Fredrik Albritton Jonsson examines Amitav Ghosh’s take on climate change and considers if the basic aims of economic development must be completely redefined to acknowledge Earth’s finite resources

Prussian author ETA Hoffmann’s tale of a poet driven mad would have shocked the Brothers Grimm – and the violence of it remains shocking, even two centuries later

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole and Chigozie Obioma are among a new wave of Nigerian luminaries who are including new ideas about gender into their ethos

As the daughter of Maus author Art Spiegelman, Nadja comes from family used to documenting each other’s lives. Her book, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This discovers shared traumas in three generations of women

Given that Koreans enjoy a low rate of violent crime by international standards, how are we to comprehend the seeming ubiquity of abuse and madness in Korean fiction? asks Seo Hee Im

Maggie Cao takes a look at two novels – Dominic Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt – that use great works of art to propel plots of mystery and intrigue

Kate Flint looks at books by Alexandra Harris, William Vaughan and Peter Davidson exploring how painters and Victorian novelists have shaped the English’s fascination with weather

The rapid ascent of the Italian pseudonymous author overseas has polarised the conversation about her at home – alternately self-flagellating or snidely condescending, writes Rebecca Falkoff

A century since he was executed, the story of Irish rebel Sir Roger Casement remains controversial due to the Black Diaries – either a genuine chronicle of his sexual history or a forgery by British officials to discredit him. Two biographers have set out to settle Casement’s case once and for all

She is known for magical worlds that have less in common with Hogwarts than Icelandic legend, but Ursula Le Guin’s writing also champions anarchistic politics

Named on Obama’s 2016 summer reading list, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days is a revelatory look into the fraternal and dangerous world of surfing, as well as a history of the sea that could sit beside the best of Twain and Conrad

The use of pulp conventions in The Heart Goes Last undermines Atwood’s claim that speculative fiction is the antithesis of those cheesy, escapist fantasies about talking squids in outer space

Most famous for his sleeper hit Stoner, John Williams also wrote Butcher’s Crossing, a western that turned the genre upside down and went to war with American triumphalism – when it was not popular to do so

When his first two novels were recently rereleased, Haruki Murakami said he viewed them with love and embarrassment. But as Lowry Pei writes, the books set a path for the author away from despair and towards true sincerity

When race is in the news, white audiences turn to black intellectuals and writers for authentic tales of blackness. But, as Matthew Clair writes, this can result in an optimistic obfuscation of truth