Sally Rooney’s books have been pulled from sale in Britain because of her support for Palestine Action after she pledged to use royalties from her work to fund the proscribed terror group.

The post Sally Rooney’s Books Pulled From Shelves Over Palestine Action Support appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

First-year M.Sc student Najeeb Ahmed went missing from JNU on October 15, 2016. A decade on, an excerpt from Nilanjana Bhowmick’s Why The World Needs Angry Women follows his mother Fatima Nafees’s fight for answers.

The 1926 film of Goethe’s tragic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil remains a spectacular feat of German expressionism

The centenary of FW Murnau’s silent fantasy-melodrama from 1926 is the occasion to ponder this mysterious film, taken from Goethe’s 19th-century depiction of the alchemist and natural philosopher who sells his soul to the devil but, in a very high-minded climax of German romanticism, is redeemed by love. (Not love of God precisely, but love of a good woman; the word “Liebe” finally appears at the centre of Murnau’s radiating vision of concentric circles conjured by the heavens, which annul his debt to the Evil One.) It is therefore very different from Christopher Marlowe’s scarier and more unforgiving account of Doctor Faustus.

Murnau’s Faust is (obviously) concerned with and animated by evil, and there are echoes of his Nosferatu, made four years previously. In this film, Faust, having struck his bargain on a provisional 24-hour basis with Mephisto, finds that he is scared of a crucifix, like a vampire. It is also very much a film of Weimar Germany with its mad energy and streaks of garish satire and black comedy; the book-burning scene in which Faust immolates all his necromancy volumes, along with the Bible, is one which resonated with later events. (Perhaps it indirectly inspired Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, later to be filmed by István Szabó.)

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

Now is not the time for the church to be discouraged; instead we must continue the good work to which God has called us. The church in every era has always grown weaker—and stronger—for all kinds of reasons, but through it all people of faith have always flourished and will continue to do so.  ... Continue Reading

Article in Atlantic claims The Blue Fighter was artificially generated, days after it won Caine prize for African writers

The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated.

Kundizeza’s story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: “Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI.”

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© Photograph: pr image

© Photograph: pr image

© Photograph: pr image

Some medieval books can’t be read by anyone, and one of them has become almost a trademark of the genre: the Voynich manuscript, kept at Yale University and dated to the 15th century. It has inspired novels and theories of every kind. Specialists often place another volume right behind it on the list of enigmas, […]

Neera Chandhoke reads Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sahir Ludhianvi and Bimal Roy as political thinkers, finding in their poetry and cinema a view of freedom as a horizon that we must continuously fight to reimagine.

Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

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© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel set in an alternative Paris, Ramachandra Guha’s exploration of the complex relationship between Mahatma Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar, and much more ...

Eleven years ago, Brad Ryan took his grandmother, Joy, camping in the Smoky Mountains after hearing that she had never seen a mountain. That one trip to a national park turned into dozens, and "Grandma Joy's Road Trip" took them to every one. Brad and Joy joined Geoff Bennett to discuss their book and their travels with Road Scholar, a nonprofit that organizes educational trips around the world.

Give the techie in your life access to the inner workings of the companies and characters shaping Big Tech.

Hunger, caste, and colonial power intersect with devastating consequences in Jeyamohan’s powerful novel centred on a colonial building in Chennai.

Raghavan Srinivasan posits the Bhakti movement in Tamilakam as an early instance of resistance to power structures, yet his study leaves several important issues untouched or only briefly mentioned.

Irwin Allan Sealy travels in the US in search of a cluster of ancient Tamil yoginis, carved in stone and now scattered across museums, only to find them in unexpected people and places. 

Deep, comprehensive, and demanding, Mammals of India by A.J.T. Johnsingh and P.O. Nameer is a natural cousin of S.H. Prater’s The Book of Indian Animals.

How to sleep like Jesus is not a prescription for how many hours you need to sleep each night. It is about progressively transforming into someone who can entrust both their sleeping and their waking to God. If sleep doesn’t come, this perspective of trust allows you to pray openly and honestly to the Lord.... Continue Reading

A lot of the practices that go under the heading of meditation are things that essentially try to manipulate physiology, like postures and breathing techniques, to try to push away all the distractions, clear the mind, and get to a quiet headspace. Whereas the meditation commended in Scripture—in Psalm 1 and picked up by the... Continue Reading

Elon Musk has donated more than $365 million to support Republicans in the midterm elections. Musk's influence on the federal government is the focus of "Blockers," a new book by Michael Lewis. Lisa Desjardins sat down with Lewis to discuss Musk's time leading DOGE and the federal workers who found themselves in its crosshairs.

An invaluable selection of poet Adil Jussawalla’s private collection is live on the website of The Bombay Poetry Crawl.

Tourism may give one the impression of seeing an unexplored world, but novels help one imagine it. As such, reading novels is a good way of discovering another country.