In a decade when feminism brought a new weight to the treatment and status of women in fiction, the best male writers began to take domestic life seriously

Drawing on writers from Anton Chekhov to Kit de Waal, Donal Ryan explores the art of writing short fiction. Plus Chris Power on the best books for budding short story writers

From Proust’s explorations of consciousness to Olivia Laing’s meditations on isolation, solitude is literature’s friend

This much-touted literary love letter to Alcoholics Anonymous is too moral in its argument for the superiority of the sober

This year’s Venice film festival begins with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s showbiz satire, a film as jittery, shallow and occasionally inspired as its hero, writes Xan Brooks

Does it help writers to drink? Certainly Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald thought so. But, wonders Blake Morrison, are the words on the page there despite and not because of alcohol?