15th January 2024
Literary references abound in the lyrics of Taylor Swift Taylor Swift, a global pop phenomenon, has a career nearing 20 years in the industry. She boasts 10 albums, spanning a multitude of genres, and while her songs may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it is impossible not to acknowledge her talent. Her music reflects ...
27th November 2023
The Glasgow Guardian gives a snap analysis of the winner of the Booker Prize, having attended the awards ceremony where it was announced. Paul Lynch, winner of The Booker Prize 2023, told the awards ceremony that he risked “dooming his career” by writing Prophet Song. His dystopian novel follows an ordinary, middle-class family, The Stacks, ...
24th November 2023
A powerful memoir that risks becoming gospel. i want to die but i want to eat tteokbokki is marketed as “part memoir, part self-help book.” Its format is unusual: recorded conversations between the author and her psychiatrist constitute the bulk of the text, before an epilogue serves as a personal reflection. In this epilogue, Baek ...
19th October 2023
Sex, art, and scandal in Kerri Maniscalco’s latest novel. “Unlike in a fairy-tale, the prince who’s coming for Camilla isn’t at all charming. But like all storybook villains, if Camilla isn’t careful, this dark prince just might end up capturing her heart.” Kerri Maniscalco, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, returns to the world ...
12th October 2023
From Austen to Calvino; essential works of fiction about fiction. Generally one of the more challenging concepts in contemporary literary theory, metafiction is defined by the Oxford English dictionary as “fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions.” It is, at ...
11th October 2023
Author David Grann talks to the Glasgow Guardian about his latest book, The Wager. After completing Killers of the Flower Moon — which has been adapted by Martin Scorsese, and is coming out later this month — David Grann knew he wanted to write about mutiny. It was whilst exploring this theme that he came ...
5th September 2023
Book Columnist Ruhee Parelkar explains the endless appeal of the campus novel. Before I came to university, my understanding of what university life would be was created by the campus novel. I spent countless hours sifting through books, looking up academia mood boards on Pinterest and fantasising about how my life would change the moment ...
28th March 2023
More than villains, victims and wives, Ellen Ruddell examines retellings of the female myth. Firmly cemented as the powerhouses of modern Greek myth retellings, Madeline Miller, author of the tremendously successful Circe and The Song of Achilles and Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne continue to ride the cultural wave, tridents in hand. Despite ostensibly being ...
27th March 2023
Lean in or Lean out? A decade on, Jeevan examines Sandberg’s infamous manifesto, and Dawn Foster’s counter to it. Since Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In topped bestseller lists, we have entered the fourth wave of feminism. This has been, in part, defined by the #metoo movement which challenged sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as ...
21st February 2023
Leah dissects her personal relationship with Glasgow’s libraries, and debates their future. Originally serving as archives, libraries have functioned as a record of humanity throughout history. Evolving from the legendary likes of the library of Alexandria to the modernist Beinecke at Yale University known as a “jewel box”, libraries have always been symbolic of knowledge ...
