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Psychological Thrillers with a Twist

It's tempting to think that good psychological thrillers are all about plot twists, but in reality, it's the characters that make some books truly memorable. Novelist and literary critic Hannah Beckerman recommends five of her favourites, from Agatha Christie to Alex Michaelides. Read more

The Best Novels by Spanish Authors

If you like your novels long, Spanish literature has some gems to lose yourself in. Richard Village, translator and publisher of Spanish Beauty, recommends five of his favourites, from the chaos of 17th-century Spain to the traumas of the 20th century, and also including a classic detective novel.

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Inventing Japanese Braille

Wei Yu Wayne Tan | History Workshop | 1st May 2025

Louis Braille's tactile reading and writing system was devised with alphabetic languages in mind, such as English or French. Japanese Braille came later, as its late 19C adopters wrestled with the problem of codifying a phonetic and semantic script with a limited number of Braille dots. Matching the dots to the kana syllabaries rather than kanji characters proved to be the key (1,600 words)

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The Alabama Landline That Keeps Ringing

Emily McCrary | Oxford American | 23rd April 2025

In 1953, the Dean of Students at Auburn University in Alabama opened a help desk phone line that students, and then the general public, could call to get answers to any query. Seven decades later, people are still phoning in. Many callers are people who, for whatever reason, don't use the internet. Some have troubles and just want to talk. And of course, some are drunk people at parties (2,100 words)

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I’d Like To Report A Murder

Hannah Baer, Lauren Oyler & Brandon Taylor | Pioneer Works | 23rd April 2025 | U

The literary takedown is "having a renaissance", supposedly, and this conversation between two critics well known for their splashy, negative reviews is both tense and illuminating. Neither holds back. Some interesting advice emerges, applicable beyond the literary sphere, such as "It’s fine to make enemies, but make sure they’re the right ones" and "Let people hate in peace" (3,600 words)

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The Freestylist

Florian Pütz | Der Spiegel | 17th April 2025 | U

Career retrospective for chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, aged 34. He has been World Chess Champion five times. Only Garry Kasparov has spent longer as the world's highest-ranked chess player. Yet Carlsen seems to be bored of classical chess. He pours his energy into online play and a new Freestyle format in which the starting position is randomly selected from 960 different possibilities (3,900 words)

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Art Of The Hedgerow

Richard Negus | Engelsberg Ideas | 28th April 2025

The English hedgerow seen through “sporting art”. Victorian aristocrats called the “Meltonians” would commission paintings of their horse, hound or friend and the landscape across which they galloped. If one looks past the shiny thoroughbreds and sharp coats, the hedges in the paintings reveal that farms were ravaged by recession in the 1820s, compared to their Georgian counterparts in the 1790s (1,400 words)

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Science Might Help Keep Wild Places Wild

Sarah Scoles | Undark | 28th April 2025

Much thought goes into how people experience the great outdoors, by forest service rangers and experts who balance protecting fragile ecosystems with making public lands accessible. Historically, this meant visitor caps through permits or fees, which can create other problems. Faced with an online permit portal for a peak, people may choose instead to climb a mountain next door, “displacing their damage” (3,400 words)

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To Live And Be Perplexed By Los Angeles

Joel Stein | The End Of My Career | 25th April 2025

Humorous account of the bizarre events after a hit-and-run in LA. The driver flees with his clothes in one hand and a guitar in another, with a brother-sister duo in hot pursuit. He hides in a posh neighbourhood, watering plants. As cops search the backyards, a woman points a gun at them. She is Jillian Lauren, bestselling author of a memoir about being in the Prince of Brunei’s harem (1,300 words)

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Human Creativity As A Natural Resource

Benj Edwards | Ars Technica | 25th April 2025

Case for protecting human creativity as a scarce natural resource in the age of AI. Suggestions include licensing or royalty systems to compensate humans and opt-out registries for AI training. Japan’s “Living National Treasures” offer a model, funding artisans to preserve vital skills. We might have an “AI commons” — AI models trained on publicly scraped data should be owned as a shared public domain (2,500 words)

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The Timeless Allure Of Tintin's Aesthetics

Ryan M. Allen | College Towns | 6th January 2025

Tintin creator Georges Remi used a consistent colour palette and the dark outlines of the "ligne claire" style to make each panel of his comic a work of art. The Adventures of Tintin exhibit "a sense of scaled urbanism as well as the naturalistic world in fantastical yet real places". It is hard not to feel emotional, for instance, at the drawing of Tintin and Snowy seeing the skyline of New York City for the first time (1,700 words)

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Wild Animal Tales

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya | Paris Review | 24th April 2025

Petrushevskaya, now into her eighties, grew up in the Soviet Union under Stalin "shuttling between orphanages, Young Pioneer camps, and tuberculosis sanatoria". In 1993, she produced a series of uncategorisable tales populated by animal characters who would seem to belong in a children's book, except for the fact that they have adult lives and concerns. These extracts are weird and compelling (2,600 words)

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Five Books features in-depth author interviews recommending five books on a theme. You can read more interviews on the site, or sign up for the newsletter.

