and class do not merely intersect, but race becomes class. I’m looking forward to reading Salt Houses (Hutchinson), a novel by Hala Alyan, which feels very promising. The Big Stick (Basic) by Eliot Cohen has been on my to-read pile for a while and I plan to get to it this summer. And House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a new poetry collection, by Ishion Hutchinson.

Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud and Acast. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

Two hundred years ago, a 41-year-old woman called Jane Austen died quietly, her head in the lap of her older sister, completely unaware that her writing would become synonymous with the very greatest of English literature.

While chicken is a Sunday tradition according to the doomed Dickie Greenleaf, this easy but tasty dish is one for any day of the week, says Kate Young

• Scroll down for the recipe

“I just realised today’s Sunday,” Dickie said. “Marge went to church. You’d better come up and have lunch with us. We always have chicken on Sunday. You know it’s an old American custom, chicken on Sunday.”

The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

African rhinos in the Mediterreanean, French butterflies in southern England... the biologist on how dynamic ecology offers hope in a changing world

After a lifetime out in the field, measuring the egg-laying preferences of Californian butterflies or counting plant species living in and around Birmingham, ecologist Chris D Thomas is no typical debut author. But like so many writers, his first book, Inheritors of the Earth, has been germinating for some time.

The seeds were sown in the early 2000s: Thomas was researching ways of saving animals and plants threatened by climate change, when he began to focus on the inconsistencies in attitudes to the ebb and flow of nature. “When things died out or declined it was seen as a loss,” he says, “but when new things arrived it was either ignored or also counted effectively as a loss, because it was seen as a departure from how things used to be. Implicitly, people were thinking that there was a way the world should be.”

The term “feminism” did not exist when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this short book (just 98pp in my Vintage Classics edition) and some critics have resisted its author’s identification with the movement. In hindsight, however, we can now see that its assault on “mistaken notions of female excellence” was the first great expression of feminist ideas. Although she does not insist on the equality of the sexes, you’ll still find, articulated in thrilling clarity, the essence of Wollstonecraft’s argument for the education of women, and for an increased female participation in everyday society. This little book, which declared that “from the tyranny of man, the greater number of female follies proceed”, set off the first ripples of what would eventually become the worldwide movement for women’s rights. A classic of post-revolutionary thought, shaped by the Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication changed life for women the world over.

Wollstonecraft began her career in 1787 with Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and then spent several years writing reviews, pamphlets, Mary (a novel), and her first foray into pre-feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which was a passionate response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. This, one of dozens of pamphlets inspired by Burke, was, in Wollstonecraft’s words, an “effusion of the moment”, attacking “the grand principles at which he [Burke] has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb”.

Daljit Nagra remembers the moment his life changed course: it was when he rang home for his A-level results. He was a 21-year-old secondary school dropout from Sheffield who had spent a year at evening classes studying English, sociology and politics. “I didn’t expect to get good grades and when my brother read them out over the phone it was a complete shock.”

He hadn’t presumed to apply for university, but his results were good enough to earn him a place in the clearing system. He took a train down to London for an interview at London University’s Royal Holloway College and was accepted to read English. It was the start of a journey that would lead two decades later to the winners’ podium at the Forward prizes, where he joined the great and the good of the UK poetry world to collect the award for best first collection.

‘So my $15m book deal got cancelled because a few snowflakes were upset over something I said about children. Well, diddums’

This is the book people said couldn’t be published because I was so dangerous. Well, you don’t get to silence The World’s Most Dangerous Faggot that easily. Have I said that I am dangerous? And a faggot? That’s because I am a dangerous faggot. Grrr. Be afraid. Very afraid. Or, failing that, just a bit bored.

So my $15m book deal got cancelled because a few snowflakes were a little upset about something I said about paedophilia. Well, diddums. Get over yourself. The truth cannot be silenced by Fake News. Let’s get something straight: I never said it was OK for men to have sex with babies. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere and that’s mine. All I said was that it was perfectly cool for men to have sex with 13-year-olds. What could possibly be controversial about that?

Gruffalo, laundry, fishfinger sandwiches, writing, often no writing … the author on taking inspiration from her two-year-old daughter and short story writing

My two-year-old daughter gets up around 5.30am and likes to bring hundreds of books into my bed to read. I can usually negotiate a cup of coffee first, by which I mean a pot of industrial-strength stovetop espresso. Pre-dawn literary analysis includes the leveling philosophy of Everybody Poos and the alarming dearth of female protagonists who solve their own problems in children’s fiction. Currently, I’m judging the Man Booker prize – the hypotheses are not dissimilar.

Toddlers radically alter your concept of a working day, so I’ve recalibrated my notions of creative purpose. Often I have to wait to work, but hopefully this state of repose (let’s optimistically call it “implicit learning”) has a potent effect on what I do write.

There’s a radiant passage at the end of Philip Hoare’s prize-winning 2008 book Leviathan, where the author describes diving with a group of sperm whales off the Azores. He gazes into the ocean around him, endlessly deep, endlessly wide. “It was as if I were looking into the universe,” he writes. A vast whale swims towards him. “Surveyed by the electrical charge of her sixth sense, I felt insignificant and yet not quite.”

Leviathan can be seen as the first in a loose trilogy – along with 2013’s The Sea Inside and RisingTideFallingStar – and this encounter feels like it encapsulates the impulse that animates each of the books. These are works of sublime self-dissolution.

Naoki Higashida’s lyrical and heartfelt account of his condition is a gift to anyone involved with the same challenges

Naoki Higashida is a 24-year-old man with severe, largely non-verbal autism. Though he cannot hold a conversation, he uses an alphabet grid to build up sentences, which are taken down by a transcriber. By this method he produced his first book, The Reason I Jump, when he was only 13. It quickly became an autism classic.

My two eldest sons, George and Sam, have autism. Sam is the same age as Higashida, and similar in many ways. When I read The Reason I Jump, I felt as if Sam was speaking to me fully for the first time – or for the first time since early childhood, when he would try earnestly to make himself understood before withdrawing, defeated. Would reading its successor be as valuable and powerful an experience?

The Scottish physician Joseph Black was responsible, in 1764, for one of science’s more unusual chemical experiments. He had already achieved fame by becoming the first scientist to isolate a pure gas: carbon dioxide, known as “fixed air” at the time. Now Black was anxious to further his work by demonstrating that the gas was exhaled by human beings.

So he looked for a place where respirations would be at their most intense and accessible – and decided that the kirk best fitted the bill. Presbyterianism in 18th-century Scotland was, if nothing else, a source of plentiful hot air. So Black, who was then Glasgow University’s professor of anatomy and chemistry, placed a solution of limewater inside an air duct in a church where it was said that more than 1,500 people would remain at their devotions for 10 hours on one winter’s day. (Glaswegians have always taken their religion seriously, it should be noted.)

When Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation came out in 1990, I was at university, and should have been reading Beowulf or Milton or something. Except I wasn’t. Tannen’s book, which went on to spend almost four years on the New York Times bestseller list, was passed to me by a girlfriend, and I devoured it instead, essays (and everything else) on hold for as long as it took. I’d had my share of boyfriend trouble; I’m sure that was part of it. Mainly, though, my hope was that it would explain why the hierarchy that operated in our seminars and tutorials continued to be so very male – and that such an understanding would, in turn, help me to make my own voice, then rather weedy, a little louder.

I hoped in vain. As some of Tannen’s colleagues in linguistics pointed out at the time, You Just Don’t Understand was not a subtle or forward-looking book: its author’s reliance on anecdote, combined with her seeming determination to emphasise gender difference, led her only to perpetuate the old stereotypes (to sum up: if men don’t talk enough, women probably do it too much). But a hit is a hit, and Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, wasn’t to be put off. She has since written several more handbooks for the general reader, easygoing guides in which she has examined, among other things, the realm of mothers and daughters, and the relationships of sisters. Now, three decades on, here comes another: You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships. The thought occurs that this volume is particularly well timed, given the way imaginations have lately been fired by Elena Ferrante.

Victorian London was a notoriously smelly place. When journalist George Sala tried to capture the experience of walking through the city, he ended up producing a kind of prose odourama: “The fumes of the vilest tobacco, of decaying vegetables, of escaping gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, unkempt, reckless humanity; all these make the night hideous and the heart sick.” The Thames in particular was a thick ribbon of smells that wound its way through the capital, and its presence could be felt far beyond the shoreline. People carried it around in their clothes and hair, and took it into their lungs. And by the 1850s it was making more than their hearts sick.

Raw sewage was being slopped into it from thousands of cesspits and overflowing privies, and this was dangerous as well as unpleasant. In 1829, newspapers reported that a Mrs Wennels and her baby had drowned when the rotten floor of their Woolwich privy gave way, and they sank into “the abyss of filth beneath”. Even the recent invention of flushing toilets hadn’t helped. Waste in a cesspit built up over time and was then dug out by workers who took it away to be used as manure. The water closet flushed waste straight into the city’s sewers, which fed directly into the river that gave London its main water supply. As a result the Thames had become what an 1827 cartoon described as a “monster soup” of disease.

