Sylvan Oswald gives a dystopian twist to the French essayist’s ideas on borders to explore modern gender politics

Full of appreciation for such essayists as William Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick and Georges Perec, Dillon has written a vital exploration of a genre

Today everybody reads Shakespeare. But what books did he read? Jonathan Bate on the writers who shaped the world’s greatest playwright – and the three books the Bard would pick for Desert Island Discs

Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week: See where Shakespeare borrowed from the French essayist in John Florio's superlative translation

From the Bible to Darwin to Dr Seuss, the author picks out books that 'open new eyes to see the world'

By Ian Pindar

The author chooses his favourite examples from one of literature's most elastic forms, taking in everything from Montaigne to Martha Gellhorn

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

Recent months have brought three high-profile autobiographical accounts of grief. Are their authors guilty of using the dead as 'writing meat'? And does the subject matter excuse cliché and melodrama? Frances Stonor Saunders deplores a trend for rowdy breast-beating

He looked at everything with curiosity, and tried to make sense of everything he studied – for the benefit of his readers, says Yiyun Li