Community Programs Manager elle roberts’ winter book recommendation for younger readers, “The House on Mango Street.” (Photo/Indy Reads) The holidays are great for spending time with friends and family, but if you have ever wanted to just sneak off with a book and find a cozy corner to read, we’ve got you covered. Whether you’re…
Filmmaker Atlee delivered a blockbuster film, Jawan, with Shah Rukh Khan in 2023. After a hit collaboration with SRK, the director has reportedly united with superstar Salman Khan for a movie. Atlee’s sixth directorial is expected to star Salman in a pivotal role. The buzz is that it is going to be an epic two-hero saga. The director is apparently considering Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth as the parallel lead alongside Khan. The latest development is that the movie is reportedly going to be a reincarnation action drama.Update on Salman Khan’s film with AtleeAccording to Pinkvilla, Salman Khan’s upcoming film with Atlee is a mega-budget reincarnation action drama. The movie is reportedly set in two distinct eras – past and present. As per a source close to the portal, Atee is aiming for a never-seen-before period set up with breathtaking visuals of a fictional world. “It’s going to be Salman Khan presented like never before in the avatar of a warrior in the period era, whereas the present era dynamics have been kept under wraps for now. The focus of the film will be more towards the period portions than the present, as the script demands more of drama and conflict in the fictional fantasy world,” the source said. The characters in the Atlee directorial will be interlinked from past and present. The two-hero epic baga is expected to go on floors by Summer 2025. As of now, the filmmaker needs time to finish the script and pre-production of the film.It is going to be produced by Sun Pictures and will be shot over one year. This film with Atlee is being touted as Salman’s big project in 2026 after Sikandar’s theatrical release on Eid 2025.On Salman Khan’s work frontMeanwhile, Salman Khan is looking forward to the theatrical release of Sikandar. The superstar plays the lead role in the AR Murugadoss film alongside Rashmika Mandanna, Prateik Babbar, Sathyaraj, and others.Are you excited about Salman’s next with Atlee? Tweet @ottplayapp and share your thoughts on X.
The seven-day long divisional book fair is set to begin in Khulna from November 26. The book fair will continue till December 2 at the premises of the Divisional Commissioner’s office.Aimed at increasing the habit of reading books, the government took decision to organise divisional level book fair across the country.The book fair will be organized by the National Book Center under the guidance of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and with the assistance of the Khulna Divisional Commissioner’s office.The book fair was announced at a press briefing held on Thursday in the conference room of the Khulna Divisional Commissioner’s office.During the briefing, Divisional Commissioner Md Helal Mahmud Sharif said books are the vessels of knowledge. Regular reading is essential for building a knowledge-based society. Students must be encouraged to take an interest in printed books alongside e-books.Additional Divisional Commissioner (General) Md Hussain Showkot and Deputy Director of the Divisional Public Library Mohammad Hamidur Rahman were present at the press briefing.The fair will be open daily from 3:00pm to 9:30pm, and on weekends, it will be open from 10:00am to 9:30pm.The book fair will have around 80 stalls, of which 60 stalls will be allocated for the publishers of Dhaka, 10 stalls for 10 districts of Khulna division, six for government offices, two for law enforcement agencies and remaining stalls for foods and refreshment for visitors, poets, writers and media corner.Besides, series of seminars, cultural programmes and quiz-competitions for children will be held every day.Police and other law enforcement agencies will be deployed and close circuit (CC) cameras will be installed to ensure tight security for making the fair a success.
