There’s a new space race – will the billionaires win?

The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose

Not just love, actually: why romance fiction is booming

From Emily Henry to Rebecca Yarros and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – romance has dominated the book charts this year. So why is it still dismissed by critics?

From Dr Seuss to All Quiet on the Western Front: 19 books to help you find hope, sense and resistance in difficult times

Writers, activists and politicians on the books they turn to for wisdom and perspective – and to restore their faith in human nature

‘There’s a sense of our freedoms becoming vulnerable’: novelist Alan Hollinghurst

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

Scott Galloway on the masculinity crisis: ‘I worry we are evolving a new breed of asexual, asocial males’

When his book Notes on Being a Man was released last month, it raced to the top of the bestseller lists. The US author, tech entrepreneur and podcaster explains his theories on dating, crying – and the rise of Donald Trump

‘I took literary revenge against the people who stole my youth’: Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu

As the first part of his acclaimed Blinding trilogy is released in the UK, the novelist talks about communism, Vladimir Nabokov – and those Nobel rumours

‘If I was American, I’d be worried about my country’: Margaret Atwood answers questions from Ai Weiwei, Rebecca Solnit and more

Democracy, birds and hangover cures – famous fans put their questions to the visionary author

‘I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t’: Karl Ove Knausgård on the fallout from My Struggle and the dark side of ambition

The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel

Can ceramics be demonic? Edmund de Waal’s obsession with a deeply disturbing Dane

The great potter explains why he turned his decades-long fixation with Axel Salto – maker of unsettling stoneware full of tentacle sproutings and knotty growths – into a new show

Journalist Ahmed Alnaouq: ‘It’s our duty to make Gaza’s stories immortal’

The Gaza-born, UK-based journalist, who lost 21 family members in an Israeli airstrike on his homeland, has taken pieces from an online platform he co-created for young Palestinians and collated them in a new book

‘We’re not doing the thing we’re built to do’: Agnes Callard, the philosopher living life according to Socrates

Why did the professor get divorced, remarry, but allow her former husband to remain in the house? In her brilliant new book, Open Socrates, she makes the case for an intellectually honest life

Fran Lebowitz: ‘I am very angry. I’m angry almost all the time’

The famously sardonic American author, public speaker and actor on happiness, bad ideas and the life-boosting nature of friendship

‘Look at your country! It’s amazing’: Armistead Maupin on moving to London

The Tales of the City author made his name as the bard of San Francisco, but now calls Clapham home. He talks about becoming a British citizen, his new novel set in the Cotswolds and missing California weed

Fran Lebowitz on life without the internet: ‘If I’m cancelled, don’t tell me!’

The writer is easy to spot if you spend long enough in New York, but interviews have to be over her landline, as she is permanently offline. She reveals why Andy Warhol wasn’t so smart, and how she learned to love a good party

Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people disagree with me, so what?’

With a hit Netflix series and The Fran Lebowitz Reader now published in the UK, the American wit talks about failing to write, her dislike of Andy Warhol and her best friend Toni Morrison