The author, like his subject, rejected consumer capitalism and travelled to Israel to find a more meaningful Jewish life. But problems arose …

One day before the outbreak of the first world war, a precocious boy called Gerhard Scholem burst into a room at home and began the rite of symbolically castrating his father. “Papa, I think I want to be a Jew,” he exclaimed. He was planning to learn Hebrew, study the Bible and become a Zionist. His father, an assimilationist German businessman who despised his Jewish heritage, was appalled: “You want to return to the ghetto?” he asked. “You’re the ones who are living in the ghetto,” his son snapped back. “Only you won’t admit it.”

Scholem meant that his father had established the family in a gilded bourgeois Jewish prison within a hostile German society – his friend, Walter Benjamin, who grew up in a similarly privileged west Berlin milieu, described it as “something of a ghetto held on lease”. These rebellious sons turned out to be unwittingly prescient.

As Britain starts to extricate itself from Europe’s embrace, it is timely to examine the intricacies of this love-hate relationship at another point of crisis. Last Hope Island describes the many continental Europeans who, escaping Nazi occupation, found refuge in Britain during the second world war. Their stories are exciting, moving and horrifying, with foreign monarchs, spies, scientists and soldiers attempting to continue their battles from a vulnerable island that did not appear well placed to resist the probable German invasion.

Lynne Olson, an American historian, has written many books about the war, and her clear-eyed prose challenges popular myths about Britain’s “finest hour”. She explores the remarkable bravery and ingenuity of these exiled European allies, but there are enough British failures and betrayals to make for hard, even upsetting reading. Although it is a brick of a book with a daunting number of subjects, it skips along, focusing on the vibrant personalities and their extraordinary stories.

It seems like only a few years ago that we began making wry jokes about the doofus minority of people who walked down the street while texting or otherwise manipulating their phone, bumping into lamp-posts and so forth. Now that has become the predominant mode of locomotion in the city, to the frustration of those of us who like to get anywhere fast and in a straight line. Pedestrian accidents are on the rise, and some urban authorities are even thinking of installing smart kerbside sensors that alert the phone-obsessed who are about to step into oncoming traffic. New technologies, as Adam Greenfield’s tremendously intelligent and stylish book repeatedly emphasises, can change social habits in unforeseen and often counterproductive ways.

The technological fixes to such technology-induced problems rarely succeed as predicted either. It was, after all, to address the issue of people staring at handheld screens all day that Google marketed its augmented-reality spectacles, Google Glass. It rapidly turned out, however, that most people didn’t much like being surveilled and video-recorded by folk wearing hipster tech specs. Early adopters became known as “Glassholes”; the gizmo was banned in cool US bars, and it was eventually abandoned.

Warner has it in for nutrition experts, dieticians, pseudoscience – and Gwyneth Paltrow

In 2008 Jess Ainscough, an Australian magazine journalist, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. Rather than undergo the drastic treatment prescribed by her doctor, amputation of her arm and shoulder combined with chemotherapy, she decided to combat the illness with something called Gerson Therapy, which involved drinking vegetable juice with coffee enemas four times day. Styling herself “The Wellness Warrior”, she charted her progress on a blog, which became a sensation. When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011, she decided to shun conventional treatment and follow her daughter’s regime. Ainscough’s mother died in 2013 and her own cancer, a slow-moving type, which is why she believed her diet to be working, began to spread; she died in 2015. With conventional treatment both women might be alive today.

Related: What do doctors say to 'alternative therapists' when a patient dies? Nothing. We never talk | Ranjana Srivastava

Following the surprise result of the general election, a discussion began regarding the failure of political journalists, pundits and pollsters to sense the shifting mood of the electorate. In some respects, this echoed the discussion about the economics profession following the banking crisis of 2008, but there were some key differences. Economists and regulators are expected to make accurate predictions, partly to protect us from catastrophic events. Despite the fun and games of predicting election results, it is silly to place the identical expectation on political analysts. Politics is by nature a deeply uncertain process.

What was less forgivable was the acute arrogance of some commentators, who dismissed Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters out of hand – they didn’t even bother to try to understand what might be emerging. For instance, Momentum, the group established following Corbyn’s election as Labour leader to coordinate his supporters at a grass-roots level, was often treated as a cult-like group of troublemakers. But following 8 June, it was clear that Momentum was a very effective canvassing operation, which drew on hard work and enthusiasm rather than the big money and machinelike messaging of their opponents. Pundits cannot know everything, but nor should they be so quick to belittle that which they have never encountered.

OK, here’s the thing. Maybe you like to think that you are a reliable user of the Queen’s English. You give slang a wide berth and never refer to anyone as a “guy” unless it happens to be the fifth of November. You don’t “do the math”, not least because back in your day it was called “maths”. Receiving an email that begins “Hi” makes you squirm and whenever you attempt to “kick ass” you worry about getting a call from the RSPCA.

Well done you. Not. For as Matthew Engel shows in this jaunty book, even the most pedantic Britons use Americanisms – words, phrases, pronunciations and spellings, but also that indefinable thing called cadence – 24/7. We can’t help it. Our ears are exposed to an American version of our mother tongue all day, every day – at work, at play and even in the deep cave of domesticity where we binge on Netflix and order take-out.

Morten Strøksnes is in search of a Greenland while Colin Speedie is mesmerised by the basker. Philip Hoare considers a new kind of shark fever

It is the ancientness of sharks that helps to enthrall and appal us. The sly, sideways sway of their whiplash bodies; the nerve-sharp signifier of their angular fins; the sense of something impossibly old, and possibly malignant. Sharks have been around for 400m years, and collectively, these cartilaginous creatures sum up all that is frightening about the deep dark sea.

On his mid-19th-century walks along Cape Cod, Henry David Thoreau recorded that sharks would be “tossed up and quiver for a moment on the sand”, and saw one “singularly film-like and indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean”. On that same shore recently, a fisherman showed me a photo he had taken on the beach where I’d just been swimming. It showed a great white lurching out of the surf within a few feet of the shore, a big fat seal in its mouth. As another fisherman chipped in: “You don’t wanna go like that.”

This powerful study, subtitled How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, exposes the bias in predictive modelling

As a child, mathematics was Cathy O’Neil’s passion: “math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world”. After a stint in academia she began working for a hedge fund (“the smuggest of the players on Wall Street”) just before the 2008 crash. That’s when she recognised the danger posed by mathematical models or, as she neatly terms them in this fascinating book, Weapons of Math Destruction. Her main point is that predictive models are never neutral but reflect the goals and ideology of those who create them. They also tend to load the dice against poor people, reinforcing inequality in society. From calculating university rankings or credit ratings and processing job applications, to deciding what advertising you see online or what stories appear in your Facebook news feed, algorithms play an increasingly important role in our lives. Even the police use big data to help them predict where crimes may occur. The problem, as O’Neil so eloquently demonstrates, is that these algorithms are often incapable of reflecting the real world: “mathematical models should be our tools, not our masters”.

• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy is published by Penguin. 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.

We are creatures of light and air. Life’s a gas, in every sense. We are oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, packed together with the carbon that photosynthesising life has plucked, one molecule at a time, from the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. At cremation, our bodies bake down to a handful of minerals. When Hamlet beseeched his too, too solid flesh to melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew, he got it about right: the Prince of Denmark would have been about 70% water, which is itself an atmospheric vapour. And he certainly could have been blown away.

Harry Truman – “not that Harry Truman”, as Sam Kean says in this bright and breezy book – was blown away by Mount St Helens. Truman was the defiant man who dismissed the warnings of volcanologists and refused to leave the high slopes of America’s most violent modern volcano before it erupted in May 1980. Kean reconstructs his death because, as a chemist, he knows the temperatures at which water, viscera and bones could vaporise as a black cloud of intense heat, 100 storeys high and 10 miles wide, came roaring down the mountain at 350mph: “Truman’s clothes would have flared and disappeared, and then Truman himself would have sublimed in the scientific sense – transformed from solid to spirit almost instantly. And with a final hiss, he would have risen up into the air.”

In The Baron in the Trees, the 1957 comic masterpiece by Italo Calvino, the hero abandons the life of a petty 18th-century aristocrat to spend his life in the boughs and branches of the forests of Liguria. Over the years his senses become ever more finely attuned to the life of the woodland until he hears “the sap running through the cells, the circles marking the years inside the trunks … the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests … the caterpillar waking and the chrysalis opening”.

