Susie Mesure

1 month ago | spectator.co.uk | Susie Mesure

Stephen May used to write contemporary novels about men who ‘live outside big cities, lack self-confidence and rarely feature in contemporary fiction’, as he once put it, adding: ‘Even Nick Hornby’s characters are more sorted than mine.’ But a chance discovery of a Wikipedia page about the three weeks that a young Stalin spent in Edwardian London sent May’s imagination hurtling back through the decades.

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Susie Mesure

The illustrator, best known for We're Going on a Bear Hunt, is getting her own exhibition - but she wishes they'd ditch the early stuffHelen Oxenbury is in a quandary. Her first solo show after almost 60 years illustrating children's books opens in less than a month and she is having second thoughts about what should be on the walls.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Freddy Gray |James Cahill |Susie Mesure

Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s twenty-fifth novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Lynn Barber |James Cahill |Alexander Larman |Susie Mesure

How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies — fifty so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this. Long ago, Allen got into the habit of making a film a year, and so he goes on. He once said he was “like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves” — he couldn’t stop.

1 month ago | thespectator.com | Susie Mesure |Mathew Lyons |Anne Sebba |Christopher Sandford

Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are “moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.” He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 — far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500.