Abhishek Bachchan’s I Want To Talk might be a hit among the everyone who has seen the film, but the movie might not be able to keep up at the Box Office, at least on the opening day. The Shoojit Sircar directorial did not attract as many footfalls as one would expect since the buzz of the film was lower in comparison. Thus, the movie might end up earning just a little over a crore. Here’s the expected Box Office collection of I Want To Talk…I Want To Talk Box Office predictionI Want To Talk might just earn a little above Rs. 1 crore. As per FilmiBeat, the movie is likely to earn Rs. 2 crores on day 1 of its theatrical release.I Want To Talk impressionsI Want To Talk has connected with both the critics as well as the viewers. The movie has been praised for being Abhishek Bachchan’s best as an actor. Netizens have even gone ahead and asked others to support the movie by calling it ‘real cinema.’The story of I Want To TalkI Want to Talk teaser stars Abhishek BachchanAbhishek plays the role of Arjun Sen, an NRI whose days are numbered after he underwent a life-altering surgery. While he is already struggling with health, Arjun also worries about him being a single parent for his daughter anyway. The two have always shared a complex dynamic, and I Want To Talk explores their changing equation too.The team of I Want To TalkApart from Abhishek, Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk features October actor Banita Sandhu with Ahliya Bamroo and Johnny Level in pivotal roles. The movie is penned by Tushar Jain and is based on a real story. The film is yet to pick up at the Box Office, and for the same reason, netizens demanded that I Want To Talk should have released directly on OTT. Nonetheless, this one has left an impact.
The Friends of the Malibu Library, is having its yearly book sale on Saturday, Nov. 23, from 9 a.m to 4 p.m. and on Sunday, Nov. 24, from 1 to 4 p.m. Contributed graphic The longest running nonprofit in Malibu, The Friends of the Malibu Library, is having its yearly book sale on Saturday, Nov. 23, from 9 a.m to 4…
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Monday mornings for most people mean catching up on emails and attending meetings. But for Tyler native Sarah Jones, they often meant facing the worst day of someone else’s life.For over a decade, Jones worked in the death care industry, with roles ranging from funeral director and tissue donation specialist to autopsy technician. Her new book, “Living Life with Death,: offers a rare and deeply personal look at life through the lens of death.Jones began her career in mortuary school in 2010, initially planning to become a funeral director and embalmer. While studying, she worked part-time with a willed body program and assisted the local medical examiner’s office. After leaving mortuary school, she spent five years in tissue donation services before returning to the industry in 2018 as an autopsy technician, a position she held until 2023.#placement_588494_0_i{width:100%;margin:0 auto;}In “Living Life with Death,: Jones reflects on the wide spectrum of lives she encountered — from stillborn babies to people over 100 years old, from peaceful passings to tragic homicides. Her collection of essays and poems reveals the lessons she learned about being alive from those who are not and how working in the death industry shaped her life. Written with deep introspection and a surprising amount of humor, “Living Life with Death” offers a unique perspective and a lesson for all readers.Living Life with Death is now available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Wipf & Stock.Jones is scheduled for a book signing at Tyler’s Half Price Books, located at 8966 S. Broadway Avenue in Tyler, on Jan. 16 from 1 to 3 p.m., where she will discuss her experiences and share insights from her debut book.
Let’s get this out of the way immediately: No, the Romans never introduced sharks to the Colosseum.
Without giving away too much of the plot of Ridley Scott’s new epic Gladiator II, the sequel to the beloved first installment that made Russell Crowe an icon back in the year 2000, one long action sequence does indeed revolve around flooding the Colosseum. Long shots focus on those unfortunates who end up in the water, only to be torn into chunks by aquatic predators, much to the delight of the bloodthirsty crowd. It’s not subtle, or historically accurate in the pure sense, and it’s not meant to be. With that said, it is pretty cool, especially on an IMAX screen.
Over its centuries of use as a venue for some of the most extreme violence ever dreamt by humanity, the Colosseum never (so far as we know) played host to sharks. The Romans did actually flood the Colosseum to host a miniature naval battle. Elephants, rhinoceroses, lions, tigers, bears, wolves, Christians, condemned criminals, and of course gladiators all bled and died for the enjoyment of the crowd; no sharks, though.
Still, it doesn’t really matter, just like it doesn’t matter that the Romans did not have newspapers or cafés, because Gladiator II—like most of Ridley Scott’s epic historical films—isn’t trying to be a faithful re-creation of the era, in this case of Rome at the end of the second century A.D. To judge his movies by that standard is to fundamentally miss what Scott is trying to accomplish, the kind of movie he imagines for years or decades, spends immense amounts of money to produce, and then directs. He makes epics with messages so straightforward that they’re impossible to miss (masculine strength is generally good, intolerance of all kinds is bad, and so on) and fills them with some of the most incredible action sequences ever put on screen. The historical setting is more backdrop than something baked into the DNA of the project.