Trekking into the rainforest at the heart of the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve in western Ecuador, the biologist David George Haskell enters a similar state. As the rain falls, he notes in the first pages of The Songs of Trees, botanical diversity is sonified:

Matt Haig is a writer of admirable versatility (children’s books, nonfiction, adult novels) and an enviable ability to produce bestsellers. Reasons to Stay Alive, his memoir of being depressed in his 20s, was one of the bestselling nonfiction books of recent years. The Humans, his wickedly funny 2013 novel about an alien taking over the body of a Cambridge maths don, sold more than 200,000 copies – a serious number for any book. And now here is Haig’s latest, which you just know is also fated to succeed. A film version (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) is in the pipeline, and just last week there was Stephen Fry, on Twitter, predicting (while simultaneously helping to ensure) that it would attract a “large and grateful readership”.

So what is Haig’s secret? A major aspect of his popularity is his ability to think up arresting concepts, and quickly make them clear and convincing. His latest novel, How to Stop Time, is a case in point. Tom Hazard, our hero, was “born on the third of March 1581”, but is still alive today. How? He has an incredibly rare genetic condition, “anageria”, which develops around puberty, and which causes sufferers to age 15 times more slowly than normal people. So despite being 439 years old, and having hung out, in his day, with Shakespeare, Captain Cook and Christopher Marlowe, Tom can, in the present, pass himself off as 41-year-old London comprehensive school teacher with a knack for making his subject, history – what else? – “come alive”.

In Jillian Tamaki’s graphic short story Half Life, a young woman called Helen tries on a previously too-small dress to work out whether or not she has lost weight. And, yes, it seems that her friends, half-jealous and half-admiring, were right. Ta-dah! She really is smaller. Before the mirror in her guest bedroom, she performs a delighted little twirl.

After this, though, things begin to get weird. She is visibly shrinking – and fast, too. In the street, she is mistaken for a child; at home, she can only stir the pan on her hob if she stands on a chair. Her sister, keen to protect her ever more miniature dignity, gamely stitches her a new wardrobe of doll-sized clothes but, alas, she doesn’t get to wear them for very long. In the next frame, we find her sleeping in a match box, and in the one after that, she is living in a special glass enclosure designed by doctors to prevent her being devoured by an insect or swept up on a passing bit of pollen. No one knows what has caused this condition, but in all likelihood, it won’t be long before Helen is invisible to the human eye.

Anthony Quinn’s two most recent volumes of period fiction, Curtain Call and Freya, were set in the 1930s and the 1950s. In Eureka, he takes another step on his journey through the 20th century to arrive in London in the summer of 1967, swinging to the soundtrack of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper. Some of the same characters from the two previous books return, but for those yet to discover this former film critic, don’t be put off joining the party for part three of this loosely linked and hugely enjoyable trilogy. You require no prior knowledge. Eureka works just as well as a stand-alone.

Indeed, you could argue that, such is Quinn’s restless inventiveness as a writer, the three novels hardly overlap at all. Where Curtain Call was a highly polished murder mystery, peeping backstage in the prewar years to witness the forces pushing Britain towards conflict, Freya was more a moving hymn to female friendship (a brave choice for a male author), set among a postwar generation of women battling to be taken seriously in their chosen careers.

Cultural integration and the repercussions of terrorism are the key elements in this expertly crafted coming-of-age story

A Good Country is the third novel in a trilogy following three generations of a Kurdish family, its action moving from Iran to the US. It is the story of Rez, full name Alireza, who is 14 years old at the start of the novel and 18 at the end; the title comes from his father’s description of the United States. Our first sight of the father, whose experience of the Islamic revolution was related in The Walking, is of a demanding, adamant man, “a tyrant without a cause”, as Rez thinks him when he suffers violent humiliation at his hands for a B grade in a school history test.

The pieces are in place for a story of adolescence in wealthy Laguna Beach, California, and the rebellion of a second-generation migrant youth against hard-working and ambitious parents. The father’s name is Saladin Courdee, an Americanisation of Khourdi, while his first name invokes the most famous Kurd in history. Khadivi places a series of clues in the narrative to indicate the struggle of migrant families to become American, and the contrasting anxieties between the generations with their potential for violent rupture.

The Party is a novelistic study in every kind of anxiety. Class anxiety, status anxiety, sexual anxiety, social anxiety, pregnancy anxiety, fashion anxiety, even footwear anxiety. I felt anxious reading it – anxious for the characters, anxious for the author, anxious for myself. I feel anxious reviewing it. The cover of the proof copy asks: “Are you invited?” Anxiously, I now pass that question on to you.

Elizabeth Day’s first novel, Scissors, Paper, Stone, won a Betty Trask award. This is her fourth and the press release offers comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. And, indeed, it is very close – in terms of subject matter and setup – to the latter.

For two decades now, Nicola Barker has been writing extravagantly ununusal books. Her subjects have ranged from a 15th-century court jester in Darkmans to the anxieties of golf in The Yips; her characters have been outliers, oddballs, obsessives of all kinds. Her last novel, 2016’s The Cauliflower, was a typically playful portrait of the 19th-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna, riffing on holiness and eccentricity, the sacred and the profane.

So the odd thing about her 12th novel – a phantasmagoria in which willing submission to constant surveillance in a regulated virtual reality keeps the population happy, or at least h(a)ppy – is that it begins on such familiar ground. The trope of a society in which to deviate from the norm is to risk instant public shame is familiar from social-media satires such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle or Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, while the figure of a lone individualist resisting coercive conformism and ersatz contentment goes back nearly a century to Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

As the computer Deep Thought pointed out in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s no good spending seven and a half million years working on the answer if you don’t start with a good idea of what the question is. Lacey’s second novel, the follow-up to 2015’s Nobody Is Ever Missing, opens with a full-scale assault on readerly curiosity: a female narrator wakes up in her own bed and then locks eyes, shockingly, with a woman called Ashley who is outside her window, staring in. The who, what and why are a powerful incentive to drive through the pages. But for the characters in The Answers, the thing they are looking for is always being deferred or displaced.

Mary, the woman whose bedroom we started out in, is looking for an answer to her pervasive, agonising and maybe psychosomatic health issues. When extensive medical investigations only add debt to her distress (because the novel is set in the US, where healthcare is a luxury), she feels as though “the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed”. The solution is an alternative and expensive therapy called PAKing – “Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia” – recommended by a hippy friend. Mary is well aware that allowing a man called Ed to hoik her about in her underwear for hours at a time might be quackery, but as it works, she reasons it’s worth paying for.

The Irish fiction renaissance continues with a gothic collection of short stories that shock and fascinate in equal measure

As Leonard Cohen asked: you want it darker? How about a story about a couple kept as sex slaves in a farmhouse in Leitrim, their desperate antics livestreamed to an audience of perverts worldwide? Or a junkie who gets a beating and a shoehorn “scoopslide right in and up on over” his “stink tunnel”? A story narrated by a foetus? The tale of a paedophile who is enrolled on a “dynamic new domestic-environment therapy with 100 per cent effectiveness demonstrated in trials across twelve countries on three continents”, which involves him adopting his own boy robot that he can abuse in the comfort and privacy of his own home? Room Little Darker, June Caldwell’s debut collection, couldn’t get much blacker. It reads like boiling tar.

As Irish fiction once again awakens to its true power and potential, Caldwell emerges as one of those giving the tradition a good old-fashioned shaking. (To name just a few others: Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney, Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett.) In the words of the narrator of “Dubstopia”, “Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland, that cunt Yeats said in the book by their mattress. But he didn’t know fuck all about the skank or fiddlers like Carol, all thumbs and kettledrums, sucking off ghosts at the window in the Old Bank on Doyle’s Corner.” If you prefer your Irish fiction sweet, ponderous and full to the brim with twinkles and craic – horseman, pass by.

Last year’s London book fair was set alight by first-time author Chloé Esposito, a former management consultant who had won book contracts worth more than £2m for her trilogy of thrillers Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. The first in the series, Mad, is just out, and introduces us to life from the perspective of identical twin Alvina Knightly.

Esposito’s opening is a cracker, and it’s easy to see why it had international publishers lining up to acquire her debut, as well as a film deal with Universal. “There’s something you should know before we go any further: my heart is in the wrong place,” says Alvina. “Seven billion people on this planet have their hearts on the left. Mine’s on the right. You don’t think that’s a sign?”

In normal circumstances, To Kill the President would be just another thriller. “Sam Bourne” is the pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland, a senior figure on the Guardian, our sister paper. Freedland is always worth reading, of course. But a book that began with US officials scrambling to stop their president replying with a nuclear strike to mockery of his manhood from North Korea would have seemed ridiculous only a year ago. Everyone knows the North Koreans would retaliate by reducing Seoul to rubble.

Readers would not just have to suspend their disbelief but send it off on holiday, if those same representatives of the Washington deep state had then concluded that the only safe option was to assassinate their commander-in-chief.

