Francisco Goya’s

‘Writing is exactly like love – you need to do it in the dark’: novelist Leila Slimani on starting a new chapter in her life

Now in residence at the Madrid Prado, the author talks about its dark, inspirational Goyas, the clandestine nature of her writing – and why she finally wrote about her jailed then posthumously exonerated fatherIt is a bright, chilly spring morning in Madrid, and the Museo del Prado doesn’t open to the public for another hour. Without the crowds, the museum is amorphous and eerily silent. A pale light pools in the corners and casts long shadows around the paintings, as if the figures inside...

‘Writing is exactly like love – you need to do it in the dark’: novelist Leila Slimani on why literature is erotic

What Dogs See

Dogs follow the direction of a person’s gaze almost as well as another person can—better, in fact, when they are motivated to, because dogs are relentless. They track the movements of our eyeballs to see what we’re looking at so that they can look at it too, and they pester us to look just as attentively at them. When my late golden retriever had something to show me—a ball that had rolled under a fence, a man with an irregular gait—he didn’t always bark.

What Dogs See That We Can’t

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Humans used to spend a lot of time thinking about what separated us from animals. René Descartes, who wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” practiced vivisection on rabbits and dogs because he thought that they lacked consciousness.