My village didn’t even have a traffic light. Now it has 1.4 million people

When author Xiaolu Guo was a child, her village was a remote farming settlement. Now, like hundreds of others across China, it has become a metropolis with four-lane roads, a cancer epidemic … and even a new language

The Guardian view on music and poetry: growing up together

Editorial: Cultural forms built with words were once all indistinguishable, but in popular culture they are again coalescing. Figures such as Chuck Berry and Derek Walcott were part of bringing them together

St Patrick’s Day: Trump’s ‘Irish proverb’ provokes derision on the web

Tweets claim the US president’s quote to impress the Irish PM on the eve of St Patrick’s Day is a poem by a Nigerian poet – but is it?

I do not like that Dr Seuss

Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in The Hat are revered as American classics. I found them cheap and creepy

American freakshow: the extraordinary tale of Truevine’s Muse brothers

Beth Macy’s bestselling book tells the story of two African American brothers with albinism who were kidnapped and forced to perform in a 1920s circus. What can their story teach us about racism in the US today?

Eleanor Catton’s new novel revealed as a pre-apocalyptic drama set in New Zealand

Birnam Wood, which revolves around a US billionaire who has purchased a bolt-hole, comes after Peter Thiel bought South Island property

Ian McEwan clarifies remarks likening Brexit vote to Third Reich

Author says his words were ‘garbled’ in translation and he never suggested UK government and Brexiters resembled Nazis

China cracks down on foreign children’s books

Chinese publishers have reportedly received orders that the number of foreign titles being printed must be cut to prevent an ‘ideology inflow’

Book reviews: fresh insights on Islam and Isis

Four new books give much-needed insight into a misunderstood religion, from history and philosophy to life under Isis

‘All my friends had some nightmare experience trying to get pregnant. My story took the cake’

At five months pregnant, Ariel Levy lost her baby. After four more years of IVF, had she left motherhood too late?

Writers unite! The return of the protest novel

From Ali Smith’s Brexit book to Howard Jacobson’s Trump satire, writers are responding to the political moment. But can art bring real change?

Publishers chased Katie Hopkins and Milo Yiannopoulos. But hate doesn’t sell

Hot air and rightwing controversy fuel social media and fill column inches, but there’s no evidence they make people buy books. Quite the opposite

Spanish writer who fled civil war to a British village honoured in Madrid

Arturo Barea, loved for his books and BBC talks, has had a city square named after him in the Spanish capital near his former school

The Raqqa Diaries by Samer review – brutal and powerful

Reports smuggled out of Isis-occupied Syria detail the horrors faced by a desperate population

I put Milo Yiannopoulos through the Christopher Hitchens test. He failed

Bill Maher likened the far-right agitator to one of the finest writers of recent times. He isn’t even close – Yiannopoulos is a boring narcissist