Ridley Scott, as he will happily tell you, isn’t a historian: “Get a life,” he said, when confronted by professional critiques of his preceding effort, the rather maligned Napoleon (2023). It doesn’t help that when he does make a movie that captures true events and period-accurate attitudes correctly, as he did in 2021’s The Last Duel, very few people bothered to watch.
The first Gladiator, despite its sumptuous setting and beloved reputation, had almost nothing to do with Rome as it actually existed in the time of Marcus Aurelius and his villainous son, Commodus. It was a sword-and-sandals costume epic, one that dressed up a fantastical plot and modern values in ancient trappings. The film invented characters who never existed, including Russell Crowe’s general-turned-gladiator, Maximus. The real-life Commodus wasn’t a good guy, but he didn’t murder his father or die in the Colosseum; his personal trainer, a wrestler named Narcissus, strangled him in his bedchamber 15 years into his reign. We could go on and on, but the gist is that the movie offers a purely invented story of the events surrounding and following the death of Marcus Aurelius.
On a more basic level, Gladiator’s values were fundamentally contemporary. It had a great deal to say about “freedom,” but its “freedom” was of a distinctly late-20th-century vintage. There’s nothing to suggest that the historical Marcus Aurelius had any interest in returning Rome to a republican form of government, as the character in the movie did, or that such an effort would have had any support among the empire’s elite or its populace. Using “the Senate” as a stand-in for the Roman people, as the story does in Gladiator, distorts the nature of the institution past the point of recognition; its members in any period, republican or imperial, were blue-blooded oligarchs in the purest sense, not representatives of the popular will. As compelling as Gladiator was and remains, it was compelling as a movie, not because of what it had to say about ancient Rome. Rome was a dream—a good dream, Scott’s characters said, over and over—and if only they could strip away the corruption and tyrannical leeches, it would be good once more.
This is what makes Gladiator II surprisingly interesting. In its basic format and approach, it shares much with its predecessor: arresting action, broadly drawn but generally effective characters, and themes that are largely intended to resonate in the present. But at the core of the movie is a substantive argument about what Rome actually was, and whether that was a good thing. Who benefits from the brutality of empire, and who pays the price in blood? Is it possible to make something positive out of a city built on the bones of the conquered? Was Rome even worth saving, either from its worst leaders or from itself? The original Gladiator largely took all this for granted, even as it made its protagonist an enslaved man fighting for his life and revenge in front of a baying crowd. It paid occasional lip service to the deeper price that empire extracts from its perpetrators and victims, but not with much conviction.
Gladiator II’s subversion of the first film’s core message is built into its structure from the very beginning, quite literally in the title sequence. We find out Maximus’s efforts were all for naught. He gave his life for a cause that went nowhere in the 16 years separating the events of the first Gladiator from the opening of the second. Rather than nameless if somewhat noble Germanic barbarians whose motivations are largely unexplored, the Romans’ Numidian opponents in the astounding battle sequence at the movie’s start are plainly justified in their resistance to Rome. Our main character, Paul Mescal’s Hanno/Lucius, fights not for Rome but against it. Pedro Pascal’s General Marcus Acacius, who we first see dealing Hanno and Numidia a crushing defeat, is entirely ambivalent about his role in conquest, tired of war, not because he wants to see his family again (as Maximus did) but because he questions the entire enterprise.
As for the value of Marcus Aurelius’ dream of Rome, one character—Denzel Washington’s deliciously villainous Macrinus—openly mocks the concept. Rome is blood and power, nothing more. The city’s streets are filled with impoverished people while its highest elite, made up of unworthy dilettantes, party boys, and gamblers, forces gladiators to fight to the death at an impossibly lavish dinner party. The pro-Roman argument comes into play via a former gladiator turned doctor (Ravi, played by Alexander Karim) from somewhere in the distant east, who was enslaved but won his freedom in the arena and married a woman from Britain. Only in Rome, the former slave says, could he have built that life. That’s not an abstract concept of political freedom; it’s the very stuff of life, albeit at the cost of everything that former gladiator’s life could have been, had he never been enslaved. Even at the end, after the bad guys are vanquished, we’re left to ask who was right.
