Malin Hay is an editor at the LRB.
If there’s anything ironic about being so scared of telling the wrong joke that you run straight into the arms of the House of Saud, it seems lost on the Riyadh Comedy Festival performers, who have, on the whole, described their experiences in Riyadh as positive – or at least positive enough to clear their consciences.
Jane DeLynn last published a novel in 2002, when she was 56, but Semiotext(e) in the US and Divided in the UK have now reissued In Thrall (1982), her most personal work and, according to Colm Tóibín’s new introduction, ‘her masterpiece’. It’s set in the mid-1960s at a girls’ high school in Manhattan. Lynn, DeLynn’s narrator/alter ego, looks...
There’s an old joke. ‘A man was choking to death in a restaurant and Barbra Streisand was sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a...
In the post-marriage era, what happens to the marriage plot? The marriage rate halved between 1991 and 2019, but fiction can’t shake its fondness for the will they/won’t they question, for love triangles and dilemmas. In her second novel, Naoise Dolan updates the form for the 21st century, recognising that for the perpetual teenagers of the 2020s, a wedding is just an arbitrary...
Since 1995, at least 51 young people have died in Scottish prisons. These include Katie Allan and William Lindsay, who shared strong support networks and, despite very different life experiences, died...
The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth is a master of the collapsing relationship. In her twenty books, she turns her eye to estranged siblings, tormented lovers, demanding parents and disaffected colleagues...
Singing, acting, directing, writing: Barbra Streisand always insisted on doing it her way. Malin Hay, who recently reviewed Streisand’s 992-page autobiography, joins Tom to discuss her performances on...
In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan,...
Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into compiling such...
With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes...
Bee Wilson speaks to Malin Hay about Paul Newman’s mystique – his passivity, his domesticity and his irresistible blue eyes.
Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, was murdered with strychnine in 1905. Her killer was never discovered – until now (perhaps). James Lasdun talks to Malin Hay about a new book by...
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