Helen Garner: ‘People would give me death stares in the street’
The novelist and nonfiction writer on her love of courtroom drama, the trials of cancel culture and why she wouldn’t have been a good psychoanalyst
January 2023
Book of the day
Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm review – a great writer’s photographic memories
A posthumous collection of essays, sparked by old photos of her Czech refugee family and friends, lucidly sketches a lost world
July 2022
Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview; Joan Didion: The Last Interview review – crafty to the end
In these revealing late-life chats, the two doyennes of US journalism display all the acuity and intellectual toughness that made them household names
December 2021
The Observer's obituaries of 2021
Janet Malcolm remembered by Michael W Miller
The US journalist on his aunt, whose exacting vision – from her writing to her elegant dinner parties – was an expression of love and generosity
July 2021
Janet Malcolm obituary
Staff writer for the New Yorker who wrote about the practice of journalism, art and biography
June 2021
RIP Janet Malcolm, America’s finest nonfiction writer who detailed the failings of others alongside her own
Alex Clark
Janet Malcolm, author of The Journalist and the Murderer, dies aged 86
April 2019
In brief: Nobody’s Looking at You; Cygnet; Where Shall We Run To? – reviews
Entertainingly spiky essays, a promising fiction debut and a pungent wartime memoir
May 2018
Book of the day
Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean – review
Dean’s group biography of female writers who dared speak their mind is a great and worthy project
May 2016
Snap judgment: how photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue captured the moment
A photographer who happened to catch the spirit of early 20th-century France, or a visionary who turned the snapshot into art? William Boyd celebrates the work of Lartigue
March 2016
Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner review – elegant reflections on life, writing and Russell Crowe
Despite disparate themes and dated subjects, Garner’s new collection coheres as a volume, and reminds us again why she is one of the greats
December 2015
Best culture 2015
The best book we've read all year: Guardian writers and readers look back
It’s been a wonderful year for literature so here are the reads we’ve enjoyed the most in 2015, new or not. From poetry to psychoanalysis, fiction to biography, Guardian writers and readers look back
April 2015
Does it matter if Joseph Mitchell embellished his journalism?
He is long known to have used composite characters and a new biography will reveal more embellishments – but perhaps that’s the magic of his work
March 2014
Joe McGinniss obituary
Controversial writer and journalist known for Fatal Vision and The Selling of the President
August 2013
Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm – review
She may be wilfully anxious but Janet Malcolm, as these minor works show, remains a ruthless, dazzling journalist, writes Leo Hickman
July 2013
Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm – review
Classics corner
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey by Janet Malcolm – review
April 2013
The Fort Bragg murders: is Jeffrey MacDonald innocent?
Andrew Anthony spoke to Errol Morris, an Oscar-winning film-maker who has written a book about the case which reaches some startling conclusions…
June 2011
A life in ...
A life in writing: Janet Malcolm
‘I hammer it out sentence by sentence and it takes a long time. That’s what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do’
May 2011
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial by Janet Malcolm – review
Simple stories can result in wrong verdicts, says Elizabeth Gumport