That is a far richer animating concept than one that sees the glory and righteousness of Rome as givens, as in the original Gladiator. The tension between ideology and reality, the fictions that make it possible for spectators to go to a gigantic Colosseum and watch people and animals tear one another apart for their entertainment, runs through the entire movie. The first Gladiator recognized the power of the Roman mob, even as it saw their taste for blood as an exotic facet of a past time; the second asks why that thirst for violence as spectacle existed, and for whose benefit.
Because this is a Ridley Scott epic, Gladiator II doesn’t ask those questions subtly, but it does so in ways that indicate a more than passing familiarity with what people living in the Roman world actually thought. Macrinus quotes the orator Cicero’s famous line that the formerly enslaved sought not to tear down slavery as a system, but to have slaves of their own. Another echoes the historian Tacitus’ equally well-known statement that the Romans brought not civilization but devastation: “They make a desert and call it peace,” Tacitus said, a perceptive critique of imperial conquest for its own sake. The Romans weren’t ignoramuses who unquestioningly accepted what they saw around them, but flesh-and-blood people who were perfectly capable of recognizing the contradictions and cruelties of the world they inhabited.
In that sense, despite the sharks and all its other historical inaccuracies, Gladiator II has something truly valuable to say about the period in which it’s set. Empires aren’t automatically good just because they cover a great deal of territory on a map, or because they construct enduring monuments like the Colosseum, or because formerly enslaved people can make new lives for themselves. If thousands have to die on battlefields to sate the ambitions of the powerful, and thousands more have to die in a vast temple dedicated to violence to remind the common people of their place in the social order and keep them from rebelling, is that something worth saving?
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Gladiator II doesn’t live and breathe a real historical world in the way that some of Scott’s other films do: The supremely underviewed Last Duel is perhaps the best portrayal of medieval knights as ignorant, violent, honor-obsessed fools ever put on screen. The Duellists, his 1977 production about two Napoleonic French cavalry officers who fight each other many times over the course of decades, similarly taps a rich vein of past reality. Gladiator II doesn’t reach those heights.
It’s not trying to. Judging it according to that standard, or one in which a pedantic version of historical accuracy takes precedence over the essence of a time and place, misses the point. Gladiator II captures the vibes of ancient Rome quite well. It asks intriguing questions about power and its costs, and the legacies we inherit from the past, that force us to deal with the brutal reality of the Roman Empire as it actually functioned. That is a far more valuable contribution than getting sequences of events nearly 2,000 years ago precisely correct.
When TikTok and Instagram turn men thinking about the Roman Empire into a meme, the historian’s job isn’t to list off the names of consuls and emperors or the years in which battles took place; it’s to use that as a chance to see Rome as a mirror for the present. People who lived long ago operated according to principles that were not our own, but the choices they made and the worlds they built show us something essential about what humanity can be. If we don’t engage thoughtfully with them, we’re doing them and us a disservice.
Whatever its flaws as a film or as a description of the past, Gladiator II accomplishes that task. If you’re paying attention, despite the copious gore, Denzel Washington having the time of his life as a scenery-chewing villain, and of course the sharks, you’ll leave the movie with a far deeper grasp of Rome as it actually was. People really did live and die on the sands of the Colosseum. Some benefited from that. Others suffered. While some will surely hate it for this, Gladiator II is surprisingly ambivalent about the Roman Empire. So are most of the people who spend their lives researching and writing about Rome. That’s not because they, or the movie, lack a perspective, but because knowing Rome—really knowing it—requires us to grapple with both spilt blood and gorgeous marble.
