Great Scott! Fitzgerald is enjoying a third act
New stage and film adaptations of The Great Gatsby attest to Scott Fitzgerald's enduring brilliance and his relevance to our boom and bust ageIn one of his most famous and personal obiter dicta, F Scott Fitzgerald once bitterly observed: "There are no ...
Jonathan Franzen is wrong: the digital age is making us smarter | Henry Porter
Jonathan Franzen says the e-reader is a threat to our very systems of justice and self-government. He couldn't be more wrongIn the last few years of his life, Charles Dickens went on the road for a punishing schedule of public readings, which certainly...
Alain de Botton’s atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one | John Gray
De Botton's atheist temple call does not need to be realised – our existing places of worship can be appreciated by allAlain de Botton has reinvigorated the conversation on religion. His new book moves away from the tedious debates of recent yea...
By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women | Lizz Winstead
The breast cancer charity's withdrawal of support for Planned Parenthood will sacrifice women's health to anti-choice dogmaI was sitting on my friend Maggie's couch last January, watching, slack-jawed, as the first order of business in the new Republic...
Better read than dead
Libraries across the UK face closure: why won't the government intervene? Shadow arts minister Dan Jarvis has a plan – even if Ed Vaizey doesn'tNational Libraries Day falls this Saturday, but this year the celebrations will be tinged with a deep sen...
Fiction in translation’s future?
Bright sparks amid gloom over the number of foreign-language books reaching English readersThat nasty rumour still won't go away: publishing houses in the UK are allergic to literary fiction in translation. A recent report by English PEN even warned th...
Watchmen prequels: A hard act to precede
The forthcoming back-story excursions don't have many illustrious precedents – but there are some seriously classy exceptionsNormally if a comics company announced a new series featuring writers like Brian Azzarello, J Michael Straczynski and Len Wei...
The self-epublishing bubble
In August 2011, Ewan Morrison published an article entitled Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?. Here, he tracks the self-epublishing euphoria of the last five months and argues that we are at the start of an epublishing bubbleThe internet is full...
Whitewashing Black History Month | Gary Younge
Arizona's suppression of Mexican American studies fits a pattern of making history serve an exclusionary nationalist mythologyNot long after I arrived in the US, in 2003, some white Americans would challenge me over my opposition to the Iraq war, refer...
Football’s inside-story tellers change perceptions and expose the soul | Rob Bagchi
Memorable and lucid insights into life as a footballer are rare – but here are some compelling fly-on-the-wall accountsFootball clubs are notoriously insular institutions which are difficult for the outsider to penetrate. Even in this age of obligato...
Ebook sales are being driven by downmarket genre fiction