“In a world where the young are increasingly taught what to think rather than how to think, we badly need some subversion. And what could be more subversive than George Orwell’s windowpane prose, and ...

My debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), won the Saltire First Book Award. My second novel, Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem, about John Ruskin, will be publish...

Over the course of 24 novels and 87 years, Anita Brookner achieved many dislocations of selfhood and may have become...

A weekly guest-editor picks and introduces a personal anthology of twelve favourite short stories. Click to read A Personal Anthology, by Jonathan Gibbs, a Substack publication with thousands of subsc...

Former chancellor, now senior figure at OpenAI, says UK needs datacentres to maintain ‘sovereignty’ over AI tech

‘An Irish Atlantic Rainforest’ author and ecological activist sets out his radical vision.Early blackberries have appeared on the Beara Peninsula. Between these and a friendly border collie, our eight...

A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds...

My debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), won the Saltire First Book Award. My second novel, Each Leaf, Each Curve of Stem, about John Ruskin, will be publish...

"It's nice to see a work of art win", John Banville said on winning the Booker Prize. Michael G Cronin traces a line from that remark to the neoliberal creative economy, and from there to Banville's defence of Israel's brutality against Palestine.

Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.

Over the last decade, Maggie Nelson’s writing has become one of the guiding intellectual lights for artists of all disciplines. Her books on aesthetics, gender, violence, and, most recently, freedom,…

Her husband says the playwright and cultural and political commentator died after a brief illness.

It was all I knew: a radical, hippy, back‑to‑nature fantasy where children and adults were meant to be equals. But was it as idyllic as it seemed?

After a shattering disappointment, Tabitha must find new ways to get up—and stay up. In this sequel to Tabitha, Get Up, she faces a determined antagonist and a possible new love, or the return of what appeared to be lost love. She must save the world’s best bar, contend with diabolical twins and...

I love Barbara Pym, an underappreciated writer whose gentle comedies of manners and unrequited love among the genteel middle classes are charming and quietly poignant. She creates an idiosyncratic …

Last year, I discovered, read, and loved A Tiler’s Afternoon by Lars Gustafsson, and it went on to become one of my favourite books of the year. Unsurprisingly, I wanted to read more of his work, b…

For the past eight years, Category Is Books has been able to comfortably oper… Category Is Books needs your support for Help Category Is Books Get Shutters!

Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any...