culture

Using her brilliant wit as a tool for political activism, writer Lindy West has fought for social justice issues such as fat liberation and abortion rights. The author of Shrill – now an acclaimed TV series – and The Witches Are Coming speaks about her work. “There’s something intoxicating about being defiant, especially when you start to articulate all the ways in which your life has been made smaller and more difficult by systems of power.”

We are living on the doorstep of a new global dark age, in which superstition, conspiracy theories and distrust of scientific expertise have risen hand in hand with right-wing authoritarianism. The howls of climate crisis denialists fill the air,...

Ovid’s The Metamorphoses , that epic medley of transfiguration and rebirth, is one of the more controversial texts in the canon of European literature because so many of the myths it narrates involve some form of sexual violence. In Wake, Siren ,...

Incidental Inventions collects 52 short essays written by the much-loved and famously reclusive Italian novelist Elena Ferrante for The Guardian over a year. Ferrante describes the project as “a collaboration” – having agreed to write this column...

Jayne Tuttle’s memoir, Paris or Die , is a literary suitcase packed with sparkling friendships, startling discoveries, mad love, intriguing challenges and hot sex. Quite a bit of hot sex, in fact. There’s also mortal danger and helpless loss, both...

Within the pages of the first short-fiction collection from Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings , we are transported to a series of engrossing micro-worlds. Editor Rebecca Starford writes in the introduction that “stories offer a way to...

Emma Viskic blazed onto the literary crime fiction scene in 2015 with the private investigator Caleb Zelic. The character of Caleb has been deaf since a childhood bout of meningitis from which he never fully recovered. In many ways the author works...

The problems of the world have become so urgent that it seems we have finally moved beyond tired arguments about whether literature should be political or apolitical. Literature and activism now go hand in glove, as evidenced by literary responses...

From Hitler and Mussolini to the Trump administration, Jeff Sparrow’s Fascists Among Us outlines how and why contemporary fascism leads to acts of terror. Sparrow contextualises fascism by linking 1930s ideologies and the contemporary movement,...