“A desolate ferry terminal on the Spanish coast isn’t a place where you’d expect to encounter sharp-edged lyricism or rueful philosophy, but thanks to the two Irish gangster antiheroes of Barry’s novel, there’s plenty of both on display, along with scabrously amusing tale-telling and much summoning of painful memories.”

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry has been named one of the ten best books of 2019 by the New York Times.

“The French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote: ‘Love begins when something impossible is overcome.’ The same could be said of hospitality: the act of accepting from another, of receiving the other, only begins, only touches the rim of true hospitability, when it pushes you beyond your limits, discomfits you, allows in the unexpected, brings about what you never imagined.”

Priya Basil, author of Be My Guest, writes in the Observer about what it means to be a host – on the domestic and family level, and as a country receiving new arrivals.

Eliot wrote that the world ends “not with a bang but a whimper”: he might be right, but then on the other hand maybe it will end with a bang? Or maybe it’ll end with crab-human mutants? And just maybe it’s time for you to decide which.

We made a game you can play right now, based on Rob Sears’ hilarious book Choose Your Own Apocalypse with Kim Jong-Un & Friends. Go and keep the world safe for another day, or at least, play some ineffectual role in deciding exactly how it dies…

The Guardian has published a selection of Joni Mitchell’s stunning watercolours from Morning Glory on the Vine, including the above (of Neil Young).

“Offstage, she seems softer and more laid-back than her fierce and foul-mouthed standup persona. In the book, she recalls starting out: ‘I was very dirty back then. Even now, I’ll look back on those days and think: “God, you were disgusting.”’ Which is very funny if you have seen any of Wong’s comedy, because you will know how filthy she is now. In Baby Cobra, there are gags about anal sex and vaginal secretions; in Hard Knock Wife, there are jokes about the things she would like to do to their nanny if he was 25, male and ‘not ugly’.”

Ali Wong interviewed in the Guardian about her new book, Dear Girls.

“I became engrossed in Mitchell’s drawings while browsing the book—they’re vivid, intimate—but her handwritten lyrics and poems are just as revelatory.”

Morning Glory on the Vine in the New Yorker.

Gina Miller, author of the extraordinary memoir Rise, has taken the UK government all the way to the Supreme Court twice and now won twice. First on its authority to trigger article 50 without parliamentary approval and now on the unlawful prorogation of parliament.

“Annie Dillard said once that the only advice any writer needs is to keep your overheads low. In our present epoch, this means you have to be very, very careful about where you choose to live. I live cheaply in the rural north west of Ireland and this means I don’t have to teach, I can just write. The city as an entity really doesn’t want anything to do with writers anymore—we’ve been priced out, as have all creative people except those from backgrounds of privilege. So screw the city—it’s the city’s loss.”

Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier, answers five questions on writing and its obstacles over at Literary Hub.

James Meek, author of To Calais, In Ordinary Time, writes about the intersections of languages with each other, and with power, at the Guardian:

“The transformation tends to be presented in popular history as an absolute, as the triumph of English over French, as if languages were hermetic national systems, as if English were taken prisoner by French with the Norman conquest in 1066, was tyrannised by it for the next 300 years, then burst free and drove the aggressor back across the Channel. As well as describing, in English, the death of French as a living language in England, Trevisa sounds the death knell for living Latin by the then radical act of translating a learned work from Latin into English.

“But neither French nor Latin went away. They seeped into what we call English and made themselves at home, giving the language its fantastical redundancy, creating something half-Germanic, half-Romance. Trilinguality was internalised. Otherwise the Albert Hall would resound to ‘Land of hope and woolder/Mother of the frith,’ and we’d sing ‘God beery our gladman Queen’ and leave the EU not to take back control but to ‘take wield again’. We’re born in English, live, love, wonder, feel and die in English, but we’re conceived, we emerge, exist, touch, desire, doubt, experience, suffer, succeed, fail and perish in French and Latin.”