Helen Oyeyemi says her new novel Gingerbread is not about Hansel and Gretel 

Helen Oyeyemi writes some of the loveliest and oddest books I’ve ever read, filled with shivery, evocative sentences and fairy tale tropes turned slantwise. Her first novel, 2005’s — written by Oyeyemi when she was in high school in the UK and published when she was 20 — was about a little girl plagued by her nightmarish doppelgänger. Her 2014 novel , reimagined Snow White as an allegory of race in America.

Her 2016 short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, featured puppets with their strings slashed like a cut throat and a marshland full of …

A second person may be “cured” of HIV

In the history of HIV/AIDS, only a single person is believed to have been cured of the virus. Timothy Ray Brown, an American known as the “Berlin patient,” had HIV for more than a decade, until two stem-cell transplants in 2007 and 2008 cleared it from his body.

Now, according to a paper published in on Tuesday, there might finally be a second such patient.

Like Brown, the new patient had cancer and received a cancer treatment involving chemotherapy to wipe out the immune system and replace it, via a stem-cell transplant, with non-malignant donor cells. In …