Sean Penn, who just do stuff, has written a thesaurus masquerading as an unreadable debut novel

First Tom Hanks, now Sean Penn. Maybe Hollywood actors should focus on what they do best.

Nicholas Rixon

· Apr 15, 2018 · 07:00 am

Rereading Kurt Vonnegut, the writer who could depict the human condition with paper clips and aliens

One of the world’s foremost fiction writers about the things we struggle to understand, Vonnegut would have been 94 this November.

Nicholas Rixon

· Nov 15, 2017 · 01:30 pm

Happy birthday, Neil Gaiman: We made a starter kit for those who, unbelievably, haven’t read you yet

There’s more to the master of fantasy than ‘The Sandman’ (although you really shouldn’t miss that either).

Nicholas Rixon

· Nov 10, 2017 · 06:30 pm

Shirley Jackson’s novels are eerie literary fiction. She left the best for the last

Fifty-five years after it was published, ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ remains a must-read for those who think horror must be supernatural.

Nicholas Rixon

· Oct 29, 2017 · 05:30 pm

Before the Booker: George Saunders has captivated readers with a twist on realist fiction for years

Before his 2017 Man Booker Prize winning novel ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, Saunders created a name for himself with short stories like no other.

Nicholas Rixon

· Oct 19, 2017 · 08:30 am

Before Stieg Larsson and Keigo Higashino, it was Raymond Chandler who transformed detective fiction

‘Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.’

Nicholas Rixon

· Apr 29, 2017 · 08:30 am

The writer of the ‘greatest horror story of our time’ died and (almost) no one noticed

William Peter Blatty wrote ‘The Exorcist’, the book that became the movie that reinvented the genre.

Nicholas Rixon

· Mar 19, 2017 · 07:00 am

Sixty-five years later, we still don’t get ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and Holden Caulfield

JD Salinger’s first novel astonished editor and readers alike on being published in July 1951

Nicholas Rixon

· Jul 23, 2016 · 06:30 am