Interesting Ideas

Philadelphia’s Speling Reform Asoshiashun wasn’t the only group to demand a simpler way of putting things in print

You may be familiar with the ghoti, the shiny animal with fins that lives in the water; perhaps you even have your own ghoti tank. Ghotis evolved long ago, but they didn’t get their name until the 19th century, when jokesters noted that, thanks to the weirdness of English spelling, the word “fish” might be written with a “gh”, as in “rough”, an “o”, as in “women”, and a “ti”, as in “lotion”.

The idea of the ghoti is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but there’s no evidence that he coined it. He was, however, a proponent of simplified spelling – an enterprise that, in some form or other, goes back centuries. From “through” to “though” and “trough”, whether you’re a child or learning English as a second language, getting the spelling right is a nightmare. Efforts to fix that might seem niche, but Shaw is one of many luminaries who have had a go. Charles Darwin, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt also took up a cause that has left its mark on American and British culture in unexpected ways.

In 2016, Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced, “We have developed a case of oil addiction in Saudi Arabia.” This was an understatement; the modern state was created solely by oil, its economy financed by oil. Prince Mohammed’s announcement came after oil prices dropped in 2014, resulting in a Saudi deficit of almost US$100 billion the […]

Paid, one-to-one caregiving for children is far from the major story at any point in US history, especially for working mothers. In the nineteenth century (and to our present) there were a staggering number of arrangements for care that allowed mothers to work and have children simultaneously. As historian Sonya Michel writes, “At the end […]

A social and personal history that refuses to gloss over the rage, envy and hurt that form part of every close bond

Falling out with a friend can feel oddly shameful. Romantic relationships are meant to have passionate highs and lows, but by the time you reach adulthood, you expect your friendships to have reached some kind of equilibrium. I have this image in my head of myself as an affectionate, devoted friend – but sometimes I examine my true feelings towards the women who are closest to me and feel shocked by my own pettiness. It is embarrassing to be a grownup but still capable of such intense flashes of rage, and envy. When my friendships become distant or strained, I wonder why I still struggle to do this basic thing.

Bad Friend represents a kind of love letter to female friendship, but doesn’t gloss over how difficult it can be. Tiffany Watt Smith is a historian, and this book is a deeply researched study of 20th-century women’s relationships, but the reason for writing it is intensely personal. In the prologue, she says that she fell out with her best friend, Sofia, in her early 30s, and has been battling with the feeling that she is incapable of close friendship ever since. In one passage, she describes hiding a sparkly “BFF” (best friends forever) T-shirt from her five-year-old daughter, because she felt so conflicted about having no BFF of her own. But the idea that underpins this book is that we expect too much of female friendship, and that leaves every woman feeling inadequate.

Stephen Witt’s entertaining study of the rise of chip company Nvidia portrays its leader, Jensen Huang, as a remarkable entrepreneur – sometimes energised by anger

This is the latest confirmation that the “great man” theory of history continues to thrive in Silicon Valley. As such, it joins a genre that includes Walter Isaacson’s twin tomes on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, Brad Stone’s book on Jeff Bezos, Michael Becraft’s on Bill Gates, Max Chafkin’s on Peter Thiel and Michael Lewis’s on Sam Bankman-Fried. Notable characteristics of the genre include a tendency towards founder worship, discreet hagiography and a Whiggish interpretation of the life under examination.

The great man under Witt’s microscope is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia, a chip design company that went from being a small but plucky purveyor of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computer gaming to its current position as the third most valuable company in the world.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

What books did your book club love talking about last year? See how they compare to the titles our subscribers say were their favorites for book group discussions in 2024.

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A journalist’s bracingly honest account of interviews with musicians from Brian May to Shaun Ryder

When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the “middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before”. Watching Queen’s posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she “felt something within myself ignite”. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: “I think I’m going to black out.”

Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman’s work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D’Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee.

