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Martha Woodroof talks to first novelists including Chad Harbach ( The Art Of Fielding ) about how it feels to gut out the unlikely path that takes a book from idea to publication....

The Nigerian Nobel laureate says the abduction of more than 250 girls by extremist group Boko Haram is a defining moment for his country....

After the success of The Hundred Year Old Man Jonas Jonasson has wisely spun his second epic yarn, about a young South African called Nombeko, from the same tangly stuff Having had a massive international hit with The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared , Jonas Jonasson has wisely spun his second epic yarn from the same tangly stuff. At the heart of his success is...

The British Library's Romantics and Victorians manuscripts can now be viewed online. Lucasta Miller has already experienced the transgressive frisson of reading Emily's diary entries What difference does it make to see the original manuscript of a literary text rather than just read the printed version? As someone who once nearly sullied a priceless Charlotte Brontë manuscript in an...

Lambert believes a life is poorly served by conventional storytelling and his poetic, tender and funny novella provides a fine alternative It's a striking conceit: Lambert 's latest book offers a life in 24 themed chapters (called things like "Fear or the Famished Wall" and "Money or Brown Sauce Sandwiches"), each of 10 paragraphs, each paragraph bearing 120 words, although I counted...

Graves's superbly sardonic memoir should be essential reading for the centenary of the first world war Robert Graves 's superbly sardonic account of his childhood, schooling, the great war and his first marriage was written in just four months in 1929, when he was 33. It was his attempt at "a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that". By then he had separated...

What the critics thought of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Ned Beauman's Glow and Lynn Barber's A Curious Career Has there been a rightwing backlash against Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century ? Mervyn King , former governor of the Bank of England, aired a certain amount of scepticism in a detailed review in the Daily Telegraph : "The claims made for Piketty's...

Jonathan Safran Foer has teamed up with the Mexican food chain to bring original stories to its cups and bags but is literary devotion compatible with digestion? It's not often that people complain about not having enough to read. In 2010, Google calculated that there were 130,000,000 books in the world. This excludes Kindles, Kindle Singles, the internet, emails, ad copy, tattoos, menus, street signs...

Can a book change Wall Street? Michael Lewis's bestselling expose of high-frequency trading has caused a 'shitstorm'. What will happen next? And will the real problems be solved? The publication of Flash Boys , Michael Lewis's bestselling exposé of high frequency traders (HFTs) in the finance industry, could hardly have been better timed as a call for the Feds to step in. In the wake of...

I've made my peace with 'login' and am getting used to the ubiquitous 'like', but this bibliophile draws the line at 'flat signed' I've recently returned from New York and I seem, at last, to have resolved my linguistic irritability with Americans, who seem preternaturally compelled to use the word "like" in, like, every sentence. This linguistic tick is largely class, age and gender free....

The world's most colourful elephant has been opening people's minds to accepting difference and being themselves for a quarter of a century no wonder he has become a LGBT hero! Enjoy this beautiful Elmer gallery with captions specially written for us by David McKee. You can win a limited edition 25th Anniversary Elmer book with a picture drawn inside by David McKee by emailing childrens.books@theguardian.com...

The author and filmmaker chat about their latest projects, artistic inspirations and pick their favourite gay characters of page and screen Read the first chapter of David Levithan's new book Two Boys Kissing, plus we have three signed copies of Every Day ! If you want one, email childrens.books@theguardian.com with the reason why by 5pm on Friday 23 May 2014 : the best three reasons will win! David:...

The launch of the British Library's digital archive, Discovering Literature, sees 1,200 treasures from Romantic and Victorian writers published online . Take a look at highlights from Charlotte Brontë's earliest story to William Blake's notebook British Library publishes 'literary treasures' on new website Continue reading... ...

Big names are lining up to make films and books based on Highsmith's novels. John Dugdale finds out what it is that makes her work so adaptable With The Two Faces of January released on Friday, its director and screenwriter Hossein Amini joins a distinguished lineup of Patricia Highsmith adapters that includes Alfred Hitchcock ( Strangers on a Train ), René Clement ( Plein Soleil , AKA Purple...

Joanne Harris says the book industry is sexist. Why else are there categories for 'women writers' and no equivalents for writers who happen to be men? This is the year of reading women, people, remember ? We're all reading female writers and helping address the literary gender imbalance which is highlighted annually and disturbingly by VIDA . So everything's good, right? We're slowly rebalancing the...

The New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton explains how her Booker prize-winning novel The Luminaries is bathed in starlight but driven by the iron exigencies of plot Continue reading... ...

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is a daring stream-of-consciousness dedicated to her brother If you're looking for a reason to shop at your local independent bookshop rather than Amazon, here's one: Eimear McBride's first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing , might never have been published had her husband not got talking to...

The teenaged protagonist of Mona Simpson's novel, Casebook , spies on his parents and learns their secrets. The novel is a haunting cross between Harriet the Spy and The Catcher in the Rye. ...

With the rise of Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi culminating in this week's election, Pankaj Mishra asks if the world's largest democracy is entering its most sinister period since independence In A Suitable Boy , Vikram Seth writes with affection of a placid India's first general election in 1951, and the egalitarian spirit it momentarily bestowed on an electorate deeply riven by class and caste:...

After more than a month of voting, with 551 million people casting their ballot in one of 930,000 polling booths, India is poised to announce the results of the 2014 election. But how are the ups and downs of Indian campaigns portrayed in literature? Fill in your ballot paper here to test your knowledge of the novels shaped by Indian politics Continue reading... ...