Less ambitious books: To the Lightbulb via The Magic Molehill
A twitter thread renaming books with less ambitious titles has been the party game of new year weekend. Why not ward off the back-to-work blues by joining in?As far as trivial pursuits go, Twitter beats any a common-or-garden board game these days – ...
Rereading: what are the returns?
What makes us return to books – is it the quality of the prose or the memories of our own lives that they evoke?Opening with Harold Bloom's incantation "Reread Shakespeare. Reread Shakespeare. I always reread Shakespeare", the novelist David Bowman g...
What’s your favourite simile, like?
The worst similes are sometimes just a hair's breadth away from the striking dislocation of the bestA late-night investigation into why a group of teenagers could be heard laughing like sozzled hyenas downstairs while the rest of us tried to get to sle...
Dickens at 200: review your favourite novel and win a clothbound edition
Which Dickens novel do you love the best? Write a review of your favourite, and be in with a chance to win one of Penguin Classics' six new clothbound editionsJohn Crace's Digested Bleak House marks the second leg in our Dickens bicentenary marathon, w...
Claire Armitstead: When is a novel not a novel? When it’s a novella
Julian Barnes won this year's Booker prize with a book that was just 150 pages long. What should we call it?One of the themes to emerge from this week's Booker Prize is the length at which a novel becomes a novel. Is Julian Barnes's award-winner The S...
Tips, links and suggestions
Tell us the books, authors and subjects you'd like to discussIn the last edition of Tips, Links and Suggestions, we asked for suggestions of publishing professionals you'd like us to invite to take part in a second series of live webchats in the wake o...
Books season: A week in
Our autumn reading promotion is well under way – but there are plenty more treats in store for bibliophilesWe're now into the second full week of our autumn books season so it's a good time to take stock. The Book Swap continues, with a lively twitte...
Charles Dickens at 200: how we’re celebrating
From an extract from Claire Tomalin's new autobiography to audiotours of Dickens's London, here's what's coming up over the next few daysThe 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth falls in February 2012 but we – along with half of the publishin...
Books Season’s greetings
The Guardian and Observer's six-week celebration of all things literary is under way. Here's a digest of what we've been up toHave you noticed anything different about us recently? Raise your eyes to the top of the page and you'll see a jazzy new logo ...
The world of book awards – a longlist | Claire Armitstead
We've all heard of the Man Booker and the Bad Sex prizes – but do you know your Impac from your Boardman Tasker?The announcement of the Booker shortlist this week signals the start of the new awards season. In a sense, though, we're halfway through i...
The Glamour of the Snow