While enjoying the May flowers, make sure you also take time for the beautiful May releases in bloom. In our anticipated reads for the month of Mother’s Day, we feature a memoir of a mother-daughter relationship and a story exploring the profound impact resulting from a mother’s choice of what to name her child. We also look at one touching novel about a middle-aged bookseller reflecting on his life in the face of illness, and another about the connection between a young man and an older widow. Three out of four of these titles are debuts, so prepare to discover some wonderful new authors. Follow upcoming coverage in our digital magazine, and join us in making these books part of a spring to remember.

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This comedy of manners set among Berlin’s cultural elite is a prescient interrogation of language, identity and power

On 7 March 2025 the New York Timespublished a list of words that the Trump administration was systematically culling from government documents and educational materials. This list, which includes the words “gender ideology”, “affirming care”, “confirmation bias”, “ethnicity”, “identity”, “immigrants”, “racism”, “prostitute”, “political”, “intersectional” and “privilege”, reads like a bingo card for Nell Zink’s astonishingly prescient new novel, Sister Europe, in which a large cast of racially, economically and gender-diverse characters convene over the course of a single evening to attend a literary awards ceremony in Berlin.

On its surface, Sister Europe is a comedy of manners set among Berlin’s exclusive and elusive cultural elite. The prose is searingly quick, revelatory and funny: Zink’s dialogue reads like our best plays. Entertaining banter could be this book’s largest trophy, were it not for the contents of the banter, which are so ambitious and ethically interested that they make it clear that Zink is one of our most important contemporary writers.

On reading [Masud’s] books, Demian discovered to his consternation a grating and persistent anti-Black racism. Was it excusable? He excused it, on the grounds that it would be hard for an anti-Black racist to do much damage in Norway, where anti-Muslim racism was a deadly threat (admittedly much of it intersectional, directed against Somalis). Was it patronising to suspend his ethical standards because the man was a genius, or Eurocentric not to suspend them, and which was worse?

He whispered hesitantly, speaking into the towel over her ear, “You want to change your life.”

“That was stupid,” she replied. “Life should change me. I don’t want to be destructive of a living thing, flattening it with myidentity.” She said the word slowly. As though identities were something ubiquitous, but distasteful, like dust mites, that might be dispensed with, given careful hygiene.

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

When HHhH by Laurent Binet came out in 2012, I was scared away by the impenetrable title. I still don’t like the title much because it gives no sense that this book is going to be so welcoming, playful and immersive. HHhH tells the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich – the high-ranking Nazi officer, “the butcher of Prague” – but it also describes Binet’s research on the subject, an obsession which verges on mania. The book makes a convincing case that Heydrich’s botched assassination was the single most significant event of the 20th century. (It also makes a convincing case that Binet is so deep into the subject matter that his opinion should not be entirely trusted.)

Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst has just won the Nero book of the year prize so it really does not need my recommendation. Nevertheless, I recommend it! It jolts you awake from the very first page, telling a true and uniquely weird love story about a British couple whose boat is sunk by whale-strike while they are sailing around the world. Elmhirst finds moments of transcendence even as Maurice and Maralyn are beginning to starve and decompose, physically and mentally, while adrift in a leaky dinghy in the middle of the Pacific.

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod is my favourite poetry anthology. The poems are presented in reverse chronological order so that the book starts with recent work from Anne Carson and Patricia Lockwood then steadily dives backwards through time: Eileen Myles to Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein before finally ending in 1842 with Aloysius Bertrand writing beautiful prose poems before the term even existed. Every time I come back to this book I find new gems.

Ten years on from his death and just before what would have been his 77th birthday, take a deep dive into the funny, fantasy works of one of the most loved British writers

With more than 75m copies of his books sold around the world, Terry Pratchett is one of the most loved British writers, best known for his comic fantasy novels set on a fictional planet, Discworld. Ten years on from the author’s death, and justbefore what would have been his 77th birthday, Pratchett’s biographer Marc Burrows has put together a guide to his hero’s work.

