This beautiful collaboration between fashion photographer Miles Aldridge and MAC cosmetics breaks all the rules, with its lobster platters, moggies, detergent divas – and the inimitable Dame Edna

John Dugdale: The recent partnership of Mark Ronson and Michael Chabon belongs to an illustrious history of collaboration between authors, poets and pop stars. But who should be getting the credits?

A politician learns an uncomfortable truth about food-bank Britain. Katherine Parkinson stars in a microplay written by Laura Wade and directed by Carrie Cracknell

Samuel Beckett’s first published novel is an absurdist masterpiece, writes Robert McCrum

With their feckless princesses and fickle princes, these 10th-century tales are as titillating as they are fascinating, writes Elizabeth Lowry

Carr longed only to paint the rainforests, wild skies and indigenous cultures of her native British Columbia. Charlotte Gray celebrates the painter who, 70 years after her death, is receiving her first major European show

Meet the artist who’s collected every single Kickstarter campaign that failed to raise a dime – from the bra with pockets to paintings made of lightning and the corkscrew that firms your buns. By Nell Frizzell

From heaving bosoms to gilt-embossed curlicues to mutilated zombies, Margaret C Sullivan shows us the many faces of Jane down the ages

Amazon, which earlier pulled several of Hachette’s books from its inventory, will resume selling all of Hachette’s catalogue

Lists of best authors under 40 reinforce the notion that fiction is a young person’s game. It’s time we started celebrating the mature voice, writes Joanna Walsh

Harriet Gibsone: It’s easy, surely? Just get five good looking lads to sing any old tosh, and watch the money roll in. Not so, say three experts

The award has been given to Torday for The Dark Wild, ‘a fantastic example of how a book for children can be serious without preaching’. By Emily Drabble

Nothing was sacred for the 19th-century caricaturist, who was notorious for his mocking sketches of French high society – he even went to prison for six months for making fun of the king. Here’s a selection of his rabble-rousing drawings

Boyd’s new thriller The Vanishing Game was not only commissioned by the car firm but has a Land Rover written in to the story Is this a new era for product placement, asks Alison Flood

Poll: Ten passages of highly-coloured prose are up for the prize every author dreads, the annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award

Jonathan Jones: Photographs can be powerful, beautiful, and capture the immediacy of a moment like nothing else. But they make poor art when hung on a wall like paintings

Thomas’s mother-in-law had ordered that the notebook be burned; her servant saved it for posterity in a paper bag

The Bible garnered 37% of the vote, while On the Origin of Species received 35%, writes Alison Flood

What are the best British buildings of the last century? And do the critics’ favourites match those of the people, asks Simon Jenkins

‘It is time for parents and publishers to stop dumbing down the tales for children,’ says editor of uncut edition

Top 10: Books about books, where literature is integral to life, are a genre in themselves, as terrific titles by authors from Nicholson Baker to Geoff Dyer very readably show

Interstellar writer Jonathan Nolan is set to have a go – and it would be a magnificent future if he can pull it off

By weighing down the characters and distorting similar letters, this new typeface pins words firmly to the page

The bedtime book for frazzled parents is followed by a venture into the jungle of family dinnertime

News: The songwriter apparently became obsessed with Jerry Lewis, prompting him to propose a slapstick comedy series to Seinfeld writer Larry Charles – before dropping the idea just after being greenlit by HBO

They submit manuscripts on time. They never suffer writer’s block. And they don’t spend hours googling their Amazon sales. There’s just one thing wrong with robot authors – their stories stink. Tom Meltzer talks to the scientists teaching creative writing to the next generation of androids, while Ni…

News: By donating his Picasso-riffing piece Gazing Ball (Charity), Koons has helped raise money for vaccination and education programmes – and he’s part of an art world increasingly given to donations of valuable work

Two-wheeled transport has come a long way over the last two centuries. Take a pictorial spin through the bicycle’s journey from the wood and iron era to the age of carbon fibre

Faraway oceans, cannibals, life-or-death struggles with sea monsters … songs that chronicled the lost culture of whaling are finding a new audience, thanks to Kings of the South Seas. Author Philip Hoare looks at their legacy

Reading group: The millions of people using the term seem confident that they know – and use it with equal confidence to signify often diametrically opposed meanings

Ben Child: Director hits back at critics who say his blockbuster space drama has as many scientific plot holes as wormholes

Last week, Taylor Swift redefined the entertainment industry by withdrawing from Spotify. This week she’s released a new video and literally changed the world for ever by smashing every paradigm

Compelling and strangely modern, the Met’s 400th anniversary show demonstrates that El Greco saw painting as more than just a craft. It was a philosophical, intellectual and religious undertaking

Zoe Williams goes among the women as fetish furniture at the RA’s new show to find out

Have a listen to Ariel Pink’s baffling new album ahead of release and let us know your thoughts

Writers including Yann Martel and Alberto Manguel hope to let incarcerated writers and the wider world know that they ‘are not forgotten’

The actor posed topless on the condition that her breasts would not be photoshopped, in protest against artificially perfect images of women. Hadley Freeman applauds the intention, but not the method

Evelyn Waugh’s Fleet Street satire remains sharp, pertinent and memorable, writes Robert McCrum

Megalomaniacs, murdering ice queens, deadly robo-cats … why are nice fluffy kids’ films such as Paddington and Postman Pat being overrun by violent villains? Nicholas Barber can’t bear to watch