The Best Travel Books: the 2025 Stanford Awards

Every year, the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards highlight the very best of recently published place writing, and select their 'travel book of the year.' We asked judge Tom Parfitt, the author and former foreign correspondent, to talk us through the six travel books that made the 2025 shortlist. Read more

The Best Novels: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction

The 2025 shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction features a family saga about formerly rich Iranian refugees, a surprisingly funny tale of ISIS brides and a "weird" midlife crisis adventure in suburban California. We asked the bestselling novelist—chair of this year's judging panel—to talk us through the six finalists. Read more

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The full Browser recommends five articles, a video and a podcast. Today, enjoy our audio and video picks.

Podcast: Mansfield Park | Novel Approaches. Close reading of Jane Austen’s novel, which might be seen as a 19C fairytale about a poor girl marrying a wealthy husband, but is also a shrewd study of income, status, precarity and speculation (32m 41s)

Video: Bernstein Rehearses | YouTube | Orchestral Odyssey | 9m 10s

Footage of Leonard Bernstein preparing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for a Mahler performance. His spoken German is sporadic, but the musicians understand his gestures and noises perfectly.

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Burning Mao

Fernanda Eberstadt | Granta | 24th April 2025

Memoir from a teenage worker at The Factory. In the late 1970s, Andy Warhol's reputation was at a low ebb but the atmosphere was one of "slapstick merriment". Her job was part receptionist — fetching sandwiches, answering phones — and part manager of Warhol's emotions. "What pierces my heart is the morning Andy stood by my desk, blushing, face contorted, too angry and hurt to speak" (4,600 words)

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200 Hours with Bach

Evan Goldfine | A Year Of Bach | 21st April 2025

Thoughts upon concluding a project that involved listening to all of J.S. Bach's musical work. It is the manifesto of a newly converted completist: if you haven't consumed all of your favourite artist's output, you have "tasted only a morsel of the world’s biggest cake". Bach was astonishingly consistent in style and quality throughout his life. Perhaps his music is a "sideways proof of God’s existence" (1,400 words)

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Sometimes You Misread The Ones You Meet

Henrik Karlsson | Escaping Flatland | 23rd April 2025

Reflections on a late-blooming friendship. The writer's close friend Torbjörn "spent 15 years as an extra in my life before I realised he was a main character". He misread their relationship as being solely a "friendship of utility". Torbjörn wasn't only funny, he was "responsive". The lesson? "If someone seems boring to you, or a bad fit, it might be that you don’t know how to prompt them" (2,200 words)

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Fly A Rhino Upside Down

Tudor Tarita | ZME Science | 16th April 2025

The best way to move a black rhino to a new habitat is a process known as "translocation", in which the tranquillised 1,300kg animal is dangled upside down from a Vietnam War-era helicopter by long straps around the ankles. This "looks like something out of a Salvador Dalí dream", but research has shown it is the healthiest, fastest and most aerodynamic way to get a rhino from A to B (1,000 words)

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The Difficulty Of Bringing Manufacturing Back

Molson Hart | 7th April 2025

Scathing fourteen-point essay on why tariffs will not bring manufacturing back to the US. Chinese workers have better reading and math abilities, and years of accumulated skill. Manufacturing needs electricity, which has flatlined in the US. Automation won’t save the day; Chinese robots are cheaper. China is working to reduce low-value manufacturing; the US is inexplicably applying tariffs to bring it back (5,300 words)

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Approaching Meaning

Marie Snyder | 3 Quarks Daily | 22nd April 2025

Reflections on the work of psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, who estimated that about half of all cases of depression might be a “crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness”. “If nothing matters, it should not matter that nothing matters, and yet it does matter. The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away” (4,600 words)

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Science And The Strapless Evening Gown

David Friedman | Ironic Sans | 15th April 2025

Down the rabbit hole of science humour magazines. In 1960, MIT’s Voo Doo magazine featured a semi-serious “stress analysis” of a strapless dress, likely an “attempt to ogle women under the guise of engineering analysis”. Years later, Deborah Henson-Conant, a harpist-turned-humorist set the article to orchestral music and performed it with the Springfield Symphony, for which she wore a strapless gown (2,000 words)

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The Rise Of Scotland Yard

April J. Skelly | CrimeReads | 21st April 2025

Since its inception in 1829, Scotland Yard pioneered many modern methods of crime patrolling and detection. They used bloodhounds to track evidence. They introduced plainclothes detectives, causing public outcry about spies in their midst. They made advances in forensics and toxicology, learning to distinguish the toxins usually found in Victorian homes — like arsenic and lead — from intentional poisoning (1,800 words)

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