At 35kg, is The History of the Saatchi Gallery a tome for the discerning art lover or just an oversize paperweight? Adrian Searle finds out ... Adrian SearleAndrew DicksonAndy Gallagher

Article by David McHutchon The original legend of the stork caliph tells the story of an ancient ruler of Baghdad entering the kingdom of the animals as a result of a black powder hawked by a pedlar. It is not just a particularly Mesopotamian fatalism, but the fatalism and eventualism of all fairy tales that guides

       They've apparently announced the regional winners of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize -- though not yet at the official site, last I checked. (And I just have to ask: why even bother with a website if you can't get the information up there as soon as it is available ? That goes for the NBCC -- see the previous story -- too.)    ...

The National Book Critics Circle announced the winners of its 2009 awards in New York on Thursday. Booker Award-winning Hilary Mantel took the prize for fiction, showing that British history has play on both sides of the Atlantic. Fiction: Hilary...

It's said that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't actually there – a saying variously attributed to Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, both of Jefferson Airplane, and Dr Timothy Leary, so-called "Galileo of consciousness". Barry Miles was there throughout: present at the recording of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life", the climactic track of Sgt Pepper, and at the live recordin...

Sex and violence pepper the adaptation of Stieg Larsson's bestselling crime novel, which might have been better served as a TV series, writes Peter Bradshaw This is part of the mega-selling Millennium Trilogy of gruesome crime novels by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Originally (and pertinently) entitled Men Who Hate Women, this first story has now been adapted for the screen and find...

A couple of bits from Childhood (1852), not presented for any particular reason besides their existence: The collection of books on his own shelf, if not so large as ours, was even more miscellaneous.  I remember three of them: a German pamphlet on the manuring of cabbages in kitchen-gardens (minus a cover), one volume of a History of the Seven Years' War, bound in parchment with a burn ...

At The Morning News, a wide-ranging conversation with the writer Philip Graham, most recently the author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. Included is his account of getting a story into the New Yorker off the slush pile, and a footnote touting The Millions and other online literary venues as places

Abdulrahman Zeitoun is the real-life hero of Dave Eggers's new book. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina he paddled from house to house in a canoe, offering help to his neighbours. For his trouble, he was arrested as a suspected terrorist Saturday afternoon and the Zeitoun household is bustling with activity, as you quickly get the impression it always is. Kathy Zeitoun, dressed in a blue s...

Virginia Woolf's house, Gertrude Stein's flat – feminist pilgrimages are a great way to connect with history. So when Vera Groskop said girls were boring, her mother decided it was time for her first trip Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn't exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can freque...