On the face of it few places in the world could be further apart than Northern Ireland and Papua New Guinea, but in his ambitious third novel Nick Laird bridges the gap with a sprawling investigation into belief and belonging. Liz Donnelly, originally from Ulster, is a US-based anthropologist and specialist in myth. She is on her way to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea – pointedly named New Ulster – to film a BBC documentary about world religions, but first she stops at her home town of Ballyglass for her sister Alison’s wedding. This is Alison’s second marriage: having divorced an abusive alcoholic, she has now settled for a nice if quiet Ulsterman she met through her local Presbyterian church.

Related: Nick Laird: a life in writing

The opening story of Sarah Hall’s new collection, Madame Zero, won the BBC National Short Story award. It’s called “Mrs Fox”, and in it, a young married woman undergoes a transformation. This may sound soothingly familiar: after all, David Garnett’s story “Lady into Fox” follows the same theme and was made into a film and a ballet; and then there are Colette and her cats, and Manga fox-spirits, and we’ve all heard the term foxy lady.

But Hall’s lady doesn’t turn into any of those anthropomorphic creatures. She isn’t a piquet-playing, clothes-wearing fox, nor a ladylike, balletic fox: she is an actual fox, the light, alert animal, spotlit in Hall’s precise imagery. “At his feet she sits with her tail rearing. Exceptional, winged ears. Eyes like the spectrum of her blended fur … he lifts her. The moderate weight of a mid-sized mammal.” And an animal she remains, for there is no magic to be found to release her in this story; instead, there is the problem of her “black scat” and “on the expensive slate floor, a patch of saliva”; plus the fact that she likes her food live, these days. The indiminishable fact of her animal-ness, and perhaps of our animal-ness, is the nub of the story. It’s shocking.

Since the second world war, numerous professors of ethics or theology and several science fiction writers have fretted over the question of whether a seer or time-traveller, knowing what Adolf Hitler would go on to do, could be justified in killing him as a preventative measure. Stephen King fictionalised this dilemma in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone, in which a man sees that a rising populist politician will become an American Hitler, and agonises about whether assassination would be a patriotic act.

Now Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, after publishing 2015’s The Third Woman under his own name, has re-Bourne the pseudonym under which he previously produced five conspiracy thrillers. In To Kill the President, a White House legal aide spots a plot to murder a recently elected controversialist president who, though never named, seems familiar.

The narrator is 400 years old, but the sardonic asides give this pacy novel a modern twist

“You see, I have a condition,” Tom Hazard, the narrator of this engaging novel, confesses on page one. He is quasi-immortal. “I am old – old in the way that a tree, or a quahog clam, or a Renaissance painting is old. I was born well over four hundred years ago, on the third of March 1581 …” For every 13 or 14 human years, he ages one year. But far from bringing him godlike pleasure, his condition places him at a mournful distance from the rest of humanity, doomed to see everyone he loves age and die. Yep, this is one for fans of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

A more liberal society has meant that romances are harder to write than in previous centuries, as lovers fail to be kept apart by impediments other than their own shortcomings. Authors have to work doubly hard, it seems, even creating whole new genetic disorders to keep blameless lovers yearning. There is always the risk of self-indulgence in novels driven by their own audacious central conceit, but luckily Matt Haig has a real feeling for what it is to be an outsider, and makes you entirely believe in the weariness of the centuries-old “albas” (albatrosses) secretly living among the rest of us giddily short-lived “mays” (mayflies). The strangeness of this parallel universe throws our own into relief, so that we see time not as a tyranny, but as a social glue that binds us and allows us kinship. And along the way there are, as you’d expect from Haig, many quirks and quips. Why worry about the future? “It always happens. That’s the thing about the future.”

Penelope Shuttle need not walk any faster – as this, her 14th collection, demonstrates. It is the gentle pace that captivates in her poems. And what a phenomenal poet she is (she has recently celebrated her 70th birthday). She has an unbossy, contemplative, unmistakable voice. She leads you quietly and helps you see things – London especially – afresh. There is nothing stale about the way she writes, although she is thinking about what it means to be older. She reflects on the city, its present moment and history – its bones. The past is there, almost palpable, and the dead, too – only just beyond touch and sight. She salutes London while resisting its metropolitan speed. Once part of a celebrated working duo with her late husband, the poet Peter Redgrove, his absence is strong enough to be a presence here. This is a volume that combines sorrow with an oddball wryness – an unusual mix. Shuttle implausibly casts herself as a relic, and in a comically sympathetic poem set in Waitrose, Balham, measures her time against the nonstop pace of the supermarket. There is scarcely time to complete a sentence:

“In Waitrose Balham
I’m sure I’m bust
and broke
past my sell-by”

It is tempting to read Ocean Vuong’s poetry with his life story in mind. Glimpses of it appear throughout his Forward prize-nominated debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds: Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and at the age of two, after a year in a refugee camp, he emigrated to Hartford, Connecticut with six members of his family. Several poems resurrect violence from before the poet’s birth, in particular the end of the Vietnam war with the fall of Saigon in 1975. Complex figures, displaced by war, haunt the book: an absent, tormented father and a beloved mother. Vuong’s intimate lyrical voice, his precise, stark imagery and engagement with gay sexuality construct a familiar story of loss, as well as the immigrant’s precarious transnational identity. But pointing to the biography alongside Vuong’s stellar rise – from the first literate person in his family to a lauded, prize-winning poet – risks detracting from the book’s literary and political elements. Balancing memory and silence with erudition, Vuong’s poetry resists being so easily pinned down.

Poetry as song, originating in lyric, preoccupies the book’s opening poem “Threshold”. The father’s singing in the shower – and a son’s surreptitious listening – form an invocation for the poet.

Fortunes are reversed and scabrous comedy gives way to a nuanced investigation of male friendship and anxiety

He’s a funny writer, John Niven. Not funny peculiar: funny ha ha. Properly funny, in a scabrous and scatological sort of way, and in his latest book he doesn’t disappoint. It’s a big, comic tableau, painted in bright, broad shades with plenty of splatter marks.

No Good Deed has a pleasingly straightforward, Trading Places-style setup. Alan Grainger is a broadsheet restaurant critic in the Giles Coren/ Jay Rayner/AA Gill mode – dandyish, sharp-penned and well heeled. One day, as he’s walking through central London, Moleskine in hand, shuffling synonyms for his forthcoming demolition of a trendy new burger pop-up, he’s accosted by name by a tramp.

Some structures are so grand and defining that it’s hard to imagine they haven’t always been there. But as Wellcome prize-winner Kerangal shows in her striking 2010 novel, translated by Jessica Moore, the bigger the project, the bigger the story. Her setting is Coca, a fictional California city that sits beside a vast river, “a long golden cobra lazing and wild, lying curved like a trigger across an entire continent”. Few locals seem to need a new crossing, but ambition and money talk, and plans are made for a suspension bridge 6,200ft long and 100ft wide that will put Coca on the map. The result is a feverish coming together of men, women and technology as project managers, construction workers and hangers-on swarm, and great machines tear the earth and inch their way into the sky. Kerangal has a fine ear for the hubbub, spinning epic, comma-flecked sentences into a symphony of human drama and mechanical ingenuity. There’s sorrow, for the way lives are uprooted and the land colonised, but there’s a tremendous, jubilant energy too, in a book that sings of global development in all its ugliness and glory.

• Birth of a Bridge is published by MacLehose. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) 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.

As Elizabeth Day reminds us in the epigraph to The Party, her title has three meanings: social, political and contractual. Each comes into play here in her fourth novel, a well-paced slow-burner of a literary thriller that peers into the cordoned-off chambers of the British establishment ordinarily off limits to all but the privileged few.

Sent to boarding school on a scholarship, Martin Gilmour becomes obsessed with a fellow student, the charismatic Benjamin Fitzmaurice. It’s not just Ben’s wealth that draws Martin in; there’s something more magnetic at work, even if he refuses to acknowledge the true nature of his feelings.

Dark stories of madness, loss and murder from a Swiss-Italian master of the short form

It’s a quarter-century since Fleur Jaeggy’s novel Sweet Days of Discipline, of which Joseph Brodsky said, “Reading time … four hours. Remembering time ... the rest of one’s life.” Swiss-Italian Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories, translated by Gini Alhadeff. They frame haunting, dreamlike moments: a 13th-century woman senses the taste of “Christ’s foreskin … tender as egg skin and very sweet”; an orphan burns alive the aristocrat who took her in “for the blasted glory of it”; a family is cursed by a possessed mandrake root. Told in Jaeggy’s characteristically jagged prose, these dark stories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative. Central to each are surreal images reminiscent of paintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: “her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust”. This is an intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic.

The award-winning author gets to the raw heart of her diverse characters in this winning sixth form tale of romance and identity

Her award-winning debut Orangeboy, a gripping urban thriller, announced Patrice Lawrence as a bold, fresh voice in young adult fiction. This promise is realised in her second book, a tender and complex story of first love, family and belonging.

