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 Everage
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?
Samuel Beckett’s first published novel is an absurdist masterpiece, a showcase for his uniquely comic voice. And it's number 61 in our 100 best novels series:
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
It’s more than two centuries since Sense and Sensibility was first published, in three austere volumes. Things have grown rather more colourful since, with heaving bosoms, gilt-embossed curlicues appealing to different decades and demographics. Here are some of Jane’s many faces
The long-running battle between Amazon.com and publisher Hachette has come to a close after months of acrimony that pitted the world’s largest online retailer against authors, agents and publishers
Lists of best authors below the age of 40 reinforce the notion that fiction is a young person’s game. Isn’t it time we started celebrating the mature voice – and the achievement of being published at all?
As the Lego-loving, mountain-making hero of Danish architecture, Bjarke Ingels, descends on London for the first time to design new 'front door' for the Battersea Power Station, take a look at his most outlandish projects: http://gu.com/p/43aa5/fb
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. How to write a boyband hit, via Guardian music
The Guardian children’s fiction prize has gone to Piers Torday for The Dark Wild, "a fantastic example of how a book for children can be serious without preaching". Read up on the winner of the only children's book award judged by authors
Nothing was sacred for the 19th-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier, 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
William Boyd’s new thriller The Vanishing Game was not only commissioned by Land Rover but has a car of this firm written in to the story. Is this a new era for product placement?
In case you missed it ... Ten passages of highly-coloured prose are up for the prize every author dreads, the annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award. Here are some extracts ... Vote for the one that lights your fire
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. Here's why
Earthquake tours in China, Nazi massacre villages in France and genocide memorials from Rwanda to Cambodia ... Ambroise Tézenas’s unsettling images show the people drawn to honeypot dark tourism sites around the world
One lays out how “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, the other saw Christianity shaken to its roots as Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Together, the Bible and On the Origin of Species are the two most valuable books for humanity, according to a survey of the British public, with the religious text narrowly edging out one of the most important works in the history of science
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 at Isaac Asimov's Foundation series – and it would be a magnificent future if he can pull it off
Lost for more than 50 years since they were featured in Life Magazine, Gordon Parks’s stunning images show daily life for one Alabama family in the shadow of race riots, bus boycotts and the fight for civil rights
Bob Dylan 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
By donating his Picasso-riffing piece Gazing Ball (Charity), Jeff Koons raised money for vaccination and education programmes – and he’s part of an art world increasingly given to donations of valuable work
In our series on fictional villains, Xan Brooks argues that the baddie of Richard Adams’s Watership Down is made all the more scary by his moral complexity
Two-wheeled transport has come a long way over the last two centuries. As a new history is published, take a pictorial spin through the bike’s journey from 18th-century wood and iron to the very latest carbon fibre creations
Faraway oceans, cannibals, life-or-death struggles with sea monsters … songs that chronicled the lost culture of whaling are finding a new audience (via Guardian music)
Guardian music's piece on Taylor Swift's new music video might be a little sarcastic. "This works on so many levels and sends out so many stark and unignorable messages, that this single scene should be considered a work of art in its own right, as well as one of the most profound statements of our age"
Compelling and strangely modern, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York's 400th anniversary show demonstrates that El Greco saw painting as more than just a craft. It was a philosophical, intellectual and religious undertaking
"Jones’s images have been so influential that almost no image of woman-as-object or woman-as-other-object can be created, even 40 years later, that doesn’t nod to them."
"I can’t help but feel that her point about the obsession with women’s bodies would be a little more effective if her method didn’t involve exposing her own"
"Even in the age of online journalism, with many old practices facing extinction, its insights into the British press remain sharp, pertinent and memorable."
"Just as films based on British sitcoms always pack their characters off on a sunshine holiday, no one seems capable of putting an innocent children’s programme on the big screen without turning it into a borderline horror movie."