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People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

The strange stories of the agents who lived apparently normal lives in the west as part of Soviet espionage programmes make compelling reading

One muggy afternoon in June 2010, Don Heathfield and his wife, Ann, were relaxing over a bottle of champagne with their two sons, Tim and Alex, when they heard a loud knocking at the door. The family was celebrating Tim’s 20th birthday at their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after lunch in a restaurant. Tim’s mother went to answer the door, calling out as she did so that some of his friends must have arrived to wish him a happy birthday. Instead she found a group of men dressed in black waiting on the doorstep. Bellowing “FBI”, they barged their way into the house and handcuffed Ann and her husband, before marching them outside and driving them away.

Alex assumed that there had been a terrible mistake; his parents were much too boring to warrant such a dramatic arrest. But there was no mistake. His parents were not Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, prosperous Canadians living in the US, but Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, Russian spies who had assumed false identities before Alex and his brother were born. Together with their parents, the two boys were stripped of their Canadian citizenship and flown to Moscow. Alex was handed a Russian passport, identifying him with a name he could not even pronounce properly. “Typical high school identity crisis, right?” he remarks, with a wry smile but an undertone of understandable bitterness, while being interviewed by the author of this book, Shaun Walker, an international correspondent for the Guardian who was based in Moscow for more than 10 years.

Joan Didion’s Notes to John, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Exit Zero, and Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews. * Fiction 1. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty (Harper) 6 Rave • 1 Positive “Terrific … A […]

Only one storyline in The White Lotus Season Three has anything resembling a happy ending: childhood friends Laurie, Jacklyn, and Kate finally rekindle their lifelong love for each other after a week of backstabbing and gossip. The viewer is left with no doubt that the three will continue to talk shit about each other until death […]

As pollution levels hit record highs and fresh water becomes ‘the new oil’, is it time to radically reimagine our relationship to the natural world?

If you find it difficult to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying or dead river. This is easier. We know what this looks like. We know how it feels. A dying river is one who does not reach the sea. A dying river’s fish float belly-up in stagnant pools. Swans on the upper Thames near Windsor now wear brown tidemarks on their snowy chest feathers, showing where they have sailed through sewage. I recently saw a Southern Water riverbank sign badged with a bright blue logo that read “Water for Life”. The sign instructed passersby to “avoid contact with the water. If you’ve had contact with the water, please wash your hands before eating.” In parts of this septic isle, fresh water has become first undrinkable, then unswimmable, then untouchable.

How did it come to this – and where do we go from here? The crisis is one of imagination as well as of legislation. We have forgotten that our fate flows with that of rivers, and always has. Our relationship with fresh water has become intensely instrumentalised, privatised and monetised: river understood as resource, not life force. The duty of care for rivers, who extend such care to us, has been abrogated. Regulation has gone unenforced, monitoring is strategically underfunded. Rivers named after deities – the Shannon (Sinnan), the Dee (Deva) – now struggle under burdens of nitrates, forever chemicals and waste.

Ginny Hogan on why we love to see the beauty and disappointment of toxic female friendships on the page and the screen. | Lit Hub Criticism Today on the Lit Hub podcast, we’re celebrating Indie Bookstore Day! | Lit Hub Radio Gabrielle Bellot reads Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters and wonders if scientific innovation will […]

Korean retailers report strong sales for Light and Thread, featuring speeches, essays and poems by novelist

A book featuring Han Kang’s Nobel prize lecture sold 10,000 copies in its first day on sale online.

Light and Thread, which takes its title from Han’s December lecture, is her first book to be published in South Korea since she was announced as the winner of the Nobel prize in literature last October.

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movie

Most people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.

As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with its ghosts.

Are you overwhelmed by the sheer number of books out there? You’re not alone. With new titles released every week and countless “must-read” lists, it’s easy to feel swamped by choices.

At the same time, it can be hard to decide what to read next, partially because of the noise, and partially because you want to make sure you'll enjoy your next read.