The chemistry is instant when Indigo and Bailey meet at sixth form. But these are two teenagers from very different places. As a small child, Indigo witnessed her father kill her mother and has grown up in the care system. Her notorious story and her own reputation for losing it shadow her start at this “last-chance” school. Mixed-race Bailey, meanwhile, who’s known for his love of guitars and distinctive ginger afro, lives with his middle-class parents. A hesitant romance develops between the pair, beautifully capturing both the shine of mutual attraction and the awkwardness of fledgling lovers. When Bailey is approached by a tramp who knows far more about Indigo than he should, he faces the most difficult decision of his life.

It’s exactly two decades since the first of JK Rowling’s books was published. Try our Nastily Exhausting Wizarding Test to see how much you have learned since then

What is Albus Dumbledore's full name?

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

Albus Patrick William Bob Dumbledore

Albus Brian Percival Wulfric Dumbledore

Albus William Bob Patrick Dumbledore

How many years in a row had Slytherin won the House Cup before Harry's arrival at Hogwarts in 1991?

Three years

Seven years

Ten years

Eight years

Which two characters share a Patronus?

Ron Weasley and Neville Longbottom

Harry Potter and James Potter

Severus Snape and Lily Potter

Dean Thomas and Ginny Weasley

When Harry and Ron visit the Slytherin common room in disguise in The Chamber of Secrets, what is the password used to get inside?

"Salazar"

"Pure-blood"

"Parselmouth"

"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus"

When Harry and Hermione use the Time-Turner to save Sirius in The Prisoner of Azkaban, how many times does Hermione turn it?

One time

Two times

Three times

Four times

Which dragon does Cedric Diggory face in the first test during The Goblet of Fire?

Hungarian Horntail

Chinese Firebolt

Welsh Green

Swedish Short-Snout

Which of these subjects would a first year student in Hogwarts NOT do?

Arithmancy

History of Magic

Transfiguration

Astronomy

James Potter, Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew are the only known unregistered Animagi – until who comes along?

Aberforth Dumbledore

Rita Skeeter

Nymphadora Tonks

Ludo Bagman

How many Educational Decrees were introduced during Dolores Umbridge's time at Hogwarts?

Seven

14

21

29

Which vault belongs to the Potter family in Gringott's Wizarding Bank?

Vault 256

Vault 394

Vault 555

Vault 687

Which of the following ingredients is NOT needed to make Polyjuice potion?

Lacewing flies

Dittany

Shredded skin of a Boomslang

Fluxweed

Which of the following books did Gilderoy Lockhart NOT write?

Camping with Centaurs

Marauding with Monsters

Wanderings with Werewolves

Break with a Banshee

In The Goblet of Fire, what type of fruit does Hermione tickle in order to gain entry to the Hogwarts kitchens?

A pear

An orange

A banana

A pineapple

In the Deathly Hallows, which ear did George Weasley lose?

Left

Right

During Harry's time at Hogwarts, the Gryffindor Quidditch team won the House Cup three times. In which of the following books did they NOT win?

The Chamber of Secrets

The Prisoner of Azkaban

The Order of the Phoenix

The Half-Blood Prince

In The Half-Blood Prince, what was the title of the book that Tom Riddle was revealed to have used to learn about Horcruxes?

Secrets of the Darkest Art

Guide to Advanced Transfiguration

Magick Most Evile

Where There's a Wand, There's a Way

In The Order of the Phoenix, which floor of Hogwarts can the Room of Requirement be found on?

Second

Fourth

Sixth

Seventh

During Harry's sorting ceremony in The Philosopher's Stone, which house is the first student sorted into?

Gryffindor

Ravenclaw

Hufflepuff

Slytherin

In The Prisoner of Azkaban, which secret passage out of Hogwarts leads Harry to the cellar of Honeydukes?

Behind the statue of the one-eyed witch

Behind the statue of Gregory the Smarmy.

Inside the Vanishing Cabinet

Beneath the Whomping Willow

In The Deathly Hallows, what are the names of the three Peverell brothers?

Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus

Antioch, Crydia, and Ignatius

Aberforth, Cadmus, and Ignotus

Antioch, Cadmus, and Ibrahim

0 and above.

Your spells have been cast

For the very youngest picture-book fans this month, Nosy Crow’s collaboration with the British Museum yields two enticing board-books, 123 and ABC. The alphabet book features stylish photographs of exhibits from around the world, ranging from Japanese porcelain elephants to Austrian woodcuts of oranges; the counting book gives infant curators the delightful illusion of handling ancient hats, dolls, keys and rings.

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.

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”.

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.

Extract: An illustrated four-course feast from Erin Gleeson for intrepid under-10s to get stuck into

T: tablespoon
t: teaspoon
c: cup
Seltzer: sparkling/fizzy

From primary school teacher to author of a stage hit, the author is now subject of a V&A exhibition celebrating his work

Two sides, 45 minutes. Get on with it. Detention if you don’t finish. This was my introduction to writing stories at my junior school in west London. Usually, the teacher would write a title for us on the blackboard. “Giraffe”, maybe, or “Lost”. I struggled for an idea, for words, for the confidence to begin, and all the time as I sat there, chewing my pencil, trying to sneak a look at what Belinda next to me was writing, the clock on the wall was ticking away.

In the end, I learned only one thing from this process: how to avoid detention. I learned that if I wrote in really big letters, with lots of punctuation and multiple paragraphs, I could cover the two pages, and get away with it. Mostly, I managed to do so. Sadly, vestiges of this kind of teaching through fear still linger on – in a different way, maybe, but fear all the same – the curriculum exam-driven, the reputations of teachers and schools judged overwhelmingly on the success of children under pressure with the clock ticking.

Whether it’s Peter Rabbit or Tracy Beaker, books offer children valuable insights into the world. Let’s not allow austerity to restrict their access

When I was younger, the thing I wanted most in the world was a Sega MegaDrive so that I could play Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II and Donkey Kong. But my pleas fell on deaf ears. As childhood sob stories go, it’s hardly one of the worst, though (the fact that my youngest brother now owns almost every game console in existence is a textbook example of how parents relax their rules with each additional child). What not being allowed to play video games did mean, however, was that I spent most of my childhood reading.

It may sound swotty, but when I was little, being let loose on a well-stocked library felt like being taken to a toy shop and allowed to choose whatever I wanted. I just couldn’t believe that all those books where there for the taking, and that I was allowed to take eight of them (EIGHT!) home with me. Perhaps this is why the continuing austerity-led library closures so break my heart. The Duchess of Cornwall may be attempting to plug the gap – in honour of her 70th birthday, her Bookshelves Project will present 70 schools across the country with 70 of the nation’s favourite children’s books, as nominated by pupils – but something as important as childhood literacy should never be left to charity. Governments should be helping children’s love of reading to flourish, not starving it of funds.

This week’s BBC Question Time was depressing viewing. It showed just how divisive the EU referendum was and how unwilling the Conservatives and Labour are to tackle the fallout. Given the politics of the last two decades this is not surprising. However, the most depressing aspect was that the loudest audience applause was for the most extreme views on both sides of the argument. Something very ugly has been unleashed and I wonder if we have politicians with the personality, will and ability to do anything about it.
Sylvia Roberts
Saintfield, Co Down

• Tacitus foresaw our current political situation. We have a prime minister who is capax imperii nisi imperasset: capable of ruling if only she had not ruled; and a foreign secretary who is tam stultus quam nobilis: as stupid as he was well born.
David Butler
London

Presto and Zesto in Limboland is a homage to the Where the Wild Things Are author’s friendship with his collaborator Arthur Yorinks

An unpublished picture book by Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, has been found hidden deep in his archives, five years after his death – somewhat like a little boy lost in the jungle after being sent to his room with no supper.

The typewritten manuscript and illustrations, co-authored by Sendak’s longtime collaborator Arthur Yorinks, were discovered in Connecticut by Lynn Caponera, president of the Maurice Sendak Foundation. Caponera was his housekeeper, assistant and friend for many years.

London Palladium
Toad, Badger, Mole and Rat are joined by new female characters in a fast-moving musical which ranges in style from Gilbert and Sullivan to raucous rock

Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic has been adapted in all available media and interpreted as just about everything from a piece of snobbish nostalgia to a socialist parable. Now it has been turned into a family musical by Julian Fellowes (book), George Stiles (music) and Anthony Drewe (lyrics) who previously worked together on Mary Poppins and Half a Sixpence. But, while they do a perfectly decent job and the result is harmlessly pleasant, I feel such a familiar story cries out for a big, original idea.

Related: Julian Fellowes webchat – your questions answered on The Wind in the Willows, Downton Abbey, winning an Oscar – and Nando's

As Paddington stars in his first film, his creator talks about the bear’s enduring appeal

It’s been more than 50 years since a little bear from darkest Peru found himself homeless and alone on Paddington station wearing a tag saying “Please look after this bear. Thank you”, before being adopted by the Brown family. In that time Paddington Bear has acquired ursine national treasure status in the UK and is equally adored abroad: Michael Bond’s 26 Paddington books have sold more than 35m copies worldwide and have been translated into 40 languages. And this weekend sees the release of the first Paddington feature film, which stars Hugh Bonneville, Nicole Kidman, Sally Hawkins, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, with Ben Whishaw providing the voice of the bear. An accompanying Paddington “trail” around London features 50 small statues of the bear decorated by celebrities ranging from David Beckham and Benedict Cumberbatch to Boris Johnson. The statues will be auctioned for charity at the end of December.

