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Lionel Shriver

Top 10 Most Disturbing Novels

This list will introduce you to the dark side of novels - the disturbing, macabre, and downright sick.^This list will introduce you to the darker side of novels.^Not everyone has the stomach for disturbing literature, but...

Cultural Life: Lionel Shriver, Author

Books I've been reading Richard Yates's Collected Stories. Lost Boys by James Miller is a post-11 September novel. I'm not sure it quite works but it reads very creative. I found Netherland by Joseph O'Neill mystifying. I...

Small Talk: Tim Brabants on seagull-related injuries and posh chocolate

Great Britain's Tim Brabants: likes a rare steak, organic chocolate and Scarlett Johansson. [Small Talk leaves a message, promising to phone back in a few hours. [Small Talk leaves a message, promising to phone back in a few...

Lionel Shriver: Give me a randy politician any time - as long as he cuts inflation

Last weekend in New York, my husband coyly announced that a big story had just broken that would destroy former presidential hopeful John Edwards's career. At 11.30pm, John Edwards gave a one-off interview on ABC's Nightline...

Hosseini scores book club award hat-trick

'Gratifying to me beyond words' ... Khaled Hosseini. Photograph: Getty Khaled Hosseini is continuing his run as the author of choice for reading groups, with his Afghanistan-set novel The Kite Runner voted book of the year for...

Game for a laugh

We Need To Talk About Kevin Keegan: a Bumper Book of Football WritingGiles Smith Penguin, 432pp, £7.99There's only one bad joke in Giles Smith's latest collection of his columns about football as seen from his armchair, and...

From pitch to page: Writing and sport

It's 11 December 1821: a brisk and sunny winter's day. Around the open ring near Hungerford "the crowd was very great... with streamers flying and music playing, and the country people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in...

Even writers get reader's block

Alain de Botton, writer Have you ever experienced reader's block? I have experienced reader's block or a kind of reading fatigue many times. Why do people think that reading a book means reading a fucking novel? Like lots of...

Getting giddy over Obama

He is the Fab One, the new Diana, a cross between Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, and when he comes to town we want to see his specialness for ourselvesWhen was the last time a visiting dignitary caused such excitement? When...

An election without dramatic tension

Best sugary excerpt of the week via Lionel Shriver in the Guardian: America's Democratic Party is experiencing a crisis of narrative. It has literally lost the plot. Having successfully enflamed the public's fictional...

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