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Adapting Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestselling book Say Nothing into a compelling television series was a monumental task. “I was well aware going in that brilliant books often make terrible films,” showrunner Joshua Zetumer tells T&C. “How do you do the story justice, especially given the scope and ambition of the book?” Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern IrelandNow 30% OffSay Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland centers on the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widowed mother of ten, and her family’s decades-long search for justice. McConville’s abduction and murder is the entry point into a compelling history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.In turning the nonfiction book into a nine-episode miniseries, the involvement of author and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe from the outset was essential. “I knew the producers, Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson,” Radden Keefe tells T&C. “I probably wouldn’t have trusted the book to just any old producers, but because I knew them and I really admired their work, it started out as an exercise of putting trust in them. Then they said, ‘We’ll bring you on board and you’ll actually work with us. It won’t be a thing where you give it to us and we go away and we come back and we have the show.'”Zetumer, who had written on numerous films, including RoboCop, Patriots Day, and the James Bond franchise, joined soon after. “When [producer] Brad [Simpson] slipped me Say Nothing, it was instantly my favorite book,” he tells T&C of Radden Keefe’s captivating non-fiction account of the Troubles. “I saw this opportunity to take on a project that reminded me why I’d wanted to become a filmmaker in the first place. The story was gripping, it was suspenseful, it was emotional. It had these vivid characters with real psychological depth, and it was true. At the same time, it was a huge creative risk because no studio was making anything like this. I signed on that early in the process, but it was so good that it was this moment where I just had to take the leap and I signed on just immediately.” Rob Youngson/FXLola Petticrew as Dolours Price.The most challenging part of bringing Say Nothing to television, however, was deciding what to leave out. Zetumer says, “I knew it was going to be one season—it had to be one season—and effectively, what we were trying to do, was cram as much into one season as most shows would do in three. The hardest thing about the adaptation, it wasn’t the fact versus fiction of it, it was: What do you not include? Because there is this just vast swirl of history around the characters. There’s sort of moment after moment, set piece after set piece. What do you cut?” Some key events that were left out include three hunger strikes (only one is in the show) and the controversy surrounding Boston College’s Belfast Project, in which ex-paramilitaries candidly discussed their role in the Troubles.Rob Youngson/FXDolours and Brendan’s decision to share their stories is a key turning point in Say Nothing.What was essential to include in the show from Radden Keefe’s book, however, was former IRA volunteer Dolours Price’s decision to participate in the Belfast Project. “That was something that seemed kind of essential to the DNA of the book that you would need in the series,” Radden Keefe says. “The series does this slightly edgy thing—that the book does too, but it’s more visceral in the series—in the sense that we take very seriously this political choice by young people to take up arms and engage in acts of terror and put bombs in public places. I don’t think we condone those decisions, but we want to understand those decisions.”He continues, “Part of the reason that these people did it is that it felt very romantic at the time, and it’s important to try and capture some of that romance that they felt, but I don’t want to romanticize it myself. I don’t think the series should. They only responsible way is to show the hangover. In the series, the first person you meet is Jean McConville. You see the consequences from the start.”Rob Youngson/FXA scene from the first episode Say Nothing.The overarching theme, and message, of the book and the show are one and the same: The truth will always find a way out. “If you have a situation in which the truth is suppressed, or there’s a code of silence, or there’s a kind of desire to look away, the past doesn’t go away just because you avert your eyes,” Radden Keefe says. “You can feel it in Dolours in those later episodes that she’s been so muzzled. It’s painful and it’s ugly at times, but she just needs to tell her story.”And though it’s a period piece, largely set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the story feels ever-relevant for today’s world, which is a distinct change from when Radden Keefe initially worked on the book. “When I was working on the book, it really did feel like I was describing a distant time and a place,” he says. “But then as we started putting this series together and the writers started writing the scripts, Black Lives Matter happened. Ferguson happened. Suddenly, you saw peaceful protestors on the street and militarized cops trying to shut them down. These questions of radical politics… How do you change the world? What really does make sense? What’s justifiable? How you avoid a wild, irrational escalation? All those questions feel very, very germane to me today.”All nine episodes of Say Nothing are now streaming on Hulu. Watch nowEmily Burack (she/her) is the Senior News Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, celebrities, the royals, and a wide range of other topics. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Twitter and Instagram.