“Paddington’s very real to me,” says Bond, when we meet in the study of the London home in Little Venice he shares with his wife of 33 years, Sue. It’s filled with mementos of the character for whom the 88-year-old author has spent more than half his life creating adventures. “I think it’s something bears have. So he comes around with me in spirit and I think an awful lot of stories start because you see a sign or you hear some conversation and you think ‘what if?’.”

Far from being the epitome of genteel propriety, her earliest fiction reveals an anarchic spirit with a disdain for authority to match any modern adolescent

Teenagers had not yet been invented in the late 1780s, when the young Jane Austen began her authorial career. But the people she chose to write about in her earliest known fiction display all the classic traits of modern adolescents on the loose: showing off, binge drinking, stealing, violence, hysteria. There are intense friendships, wild love affairs and, not infrequently, utter contempt for the older generation.

Austen’s Victorian biographers preferred to date her career from the appearance of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, when she was 35. They shaped the image of her as a cheerful, if pious and solitary, writer who penned her works quietly and covertly at home under the pseudonym “A Lady”.

Jamie O’Neill’s book was met with acclaim and shock on its release in 2001. Ireland may now have same-sex marriages, but the tale remains compelling

I was a young man, still in my twenties, when Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys was first published in 2001. I was working in a Dublin bookshop and there was a lot of talk about the book, but for all the wrong reasons. The papers had picked up on the news. Irish writer receives record advance for novel! It happens still. Articles about literature that turn out to be articles about money, giving false hope to young writers who end up thinking that it happens to everyone. Although it can, if you have the skill and good fortune to write a masterpiece.

I remember working on the front till one morning, around the time that the book was receiving rave reviews and topping the bestseller list, when a middle-aged man came in and circled the display in the centre of the shop with an unimpressed expression on his face.

Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, Nicola Barker spent a portion of her formative years in South Africa, returning to the UK at the age of 14. Published in 1993, her first collection of short stories, Love Your Enemies, was the winner of the David Higham prize for fiction, and joint winner of the Pen/Macmillan Silver Pen award. Since then, she has written 11 novels and another short story collection, and in 2003 she was named one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists. Her 2007 book Darkmans made the Man Booker shortlist, and she has made the longlist on two other occasions for her works Clear: A Transparent Novel and The Yips. Her new novel, H(a)ppy (William Heinemann), is out on 20 July.

If you’re having lunch with the Booker-shortlisted novelist, expect a wide-ranging discussion

If you were to go in search of a prime example of the genus “writer”, Colm Toíbín would have strong claims as exhibit A. There’s the face to begin with: meaty, heavy browed, quick-eyed, both grave and wickedly animated, the head and neck invariably rising, as today, out of a white shirt and a black coat. And then the voice, with the inflection of his native Co Wexford, low tones moving easily to lightness, erudite and conspiratorial. Seeing Toíbín advancing toward you across the restaurant is the equivalent of hearing a memorable opening line: “Call me Ishmael”, or – his own favourite this (from Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers) – “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.” You sense that Toíbín comes complete with stories.

In vague homage to his early writing career in Catalonia we are at the Marylebone outpost of the tapas chain Iberica (which actually has its roots in the northern Spanish province of Asturias, where owner Nacho Manzano developed his two-star Michelin soul food up in the mountains). Toíbín has been doing an interview with the BBC up the road about the sex life of Henry James and he’s had no breakfast – “I just lay in the hotel bed brooding as ever” – so he’s starving. Having established the provenance of the Asturian waitress, with whom he falls into fluent conversation about the Spanish distinction between talking “Christian” rather than “Catalan”, he offers a potted history of the weakness of the separatist movement. “Catalan is spoken also on the islands and in Valencia. But they hate Barcelona. Menorca went communist in the time of the civil war. Mallorca went fascist and those tendencies persist as though there was something in the blood or in the soil – while Ibiza just has fun and enjoys life…” As he recounts this history we pick some staple highlights from the menu: patatas bravas, padrón peppers, twice-cooked lamb, jamón ibérico from Manzano’s acorn-fed pigs, and settle back while the plates fill the table.

High on vodka and crack, Curtis Dawkins shot a stranger dead. Sentenced to life in prison, he went back to his first love – writing. He tells Chris McGreal about his controversial new book

The one story Curtis Dawkins is not permitted to write is his own. Of how he dressed up as a leprechaun, got out of his mind on crack and vodka and went out with a gun on to the streets of Kalamazoo, Michigan. By the time a police Swat team captured him, Dawkins had killed one man and taken another hostage.

Even before the trial, his lawyer told Dawkins he would be locked away until the day he died under Michigan’s unforgiving sentencing laws. When the 49-year-old former salesman was swallowed into the state’s sprawling prison complex 12 years ago, he might have abandoned himself to the obliteration of his future. Instead Dawkins found an escape in reviving the dream he abandoned years before in frustration.

The Irish writer’s debut book, about her family, her husband’s illness and the boon of sea-swimming, is being made into a film

Ruth Fitzmaurice is the author of I Found My Tribe, about life with her film-maker husband Simon, who has motor neurone disease, and their five children. It is a memoir that celebrates friendship and the curative power of swimming – in all seasons – in the Irish Sea.

How did you and Simon meet?
Simon gatecrashed a party with friends – posh boys from south Dublin. He was loud and brash and I thought: what an idiot. Obviously, I changed my mind later. Next time I saw him was at a bus stop in Dublin. I was working in radio. He took my phone number but didn’t call me. A couple of days later, walking to work, I turned my head and there he was standing beside me. We felt mortified. We realised we’d been walking to work the same way for months. It was lovely. It felt mapped, meant to be.

The novelist on the dangers of people, email and the folly of taking advice advice from writers

By 9.20 I am back at the house, boiling the kettle and starting to slip down into thinking properly. During a novel, this moment doesn’t exist. The novel insists itself through every single thought and out-manoeuvres the need for almost any kind of human interaction. There are moments in both my books which are as real to me as my own life. But I’m not working on one today so the morning is dangerous. Hopefully no one will phone. People are the worst distraction, or an interesting email arriving out of the blue. I make a cup of tea. I get upstairs to my desk as quickly as I can, ignoring the mess.

I put the computer on. I won’t look at the news. Just a quick check of the emails then. Shit it. Loads. All wanting fiddly things. The name on my passport? Eimear McBride. Which train do I want to Stansted? The 14.20 would be great, thank you. Are you around this week for an interview with our local paper but they’re not sure when exactly? Yes, probably. Actually they can’t do it this week, can they get back to you? Yes. We’ve had a think about it and decided it’s not convenient to do an event with you at our bookshop but see you some other time, yeah? Yeah.

Colson Whitehead was six months into writing a novel about the digital economy when he was seized by the ghost of an old idea. The 47-year-old, who was a reviewer for the Village Voice in his 20s and had since published five novels and two non-fiction books, was in, as he puts it, the perennially gloomy mood that is his baseline when writing. “I usually have two or three ideas floating around,” he says. “When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.” Reluctantly, he put aside the nascent novel, on the basis that a satire about digital media was something “a 27-year-old hipster would be better equipped to deal with”, and turned to the other idea.

Related: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive

The novelist on writing about sex, her turbulent home life and why short stories are particularly hard to craft

The Booker-shortlisted author is known for her sharp focus on wild landscapes and the natural world, winning fans with The Electric Michelangelo and The Wolf Border. But her latest collection of short stories, Madame Zero, is full of characters coping with altered states and fresh challenges.

Do the troubled identities in this book indicate changes in your own life?
There are people who believe you are the same person once you have had a baby, but that’s rubbish. I’ve had a turbulent two years because, as well as giving birth, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. So I had a double whack to deal with, exacerbated probably by being a single parent since separating from my daughter’s father. Having said that, I actually don’t know which of the stories I wrote before I had her and which after. She is still only two, so I have to find moments to work and it is still quite intense.

Matt Haig and I meet in a flat in London, the morning after the terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena. Typically, he has already spent several hours battling racists and trolls on Twitter (he has a very large following), but he doesn’t seem stressed. “I’m actually quite relaxed; I like this period just before I get really neurotic [about the launch of a new book],” he laughs. As for social media: “I tweet more when I’m writing more ... I’ve got quite a distracted brain anyway.”