This is where book recommendation websites can be a godsend. They act as friendly guides to help you discover new reads that match your tastes, especially if you’re an avid reader looking for trusted advice and community input. In this post, we’ll explore some of the best book recommendation sites available. 

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A gosling grows up; a campaign to save trees; the impact of partition; thorny dilemmas; wearing a hijab in Essex and more

Gozzle by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Sara Ogilvie, Macmillan, £12.99
When a bear finds a goose egg, rather than breakfast, it hatches sweet, tenacious Gozzle, who’s convinced goslings can do everything bears do. But what will happen when she learns to fly? A comically adorable picture book about family, growth and change.

Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah, illustrated by Melissa Castrillon, Magic Cat, £12.99
Zephaniah’s posthumously published picture book, featuring a dynamic repeated refrain and soaring, swirling illustrations, calls on young listeners to safeguard trees and the riches of the natural world.

A weekly behind-the-scenes dive into everything interesting, dynamic, strange, and wonderful happening in literary culture—featuring Lit Hub staff, columnists, and special guests! Hosted by Drew Broussard. April is, as it turns out, a great month for book lovers: the first big wave of pre-summer titles arrives, St. Jordi Day (and Shakespeare’s birth/death-day) is April 23rd, […]

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from an engrossing study of Chinese women to a fun, loveable novel

• This article was amended on 7 April 2025. In an earlier version, the author Kevin Barry’s surname was misspelled as “Berry”.

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. It can be difficult to be honest and take an earnest inventory when writing about oneself. As a person with enough food and body issues to fill a book (which I did), I found my body, as a topic, especially tough. I have read a […]

The actors are lending their supporting to the campaign by Wordsworth’s great great great great granddaughter to keep Rydal Mount in the Lake District open to the public

Actors Brian Cox, Miriam Margolyes and Tom Conti as well as the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce are among those calling for the home of William Wordsworth to be saved as a site of literary heritage.

The Romantic poet lived at Rydal Mount in the Lake District from 1813 to his death in 1850. The property has five acres of gardens which were designed by Wordsworth.

This week we at Lit Hub sought deep focus, wise Dad energy, and salt. We celebrated surprises and anniversaries. We looked spring in the face and said, do your worst. Speaking of the season. Drew Broussard is “reallllly digging” a 2023 Kali Malone album, Does Spring Hide Its Joy. He insists this record—an ambient, durational […]

Tomorrow, Saturday 4/26, is Independent Bookstore Day! And while every day can and should be Independent Bookstore Day (stop buying books from Amazon, stop linking to books on Amazon, stop posting the Amazon sales and the B&N sales on your social media), it’s nice that we have a dedicated holiday to celebrate all the great […]

One day, when I was a teen, I remember my parents bringing me a collection of Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults. I had been a fan of Dahl’s fiction as a child, particularly Matilda and James and the Giant Peach, so it must’ve seemed only natural. Dahl’s stories for children are impish and twisted, […]

Between April showers and sunshine, you’re sure to be craving some fresh reads. Here, we present a murky story of literary suspense, a novel of historical England, an African Gothic tale, and a book about a woman with an abiding interest in airplanes. Read them with your book club safely indoors while weathering spring storms, or take them to the park to enjoy amid the gradually warming breezes. And look out for upcoming coverage in our digital magazine!

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A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious

This is not a self-help book,” the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history”). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.

But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers” by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

Why do Professional Book Reviews Matter? In the age of star ratings and reader comments, you might wonder why professional book reviews are still important. The truth is that crowd-sourced opinions (like those on Goodreads or Amazon) can be useful but should be just one data point. Readers on these platforms often rate generously – 5-star ratings can be given out “like they’re giving away candy,” as one commenter put it. Popular opinion can also be volatile or “trendy”​, sometimes skewed by hype, author fandom, or even coordinated campaigns (both positive and negative). For example, Goodreads users posted 26 million reviews and 300 million ratings in one recent year​ – an overwhelming v... [More]