Amy Raphael

Ben Okri is an award-winning poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and playwright, knighted for services to literature in 2023. Born in Nigeria, he went to school in London and returned to Nigeria on the eve of the civil war. After reading most of the books in his father’s library, Okri has since written a dozen novels including 1991’s Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road. Recent novels include Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Brokenhearted, a modern fable that pays homage to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Waking the Warriors. Here, he discusses four short novels, representative of different cultures, that he thinks people should read. Short novels are tricky to write and require a totally different discipline to a long novel.

For summer getaways, look no further than British brand Ettinger to carry all you need in enduring style. The luxury leather goods brand’s collection of travel bags, available in overnight and weekend sizes, exemplifies Ettinger’s ethos of adopting traditional manufacturing processes, focus on durability, and attention to detail. The company uses various types of leather according to need: fine bridle leather is more delicate than traditional bridle hide and thus more versatile; soft Italian calf is chrome tanned, dyed, and drum rolled to give the leather a silky touch that improves with age; goat leather, one of the finest in the world, is known for its softness, strength, and resilience.

The writer Paul Fischer was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in France and now lives in Canada. His first book, A Kim Jong-II Production, the true story of the kidnapping of two South Korean filmmakers in North Korea, was one of NPR’s best books of 2015. His sophomore book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, explores the disappearance of Louis Le Prince, who shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. For his third book, Fischer turns to the inside story of the friendship between Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg. The Last Kings of Hollywood is a New York Times bestseller. Here, he discusses five film books that have influenced his work.

When I was 20 and tentatively trying to write, every single person I knew read Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites (1975). It not only gave the short story a good name, but it also gave writing a good name. It was like a punk moment converted into fiction. People used the word “macabre,” but there was a sort of excitement about the characters, the strangeness of the stories, the shortness of some of the stories and just how much contemporary urban life was in them. Often people suggest I investigate a writer. I was in Toronto about 20 years ago when someone told me about the extraordinary Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod. He had written two books of short stories which were republished in 2000 in one volume called Island: The Collected Stories.