Haig is probably best known for his 2015 book Reasons to Stay Alive (it was in the top 10 bestseller lists for nearly a year) – a warm and moving memoir-cum-self-help book about his first descent into depression, aged 24, and his subsequent efforts to climb out of it. Haig is also the author of seven novels for adults, seven books for children and various business books, but his latest is a genre-defying novel called How to Stop Time. Its hero is Tom Hazard, an unremarkable history teacher at a London comprehensive, who lives with a secret: he has a rare condition that makes him age very slowly; he may not look it, but Tom is more than 400 years old. This is a book full of fantastical adventures, from Elizabethan England to the south seas, but it is also intensely sad. Tom travels the world and witnesses history, but is doomed to watch societies continually repeat their mistakes. He can hang out with Shakespeare and meet Captain Cook, but the one thing he mustn’t do is fall in love. Like the alien narrator in Haig’s laugh-out-loud funny The Humans, or the family of vampires at the centre of his YA novel The Radleys, Tom is an outsider who is physically superior to mortals, but he would sacrifice it all for a life of human vulnerability and pain. Haig writes exquisitely from the perspective of the heart-sore outsider, but at their most moving his novels reveal the unbearable beauty of ordinary life.

To mark 200 years since Jane Austen’s death, prolific screenwriter and Bafta fellow Andrew Davies discusses his five steps for adapting Austen’s novels for the screen. Davies who is known for his award-winning 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice illustrates each point with clips and references from each of his Austen TV classics

Two hundred years after her death, readers are still enchanted by her novels. Adam Frost, Jim Kynvin and Amy Watt do the maths on her enduring appeal

Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud and Acast. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

This week we’re talking science and culture, and how to bridge the divide between the two, with Richard Dawkins and Carlo Rovelli.

The activist and author speaks to Gary Younge about her book No is Not Enough, and the importance of finding a way to push back against the shock politics of the Trump administration

Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud and Acast. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter

After tackling the social impact of branding and corporate dominance in No Logo, then the use of crises to further political agendas in The Shock Doctrine, and the problem of political apathy in the face of climate change in This Changes Everything, activist and author Naomi Klein is back with a book that unites all her previous targets: No Is Not Enough.

Tom Gauld’s take on what might happen next, after the artist Phil Collins arranged for the transportation of a statue of Engels from Ukraine to Manchester

A visual history of the writer Sylvia Plath is to go on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. It includes photographs of her throughout her life, rarely seen artwork including self-portraits and letters, and personal objects, including her childhood ponytail, preserved by her mother. Sylvia Plath: One Life can be seen until 20 May 2018

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

Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things, quickly established her as a star international author, winning the 1997 Booker prize and selling more than 8m copies.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Subscribe and review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast

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

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

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.

The Turkish novelist warns against complacency and self-consciousness and urges western thinkers to speak out

It is an unhappy country that hates its public intellectuals. Turkey, my motherland, is one such place. Increasingly today, intellectuals are demonised in pro-government media, trolled on social media, accused of being “traitors” or “collaborating with western powers”, put on trial, imprisoned or exiled. But one thing they are not is ignored. Turkey, just like Russia, has a long and depressing tradition of taking its intellectuals seriously and making them suffer for daring to think differently.

Here in the UK things are very different. Freedom of speech prevails, democracy is strong. Novelists are not sued for tackling controversial issues, academics are not expelled in their thousands, journalists are not put in jail en masse. Compared with their Turkish, Russian, Venezuelan, Pakistani or Chinese counterparts, British intellectuals have so much freedom. One would expect them to be aware of this privilege, and speak up not only for themselves but also for those who can’t. So why don’t we have more public intellectuals in this country? The answer lies in the words of a British academic who once told me: “Well, we think it’s a bit arrogant to call yourself intellectual. And to do that publicly is twice as arrogant.”

My own experience of this unfathomable reach of consciousness drew me to explore uncharted territory in my novel The Half Life of Joshua

When I woke up, I couldn’t remember what year it was and I didn’t know why a doctor was standing over me, speaking Spanish. When I quizzed him, he told me it was 5 March 1992 and that I was in Ecuador. I couldn’t remember anything that happened in 1992, least of all going to Ecuador.

Apparently, I had been in a bus crash; there had been a collision with a lorry. It was news to me. In the black hole of my mind I knew only one thing: that wherever I was, I had been there with my girlfriend Stella, and that she had died in this accident of which I had no memory. A moment later, the doctor confirmed what I already seemed to know; Stella had indeed died in the crash. But how could I have known that, when I couldn’t remember anything else? How did this information reach my subconscious?

Sarah Waters, Edmund White, Jeanette Winterson, Jackie Kay – 50 years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, writers recall the books that first spoke to them of their lives and longings

Surpassing the Love of Men by Lillian Faderman (1981)
It was 1987, and I was in my final year at the University of Kent. My housemate and I had been lovers for months, but, still too timid to come out, we were tiptoeing across the landing to each other’s bedroom at night, tiptoeing back again in the morning. The secrecy was not without its thrills; even more exciting, however, was the sense I had of being on the brink of a new, less shadowy identity, a new way of being in the world. I saw a reference to a book called Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, by Lillian Faderman: I still remember the flustered way I asked for it, upstairs at the Albion Bookshop, Canterbury. It was the first time my private passions had resulted in some sort of public act.

Paul Robeson possessed one of the most beautiful voices of the 20th century. He was an acclaimed stage actor. He could sing in more than 20 different languages; he held a law degree; he won prizes for oratory. He was widely acknowledged as the greatest American footballer of his generation. But he was also a political activist, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, exerted an influence comparable to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in a later era.

The son of an escaped slave, Robeson built his career despite the segregation of the Jim Crow laws – basically, an American apartheid system that controlled every aspect of African American life. He came to London with his wife Eslanda – known as Essie – partly to escape the crushing racism of his homeland. Yet later in life he always insisted that he became a radical as much because of his experiences in Britain as in America. In particular, he developed a deep bond with the labour movement – particularly with the miners of Wales. That was why, in 2016, I travelled from my home in Australia to visit the landscape that shaped Robeson’s politics.

Fake news, alternative facts – US politics continually outstrips even the most outlandish imaginations. Thriller writers need a radical rethink

Fifty six years ago, a young Philip Roth despaired at the apparent inability of his chosen trade to compete with the world around him. “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality,” the novelist declared in his essay Writing American Fiction. “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

Roth wrote those words in 1961, when he could look out on the America of John Kennedy, J Edgar Hoover and Malcolm X, not long before the Cuban missile crisis would see the world teeter on the edge of Armageddon. You can see why he felt those engaged in the pretences of fiction had to struggle to keep up when “the actuality” was generating characters of such vivid intensity and events of high drama.

Strangers remove food from her shopping trolley, humiliate her in the gym and refuse to sit next to her on planes. How did size get to be such a big deal?

To tell you the story of my body, do I tell you how much I weighed at my heaviest? Do I tell you that number, the shameful truth of it always strangling me? At my heaviest, I weighed 577lb, or over 41st, at 6ft 3in. That is a staggering number, but at one point, that was the truth of my body.

I do not weigh 577lb now. I am still very fat, but I weigh about 150 pounds less than that. With every new diet attempt, I shave off a few pounds. This is all relative. I am not small. I never will be. For one, I am tall. I have presence, I am told. I take up space. I intimidate. I want to go unnoticed. I want to disappear until I gain control of my body.

Fifty years ago a poster of Bergman’s film Summer with Monika inspired McGough to write a sequence of love poems, now illustrated by Chris Riddell

Dear Monika,

I know it’s unlikely, but did you hear that Summer with Monika has recently been republished? If I had an address I would send you a copy, as I’m sure you would love the new illustrations. Can it really be more than 50 years since I last saw you?

From academics to school sweethearts, superfans raise a broom to the boy wizard

When I was eight, I got my first pair of glasses. Far from being teased at school, the only hassle I got was endless requests to try on my new specs. My father looked at me with suspicion. Had I faked the blindness, he asked, just so I could look like Harry Potter?

With my cropped hair and glasses, I did look like a tiny girl Harry. And while the similarity was not deliberate, I did nothing to avoid it, either. The Potter books were the great pop cultural event of my generation (I was born in 1991). In between Game Boys and Pokémon, kids began reading again. My school librarian, both confused by and exasperated with Pottermania, dealt with fights over the school’s few tatty copies by imposing a new rule: Potter books could be borrowed for only three days, instead of the week every other title was allowed.

Nigerian American writer Teju Cole also takes vivid photographs which, in his latest book, Blind Spot, he matches with passages of allusive prose. Here he talks about travel, memory, and the day he lost his sight

In April, 2011, Teju Cole woke up in his room in a writer’s colony in upstate New York to find that he could not see clearly. He was taken to the small town of Hudson nearby, where an ophthalmologist advised him to see a specialist in Manhattan. Walking to the train station, Cole became aware that his sight was deteriorating dramatically.

