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Anne Serre. Photo: ©Sophie Bassouls/Leemage and New Directions Publishing. Anne Serre’s The Governesses (translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson) is like someone else’s feverish vision, something you shouldn’t be seeing. The tightly crafted prose keeps the hallucinatory qualities in check, and Serre’s coy delivery means nothing is easy to pin down. Monsieur and Madame Austeur hired the three young governesses to enliven their home, but they have since become more than employees; not quite like family, they are mysteriously unshakable fixtures in the domestic realm. So much about this fairy tale of voyeurism moves in strange ways, the plot unfolding in little discrete episodes: the governesses hunting strangers, entertaining suitors, planning a party, teasing the old man across the street. The whole thing has a sense of humor about it, though it’s hard to be sure whom the joke is on. There are no real conflicts, and while you could easily sink your teeth into the nuanced prese

As half-term comes to an end in the UK, and the looming prospect of an isolating Winter holiday break approaches, we’ve found these wonderful resources for parents and guardians to use with their children. Have a look and we hope this adds some extra fun in those precious bonding moments and educational delights with young ones.     Publishers, Books & Comics   1. This Is Book Love www. thisisbooklove.com This is Book Love is an award winning collective of Educators, Artists, Musicians, Creatives, Aunties, Uncles, Parents and Grandparents working together through an online shop to bring as much multicultural content and books in to one place.   2. Knights Of knightsof.media Knights Of publishes commercial children’s fiction – distributed through the UK, Ireland and Europe.   3. Miiato www.miiato.com Discover new superheroes with children’s book author Miia Torera’s I.S.A series!   Storytelling   4. Anike Foundation’s African Folktales anikefoundation.org/folk

Africa Writes have teamed up with Bloomsbury to bring you an excerpt from Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives . Here’s a blurb of the historical fiction novel: Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari , the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the army, at the right hand of an officer whose control has ensured his protection but marked him for life. Hamza does not have words for how the war ended for him. Returning to the town of his childhood, all he wants is work, however humble, and security – and the beautiful Afiya. The century is young. The Germans and the British and the French and the Belgians and whoever else have drawn their maps and signed their treaties and divided up Africa. As they seek complete dominion they are forced to extinguish revolt after revolt by the colonised. The conflict in Eur

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona for a virtual wine tasting on Friday, November 13, at 6 P.M. on The Paris Review ’s Instagram account . For more details, visit our events page , or scroll to the bottom of the page . Stuffing for a squab: pancetta, sage, and its own heart and liver. Photo: Erica MacLean. On Halloween, when many people abandon themselves to the linked joys of sugar and horror, we more literary types decide to dine from transgressive fiction. I have at hand two books by the French writer Gabrielle Wittkop (1920–2002): Murder Most Serene  and The Necrophiliac . The former, set in Venice between 1766 and 1797, is a murder mystery wherein the wives of a nobleman named Alvise Lanzi keep dying from poison. Perhaps the killer is his mother, Ottavia, whose basement cellar for Nebbiolo wine also hides “flasks and phials”; or it could be her cicisbeo who is also a spy; or the maid, Rosetta Lupi, in her “apron edged with lace”; or Alvise’s jilted lover Marcia Zolpa

Nigerian writer Yewande Omotoso’s third novel will be published will be published by Cassava Republic in Autumn 2021. The book, titled An Unusual Grief, is about “a woman’s effort to come to terms with the death of her estranged daughter.” The Bookseller reports that the publisher acquired the English and Commonwealth rights from Elise Dillsworth […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3mx4CfN

The History of EC Comics tells the story of one of the most infamous and influential forces in twentieth-century American pop culture. Founded in 1944, EC Comics quickly rose to prominence by serving up sharp, colorful, irresistible stories that filled an entire bingo card of genres, including romance, suspense, westerns, pirate tales, science fiction, adventure, and more. Perhaps most crucial to the company’s success, however, was its pivot to horror . In the following excerpt, Grant Geissman chronicles the origins of such gruesome, bone-chilling series as Tales from the Crypt and explores how the relationship between two key figures—the artist, writer, and editor Al Feldstein and the company’s publisher, Bill Gaines— acted as an engine that propelled EC Comics to the forefront of the industry. Detail from the cover of Three Dimensional Tales from the Crypt of Terror No. 2, Spring 1954. Art by Al Feldstein. Copyright: TM & © William M. Gaines Agent, Inc. With Bill Gaines a

Like everyone on Twitter, I have been transfixed by the HBO documentary series The Vow , about the self-improvement cult/pyramid scheme/sex trafficking ring known collectively as NXIVM. The organization’s leader, Keith Raniere, was found guilty on seven counts of racketeering and sex trafficking in 2019, and this week, on October 27, he was sentenced to a hundred and twenty years in prison. The most sensational headlines of the case are about the former teen actress Allison Mack’s involvement in a secret sadomasochistic group within NXIVM known as DOS (“dominus obsequious sororum,” a phrase in a language that could at best be described as Latin-esque that supposedly meant “lord over the obedient female companions”) in which she and other “masters” recruited other women as “slaves,” some of whom were made to have sex with Raniere. Grotesque details abound in this story, particularly of slaves being branded with a soldering iron near their crotches with a symbol containing both Mack’s a