Holiday time: love it or dread it? In this Holidays from Hell issue with stories by Mark Piggott, Sarah Butler and Joseph Ridgwell, travel plans are subject to change...

Toby Litt and Drew Gummerson join Julia Bell and Marion Urch at the Guardian Newsroom on Wed 21 May in a debate on how useful writing courses really are to aspiring writers. Pictured: Aoi Matsushima, chair.

Sarah Salway is one of very few authors who’ve been known to walk around London in a bra. (It’s for charity, so it’s OK). Here she bares her literary bests.

A short novel by Gordon Burn, and short stories set in Britain and China by Vanessa Gebbie and Eileen Chang. And some non-fiction to bridge the Shanghai to Shepperton gap, from JG Ballard.