Patrick Gale in The Guardian:
Imagine a shattering portrayal of Pakistani life through a chain of interlocking novellas, and you’ll be somewhere close to understanding the breadth and impact of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s first novel. Reminiscent of Neel Mukherjee’s dazzling circular depiction of Indian inequalities, A State of Freedom, it’s a keenly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed short-story collection with which he made his debut in 2009, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders – also portraying overlapping worlds of Pakistani class and culture.
We begin in the squalor and bustle of a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, where the heartbreaking figure of a small child, abandoned to his fate and clutching a pair of plastic shoes, is scooped under the protection of a tea stall owner. He proceeds to raise the boy as his own son, having only daughters, but Yazid is also adopted by the stall’s garrulous regulars, who teach him both to read and to pay keen attention to the currents of class, wealth and power which flow past him every day.
Loved, popular, clever, Yazid grows into a bull of a teenager with keen entrepreneurial instincts; he soon makes the tea stall, and his shack behind it, the cool place for a gang of privileged schoolboys to hang out, smoke and play games.
More here.
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It is not clear how Carruthers and Graham imagined the public would respond. The tree was a beloved landmark, its silhouette an instantly recognizable symbol of England’s North East. As virtually every news 
If you live in the United States, chances are you’re familiar with the game rock-paper-scissors. You put out your hand in one of three gestures: clenching it in a fist (rock), holding it out flat (paper) or holding up two fingers in a “V” (scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock.
Over the weekend, the United States bombed Venezuela, and 
“I can’t believe you haven’t read this,” my husband said one day right before Thanksgiving. He was holding Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “
Our society faces a dramatic, but elusive, crisis.
And here we arrive at a whole knot of issues at the heart of both Aviv’s and my own earlier characterizations of Oliver’s story. Because Oliver could relate to the situation of those wretched patients both out of the residue of his mother’s malediction itself and the sheer extent of the drug induced extravagances and catatonias he’d thenceforth experienced as its direct result during his ensuing wild California days (when his slogan had been “Every dose an overdose”), and beyond that, the wider identification he’d come to feel more generally with what his California-era friend, the psychoanalyst Bob Rodman, termed “communities of the refused” (an identification which would subsequently extend to Parkinsonians, Touretters, amnesiacs, the Deaf, the catatonic, the colorblind, the faceblind, and other such marginalized communities, and for that matter ferns and cuttlefish and even certain inert chemical elements as well). That sense of identification came to ground a profound empathy which, on the one hand helped him to give voice to the otherwise voiceless by helping them to reclaim their own stories, their own narratives, in so doing allowing them to reemerge as the active agents of their own lives—a practice which, granted, occasionally overstepped its bounds into outright projection and, in the subsequent recounting, downright confabulation.
When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, and when they turned their attention back to him, they found the infant’s mouth full of golden sweetness. Cicero provides our first surviving record of the legend, which is repeated with variations over centuries, always as a portent of the sweet style the infant would ultimately possess.
“Heated Rivalry” has become a breakout hit. The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals. If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical.
In an unremarkable New York apartment, sometime in the not-too-distant future, a man tells his robot to come to bed. She is a “Stella,” an intelligent machine who looks and sounds like a woman. We soon learn that she is a “Cuddle Bunny,” a euphemistic term for the sex-robot setting she’s currently running. She is also set to “autodidactic” mode, which gives her a searching intellect and a nascent independence. Her name is Annie, and we will follow her on the journey to elevated consciousness in “Annie Bot,” Sierra Greer’s slyly profound debut novel.
If you want to lose weight, exercise doesn’t really matter.