From 2015 to 2017, the writer, critic and historian Kari Sperring wrote a column, Matrilines, for Strange Horizons, about women writers of fantasy. She started with Katherine Kurtz, writing "we are leaving out the women ... Like so many women in SF, she should not be suppressed, overwritten, forgotten. She is part of our DNA". Other columns covered Claudia J. Edwards, Dion Fortune, Elizabeth Goudge, Clemence Housman, Louise Lawrence, Elyne Mitchell, Miyabe Miyuki, Judith Tarr, Evangeline Walton, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Veronica Williams.

From science kits to karaoke machines, shower sets to brain-boosting games, here are the presents our mini testers loved the most

• The best gifts for seven-year-olds

Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them.

By eight, children’s interests and skills are taking shape. They’re more confident readers, more strategic thinkers and curious about how things work. And while they think they’re extremely grown up, eight-year-olds still need plenty of time to play for their overall wellbeing.

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© Composite: PR Image

© Composite: PR Image

© Composite: PR Image

Two obsessive artists team up to achieve their dreams, but then their aspirations diverge

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.

Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.

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© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

That Will There, Transcription, and Down Time each tease out the confluence of ambivalence, exhaustion, and over-compensative compliance that underscored pandemic life is compelling. Their characters' lack of clarity about Covid and its consequences is, ironically, its own form of clear-sightedness. It speaks to a very contemporary feeling of unease about Covid and the recent past and what this ultimately says about where the culture is heading.

If these characters fail to successfully inhabit the world, it is at least in part because their world—the world as theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida had taught them to see it—isn't one that is easily inhabited. How can a person make a home in an impersonal symbolic field or an ineluctable power machine or a network of deceptive and unstable signs? What kind of human flourishing is possible in such an inhuman universe? What kind of a life?

It's the software engineers who are losing their jobs to AI, not the weed trimmers, pawn shop workers, garbage men, and grocery store workers. In these novels and in this economy, even the extralegal jobs, despite being precarious on their head, have become more stable than most.

Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections turned 25 this year (it was published right before Sept. 11). Here is a small collection of articles, including an overview, some critics revisiting the book [archive], a Gen Xer who asks Was this the last great American novel?, two interviews with Franzen, one in The New Yorker [archive], one in the Grauniad, and news of the (inevitable?) Netflix adaptation.

Related: How Jonathan Franzen became America's most divisive novelist [BBC] Jonathan Franzen: The Great American Misogynist [Medium, archive] Jonathan Franzen 'considered adopting Iraqi orphan to figure out young people' [Grauniad] A-and: Never forget [archive]