I have just made my debut in the U.S. with my novel Fathers and Fugitives, a book that garnered praise and won prizes in South Africa, but has, until recently, been unknown to readers in America, as am I as a writer. Unless you live in the English-speaking world, and unless your book is written in English, you initially have a relatively small potential readership. There are some exceptions; Chinese and Spanish books certainly have a large audience, for instance. But when you write in the Global South, and in a small language like Afrikaans, as I do, then you have to first achieve success in your country of origin—and then hope that international agents and publishers will notice you and take a chance on your work. And that it will then find a wider audience. It is the case with many authors that they may only ever find success within their own country and cultural sphere, and that’s fine too. But it is in the DNA of most writers to want to be read as widely as possible. In my own case, ironically, I used to live in New York and London, the two centers of publishing in the modern era. But back then, my life was lived in an entirely different sphere. I was trapped in the world of corporate law, working first in a New York law firm, and then in a U.S. multinational company. In 2010, I left my job and London behind and returned to the country of my birth to write. Leaving a lucrative job in the world of international lawyering with a plan to start a literary career in South Africa is not what most people would recommend. Somehow I’ve made it work. Apart from being widely reviewed and read in Afrikaans, my books have also appeared in some continental European languages. Some were published in English in the U.K. previously, by small U.K. independent publishers. It is only now, though, that the more established Europa Editions, an outstanding publisher of translated fiction, has taken on the book both in the U.S. and U.K. and with real enthusiasm. Most PopularThis has been an interesting journey, detouring via law and a professional life in New York and London, and then back to my home country and writing in my mother tongue, a small language spoken only at the southern edge of the world. On top of that, it is a language with a complex history—it was, for a long time, associated with Apartheid, even though the majority of its speakers are in fact Black, and it had its origin in the mouths of slaves who were emulating their masters’ Dutch. It was then hijacked by the Apartheid architects, who tried to erase this history and refashion it as a white language. So, I started my second career—writing fiction—in this marginal language, in a small southern outpost of the world with a difficult and complex history, and then my writing slowly started traveling northwards from there. Particularly for someone who used to work as a cross-border mergers and acquisitions attorney in New York City, this is an unusual journey. Perhaps I can now think of myself as a cross-border author.The story of Fathers and Fugitives, to some degree, mirrors this back and forth between north and south. My protagonist, Daniel, is a South African journalist living in London. His father’s will compels him to visit a long-lost cousin on the old family farm in the Free State, deep in the South African hinterland. Daniel and his cousin then travel with a seriously ill boy to Japan for an experimental cure, on a voyage that will change their lives. The cousins ultimately return to South Africa. And go to the U.K. again. And then Daniel returns to South Africa once more. I wanted to take Daniel out of the cosmopolitan life he has established in a first-world urban world and destabilize the precarious balance between home and non-home that he had established. I wanted, in effect, to “reparochialise” him, embed him in a remote South African landscape. And then see how that works out for him.I admire the approach of the revered Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who has for decades been an activist for inverting the hierarchy of languages. He switched from writing in English to Gikuyu when he was in detention in Kenya in 1977, making the point that his writing is aimed at those who are politically oppressed in his own country. In 2017, a Pan-African writers’ collective resolved to translate wa Thiong’o’s story into 27 African languages. Their question was: why should every work of literature from Africa be either produced in or be translated into English? And the assumption that they—and Thiong’o—are constantly challenging is that African languages cannot accommodate or express intellectually complexity. Shouldn’t monolingual English speakers, rather than translators or non-English-speaking authors, be doing the work? Shouldn’t they meet literary works on their own terms, or at least in the language in which they are produced?In theory, yes. But the practical reality in the world as currently works, is that, in order to reach out to readers across the English-speaking world, an English text is what you need. In the past, i.e. in the case of my first three books, I translated my own work. This time I experimented with a third-party translator—a veteran of South African literary translation, Michiel Heyns. For the first time, I didn’t have full control over my work in both Afrikaans and English. When my work is translated into languages I don’t speak (it is currently being translated into Italian), I am happy to give up control. Letting go of a translation into English, the language that isn’t (quite) my first language, but one in which I studied and lived and worked for much of my life, was difficult, though, and I did remain involved in the process to some degree, especially the copy editing.But now that writing, translating, and editing are done, one can only let go and let the book make its own voyage into the bigger world. Like a boat gently launched into choppy waters. It will hopefully be an adventurous tour, with lots of surprises along the way.Fathers and Fugitives is available now wherever books are sold. S.J. Naudé is the author of two collections of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds and Mad Honey, and two novels, The Third Reel and Fathers and Fugitives. He is the winner of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the kykNet-Rapport prize, and is the only writer to win The Hertzog Prize twice consecutively in its 100-year history. The Third Reel was shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize. His work has been published in Granta and other journals in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and ItalyMore from Paste