Cut the Kerouacing, don’t Tolstoy on
Cut the Kerouacing and don't Tolstoy on too long: what slang meanings could your favourite writers lend their names to?Urban Dictionary – an online repository of contemporary slang – is a site I like to imagine Jeremy Paxman stumbling across late a...
‘I keep hearing about grown men weeping’
Hermione Hoby meets New York author RJ Palacio, whose book about a child with facial abnormalities is being hailed as a crossover classicI never thought a children's book could make me reconsider the schmaltziest day of the year but, while waiting in N...
The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer – review
What makes the women of an American town go on a sex strike? The rather unconvincing supernatural cause doesn't spoil an otherwise warm, worldly and witty novelRobby and Dory Lang are so popular with the students at their suburban New Jersey high schoo...
The voice of the Beats
It's more than half a century since Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl landed like a bombshell in the staid world of 1950s America. But what was the poet really like? Friends and colleagues remember himWhen Allen Ginsberg performed at the Six Gallery reading i...
Spider-Man the Musical: reviews roundup
Having been prevented from reviewing 'Broadway's biggest punchline' for months, the New York critics are fed up of waiting – and are lining up to kick it. Is it curtains for Spidey?Had you strained your ears in New York on Monday night you might just...
Can the Spider-Man musical turn disaster into triumph?
It's the talk of New York, a Broadway show with music by U2's Bono plagued by broken limbs and technical mishaps. With its official opening repeatedly delayed, critics plan to break with protocol and review the Spider-Man musical before press night. We...
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek – review
Michael Haneke's film The Piano Teacher has nothing on the visceral, disturbing novel from which it was adapted, writes Hermione HobyIn Michael Haneke's 2001 adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel, the role of the piano teacher is played, with a chilli...
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson: the next chapter
With her first novel, society's favourite it girl is reborn as a lit girlCall me a snob, but minor incursions of the postmodern are not what I expected from Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's first novel. But there, 16 pages in from its very sequinny exterior, we...
Paperback of the week: Small Memories by José Saramago
The late Nobel laureate is brought back to life, man and boy, in a charming patchwork of recollectionThere are two acts of revivification at work in this memoir. The first is of a curious and thoughtful schoolboy, brought to life as his older self reca...
Basharat Peer: Curfewed Night | One to watch
This 33-year-old's moving portrait of Kashmir is attracting huge critical acclaim, from Salman Rushdie among others
A Kashmiri journalist who studied in America and has worked as an editor at Foreign Affairs, 33-year-old Basharat Peer is the author of the eagerly awaited memoir Curfewed Night. Drawing on both...
Nicola Barker: ‘Darkmans would have been a catastrophic choice for the Booker’
The author on her new novel, why she is a boring letter writer and why she loves England more when she is not there
You're a great mimic as a writer and the new book involves you taking on the voices of a whole village. How do you manage...
