Donna Tartt's The Secret History is perhaps the most famous example, although the campus novel has evolved considerably since its publication in 1992. Sally Rooney's Normal People, Elif Batuman's The Idiot and R. F. Kuang's Babel demonstrate just how much territory the genre can cover, from the intimate complexities of relationships to questions of class, identity, institutional power and politics.
For much of the history of publishing, becoming a bestselling novelist was a fairly straightforward proposition. Not necessarily easy, of course, but at least the rules were reasonably clear. You wrote a book, persuaded a publisher to publish it, hoped the newspapers would review it favourably, and waited to see whether readers bought it.
A French novelist has just won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. Nothing particularly unusual about that. Except that, the following day, he appeared on French radio and explained that he had used ChatGPT while writing the winning novel.
In 2011, Chad Harbach published The Art of Fielding, a debut novel about baseball, friendship, ambition and life at a small American college. It was one of those rare books that seemed to arrive already surrounded by the language of literary importance. There were comparisons to Jonathan Franzen, considerable excitement in the publishing world and the sense that a major new American novelist had announced himself. Harbach was suddenly in possession of the sort of debut most writers spend their careers dreaming about.
And then he didn't publish another novel. Not the following year. Not five years later. Not even ten. Fifteen years passed.
In 1971, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal appeared together on The Dick Cavett Show. It should have been an opportunity for two distinguished American writers to discuss literature, politics and perhaps the future of the novel. Instead, Mailer had reportedly headbutted Vidal backstage, and the subsequent television appearance became an extraordinary display of literary hostility. Mailer was belligerent, Vidal was cutting, and fellow guest Janet Flanner looked increasingly unimpressed by the whole business. It was the sort of evening that rather undermined the idea that reading great books necessarily makes people more civilised.
In November 1966, Truman Capote threw a party at the Plaza Hotel in New York. It was called the Black and White Ball, and the guests included an extraordinary assortment of actors, politicians, socialites, artists, writers, and people who seemed famous primarily for knowing other famous people. Everyone wore masks.
Newspapers covered the preparations, the guest list and the event itself with the sort of fascination normally reserved for royal weddings. And at the centre of it all was a small, extravagantly dressed man with an unmistakable voice who had recently published a book about the murder of a Kansas family.
There is something peculiar about reading George Orwell. You can pick up an essay written eighty or ninety years ago, settle into the first paragraph and almost immediately forget how old it is. The clothes have changed. The politics have certainly changed, and the references sometimes need explaining.
But the voice seems to arrive without having travelled through time at all. Orwell sounds as though he's sitting across the table from us, slightly impatient, about to explain something that ought to have been obvious in the first place. It's one of the main reasons why I find myself going back to Orwell again and again.
I've just reread The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, and somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, being irritated by it and occasionally wondering how on earth a 23-year-old got away with some of it, I found myself thinking about criticism. Not criticism of Amis, but Amis as critic.
That might seem an odd response to The Rachel Papers, a novel published in 1973 about Charles Highway, an extraordinarily self-absorbed, arrogant character pursuing a place at Oxford and Rachel Noyes with the sort of strategic planning normally associated with a minor military campaign.
We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”
Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another.
In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't?
Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.
Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.
That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.
Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.
It started because I'd found my signed copy of The Goldfinch in a box in the attic. From there, I fell down the Donna Tartt rabbit hole and started wondering why one of my favourite writers hadn't published a novel in more than a decade.
Well, here we are again. On 23 September 2026, it will be thirteen years since The Goldfinch was first published. Thirteen years without a new Donna Tartt novel and, this time, we've officially entered uncharted territory.
.png "Two writers, two very different personalities and the problem with pretending the journalist isn't there")
Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.
Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.
In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith.
Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.
So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?
Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.
Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.
.png "Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the ethics of fiction")
'Writers are always selling somebody out.'
It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.
.png "The comeback of the literary antihero: Why we love flawed protagonists")
Modern literary fiction has taken a rather different path.
Today, some of the most memorable novels are populated by characters who are selfish, manipulative, emotionally detached or quietly destructive. They lie. They disappoint us. Sometimes they commit terrible acts. More often than not, they simply refuse to become the people we hope they will be.
.png "Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?")
We all do it. Me included.
As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.
I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.
Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.
On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.
But is it really?
.png "The best books about the Falklands War | Top 3 history books")
More than forty years after the war, the Falklands campaign remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the twentieth century. Lasting just seventy-four days between April and June 1982, it saw Britain project military power halfway around the world to retake a remote British Overseas Territory after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982.