“Darkness encroached by degrees,” he later wrote, “and, in the afternoon sun, I could hardly see out of my right eye, and not at all out of the left. I had become almost totally blind.” He stumbled onwards somehow making it back to Manhattan that evening. A few days later, he was diagnosed with papillophlebitis, a temporary and sometimes recurring condition caused by blood vessels bursting behind the retina. It is more commonly known as big blind spot syndrome.

US writer Joshua Ferris, 42, is the author of three novels including Then We Came to the End (2007) and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (2014), which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. His new book is a collection of short stories, The Dinner Party.

Many of the stories have been published separately over the past 20 years. What was it like reading them back?
I’m a perfectionist, so none of these stories were going to escape scrutiny. I was never guaranteed to pick up 11 stories and think they were all perfect. But they are certainly representative of the person I was back then and the writer I was. And so in a way it’s not just that the stories mean something to me, it’s a record of my life.

The cult Irish writer is back with a prize-winning novel, Solar Bones, after a decade in the doldrums

“I couldn’t give my work away, to be honest with you. No one wanted to know.” Now in his 50s, Irish writer Mike McCormack spent a decade in the doldrums before the triumph of Solar Bones, a single- sentence novel in which the ghost of a Mayo engineer called Marcus Conway looks back on his life and death. Now out in the UK, it was originally published last spring by the tiny Irish press Tramp; hailed in the Guardian as a book for “anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes”, it went on to win the Goldsmiths prize for innovative fiction. As judge Blake Morrison pointed out, “its subject may be an ordinary working life, but it is itself an extraordinary work”: taking in faith and family, politics and art, sex, death and cosmic anxiety – as McCormack says now, “life, the universe and the whole damn thing”. What marks it out is the continuous prose, surging on through memories and digressions. “A ghost would have no business with a full stop,” he points out matter-of-factly. “It might fatally falter and dissipate.”

Related: Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Ben Brooks: is experimental fiction making a comeback? | Books feature

The children’s author and illustrator on parks and play areas, the allure of Alfie, and undignified moments on tour

When my children were young it was always a struggle to find enough time at the drawing board. I constantly had my eye on the clock. But now I have the great luxury of going into my workroom after doing my stretches and having a leisurely breakfast, and working until I am tired, which is usually late lunchtime.

The window of my workroom looks out over a communal garden, with a big west London sky. Sometimes I can see flights of ducks commuting in from Barnes reservoir in search of richer pickings in Green Park. Good natural light is always the best to work by. At one time, I used to listen to music while I worked – nothing too demanding, 1930s jazz mostly. But now it has to be silence.

From Shakespeare to Woolf, Turner to Gormley, Philip Hoare explores the eternal allure of the ocean

‘The sea has many voices / Many gods and many voices,” TS Eliot wrote. “We cannot think of a time that is oceanless.” “In civilisations without boats,” Michel Foucault observed, “dreams dry up.” It is, plainly, a fluid state, a place of transition and transmutation; the place from which we all came.

In the womb we swim in salty water, sprouting residual fins and tails and rudimentary gills, turning in our little oceans, queer beasts that might yet become whales or fish or humans. We first sense the world through the fluid of our mother’s belly; we hear through the sea inside her. We speak of bodies of water, Herman Melville wrote of “the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin”.

Lack of copyright has filled a nation of very keen readers with multiple versions of foreign books – doing artistic as well as financial damage to writers

If JD Salinger could see what was on the shelves in Iranian bookshops, he would turn in his grave. The Inverted Forest, a 1947 novella that he refused to republish in the US for more than half a century, is widely available in Farsi in most Iranian bookshops, for just 90,000 rials, or £2.20. (English-reading Salinger diehards hunting on AbeBooks only have the option of a $500 secondhand copy of the Cosmopolitan issue where it originally appeared).

The Inverted Forest’s publication in Farsi is just one example of Iran’s messy, complicated, yet fascinating translation scene, which has long been undermined by the country’s failure to join the Berne convention on copyright. Iranian authors who publish in their home country are offered some protection under national law, but the work of writers who publish outside Iran is completely unprotected. According to the Tehran Times, one Iranian translator has secured the copyright to produce a version in Farsi of Paula Hawkins’s 2017 novel, Into the Water. But at least five others are already working on competing translations.

I have long believed in the necessity for radical housing reform, and the events of recent weeks have only proved its fundamental urgency. After Labour’s increased vote on a clear social-democratic platform, followed by the disaster at Grenfell Tower, the impossible seems not only possible, but essential to prioritise. The way we build, allocate, finance and perceive housing in this country has to be transformed utterly.

I knew from experience, having grown up on a peripheral postwar estate, that treating council housing as a distinct, nominally “separate but equal” entity from private housing reinforces social stigma and the sense that you’ve been sent to live out of sight of those with power. Now we know that housing inequality kills.

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

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 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.”

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?

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.

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.”

In 1938, the year my mother left Germany for good and never saw her parents again, Virginia Woolf published a book entitled Three Guineas. It was about how women could prevent war.

Virginia Woolf's name is not normally associated with great affairs of state, of course. Quite the reverse. She regarded them with a fastidious disgust, as a vulgar distraction from the true business of life: attendance to the finer nuances of one's own emotional state. Along with the other members of the Bloomsbury group - that influential and endlessly chronicled little band of British aesthetes of which she was a moving spirit - she was dedicated to the proposition that beings as sensitive as they to the music of life ought not to be bound by gross social conventions, and that it was their duty (as well as their pleasure) to act solely upon the promptings of the sympathetic vibrations of their souls.

The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line

Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals. Even tens of thousands of years ago, our stone age ancestors were already responsible for a series of ecological disasters. When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet’s ecosystem. It was not the last.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of Homo sapiens. In scene two, humans appear, evidenced by a fossilised bone, a spear point, or perhaps a campfire. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre-stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, have gone. Altogether, sapiens drove to extinction about 50% of all the large terrestrial mammals of the planet before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

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.

Murderous, moody, crazy, depressed, nervous, exhausted, shouty, weepy – even before I get to the word "woman", you know it isn't a man I am talking about, because certain words have stuck to women like wasps in jam. My next word, "hormonal", applies as much to testosterone-spiked banksters and irrational males with machine guns as it does to menstruating or menopausal women, but it's one of those words that has become gendered for social, not scientific, reasons. A mix of confusion and camp comedy, "hormonal" is how we explain and explain away a woman's experience of the changing biochemistry of her body. A woman talks to her GP like a sinner at confession: "It must be my hormones" covers everything from not wanting to sleep with your husband, to wanting to kill him. Meanwhile your waistline expands and your hair falls out. The prescription is likely to be the same: antidepressants or HRT.

Over the last few years I have been trying to find a medical model responsive to the fact that our bodies are not machines made of faulty parts but a process in constant movement and change. And I have been looking for medical practitioners able to discuss the mind-body balance as a synergy, not a confusing, frightening war.

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

When Marilyn Edwards, who has died aged 71, took up a job at the Publishers Association in 1965, she found herself at the focal point of a book trade still retaining something of its character as a cottage industry – dozens of independent publishers, each with its own characteristics, serving bookshops up and down the country. It was full of appeal to her enthusiastic and gregarious temperament.

Marilyn was born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, eldest daughter of Gordon Edwards, a chest physician, and his wife, Helen (nee Garner). After schooling in Leeds, she went to secretarial college in Bradford. Her first job was as live-in secretary to Chad Varah, the founder of the Samaritans, after which she moved to the Publishers Association.

Highlights on the August schedule for the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater include World War II films that commemorate the U.S. Army Air Force’s bombardier training program and the 75th anniversaries of the Siege of Malta and the Battle of Mount Austen in Guadalcanal. Blues songwriter, singer, guitarist and Virginia native Eli Cook will perform live in concert on August 18.

Click here for more information.

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

The Library of Congress  will host the concluding day of the groundbreaking “Asian American Literature Festival” on Saturday, July 29.

Click here for more information.

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

On July 25, the Library of Congress will host a daylong symposium featuring a cadre of experts to explore the value of using digital collections and their impact on the public.

Click here for more information.

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

The roots of skiffle as a musical genre and its influence on popular music will be discussed in a book talk by singer and guitarist Billy Bragg at 7 p.m., Friday, July 21, at the Library of Congress.

Click here for more information.

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

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).

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

“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.

Click here to register.

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

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. 

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

All Events Are Free and Open to the Public

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

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.

Click here for more information.

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

The Library of Congress today announced it has put online the first installment of a major oral history project documenting the diverse culture of contemporary workers around the United States. The Occupational Folklife Project, a multi-year initiative of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, launches today online with a collection of interviews from the Port of Houston.

Click here for more information.

In 1926, America celebrated the 150th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. To mark the occasion, citizens of Poland – more than 5.5 million of them – signed a unique birthday card, The Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship. Now, all 111 volumes containing more than 30,000 pages – many beautifully illustrated or accompanied by photographs – are digitized and accessible on the Library of Congress website.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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. 

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

Click here for more information.

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.

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.