Beauty lies buried under brutal history

This is exactly what it is like to be alive

Doodle is based on Kafka’s 1915 novella ‘The Metamorphosis’

Richard Matheson's influence over film and fiction spanned generations. Stephen Spielberg's career was kick-started by Matheson's short story Duel. Stephen King cited him as his biggest influence and waxed particularly lyrical about his novel The Shrinking Man (1956). George A Romero was inspired to make his classic Zombie movie Night of the Living Dead by the way the vampires shambled about in the first film version of Matheson's best known novel, I Am Legend (1954).

Ernest Hemingway was one of the most-celebrated writers of the twentieth century, possessing a straightforward prose style, which often leaned towards understatement.

Lydia Davis, the shortest of all short story writers, whose works can be as brief as a single sentence, has won the fifth Man Booker International Prize.

That scarf, those glasses  – she must be a writer?

When Dominic Cooke took over at the Royal Court, he said he wanted to stage more plays about “what it means to be middle class”. Now, as the reins of artistic director pass to Vicky Featherstone, comes possibly the most middle-class play of his era - and very funny on the topic it is too.

The London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre will contain a large number of events catering for a diverse range of tastes. Watch the videos below for a couple of selections.

The odd couple turn to crime-fighting

Here's an unusual situation; an author who's certainly not dead, not unknown or out of print in his native USA, greatly admired, yet ignored and unrepresented on these shores. While UK publishers reprint the most minor Nordic crime novels, we're denied an astonishing American voice.

As the world waits to see what the North Korean dictatorship does next, the judges of the Pulitzer prizes yesterday honoured a novel acclaimed for its depiction of the secretive state, naming Adam Johnson’s “The Orphan Master’s Son” as the winner of the fiction award after withholding the prize last year.

A literary shotgun blast to the face