books
-
The lists of “100 Authors to Read Before Graduation” and the “50 Classics All School Learners Should Read” I came across recently compel me to reply to those who compile them. There is something faintly absurd about a list called “The 100 Greatest Authors of All Time” that contains 20 or 30 writers from Britain…
-
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were written as science fiction in the 1940s. Today, they look increasingly like an early attempt to grapple with a problem we are only beginning to understand. The first law was simple enough: a robot may not injure a human being, or allow a human being to come to…
-
American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney has been named the winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for writers aged 39 and under – for her debut poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. Selected unanimously by this year’s judging panel, the collection traces the turbulent, often…
-
There is a particular kind of reading experience that is difficult to explain without sounding as though something improbable has occurred. You are reading as you always do, moving through sentences, following an argument, inhabiting a voice, and then something shifts. A line stops you. Not because it is especially beautiful, or clever, or even…
-
Today is World Book Day, a day to honour all the books that have made us laugh out loud, caused us to weep, or both, and have stayed in our memories for as long as we can remember. They may not be Nobel-esque literature, but they are the stories we go back to over and…
Jenn Writes 