Books

My Media Diet: In her debut novel, Allie Rowbottom unpicks what longing for synthetic beauty can do to a person’s psyche. Here’s what the author – who’s well acquainted with Instagram’s dark underbelly – gets up to online.

From New York drag bars to Japanese idol culture, slender winter days are for powering through slender books such as these.

The multidisciplinary artist has just released A Sphinx Looking For a Poet, a collection of poems written in Parisian solitude that’ll have you lunging for the suitcase.

The pair, together with co-founder Lester Walker, have just released their extensive recipe book, Black Power Kitchen, celebrating the richness of cuisine from West Africa and the Bronx. Here’s what they get up to beyond the kitchen…

Anna Cafolla selects page-turners to spook and satiate the senses, from Jonathan Nunn’s London food odyssey to Philippa’s Snow’s analysis of self-injury as entertainment, with a healthy dose of sexy salaciousness thrown in via Annie Ernaux.

The New York writer’s exhilarating second novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You, features a distant and unfeeling protagonist. Someone who’s far from the charming, approachable former Vogue journalist who arrives armed with a list of questions for, um, THE FACE. Hmm, just who’s interviewing who, Stephanie?