The long read: Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end?

The French-Moroccan author’s slightly precious meditation on literary creation is strongest when examining its limitations and reflecting on her own childhood

The first, and greatest, adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s troubling 1955 novel still possesses a strange and unnerving power

A sufferer writes about how the skin condition affected figures as diverse as Joseph Stalin, John Updike and Cyndi Lauper

The pleasures and perils of sustaining human connection while physically separated have inspired writers from Sally Rooney to Vladimir Nabokov

The Booker-longlisted author on the dazzling wordplay of Nabokov, feeling bemused by Haruki Murakami and struggling to finish Dickens

Part showy display of literary style, part grumpy personal letter, this is a rich celebration of the power of writing

An account of a teenage affair with a teacher feels like therapy and lacks deep thinking

From Lewis Carroll to Vladimir Nabokov and Shirley Jackson, the best of these stories combine fantasy with very real psychology

The term may be new, but as stories from Homer to Henry James show, the behaviour is anything but

Older generations argue that young people’s insistence on equality in all things – including books – threatens to stifle free speech. But is that always true?