Mia Levitin

Blow your mind

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The UK seems on the brink of a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ – but, stripped of shamanic ritual and sanitised for medicinal purposes, will psilocybin retain its power?

Violence in the Valley

12 August 2023 9:00 am

When a man with a machete infiltrates a local synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the peace of one the ‘greenest, quietest, safest’ places in America is shattered

The inner world of others

15 July 2023 9:00 am

As ever in her short stories, Hadley uses the smallest details – of dress, food and decor – to masterfully convey class, character and the inner world of others

A sister’s quest for justice

11 March 2023 9:00 am

Ten women, on average, are killed there every day – and Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation of her sister’s murder is met with the usual ‘silence of impunity’

How the Muppets went to Moscow as ambassadors for democracy

4 February 2023 9:00 am

In 1993, Natasha Lance Rogoff was tasked with introducing the American puppets to Russia in the hope of cultivating peace, love and understanding

Displacement and disturbance: Seven Empty Houses, by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed

5 November 2022 9:00 am

Thrice nominated for the International Booker prize, the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a wave of Latin American…

Isolating with the ex: Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Elizabeth Strout’s fourth book about Lucy Barton comes on the heels of Oh William!, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.…

A post-racial world: The Last White Man, by Mohsin Hamid, reviewed

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…

Life’s great dilemma: Either/Or, by Elif Batuman, reviewed

28 May 2022 9:00 am

In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif…

Only time will tell if there’ll be a Great Pandemic Novel

9 October 2021 9:00 am

We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…

Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed

5 September 2020 9:00 am

Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…

The dark underbelly of New Orleans revealed by Hurricane Katrina

1 August 2020 9:00 am

Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book…

Too plain or too pretty — are we still prejudiced against professional women?

7 March 2020 9:00 am

In Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders, the social historian Jane Robinson — whose previous books include histories of suffragettes and bluestockings…

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales are among the most harrowing in all literature

18 January 2020 9:00 am

‘I consist of the shards into which the Republic of Kolyma shattered me,’ Varlam Shalamov once told a fellow gulag…

Deborah Levy

A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

24 August 2019 9:00 am

Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same…

Erotic longings that left me cold

10 August 2019 9:00 am

The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less…

A very tangled web: Liar, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, reviewed

4 May 2019 9:00 am

The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ – see above left  (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of…