The 83-year-old played his first date of an intimate 20-city tour after quitting live performances back in 2018

Paul Simon largely avoided mention of the health problems that had kept him off the road for the previous seven years when the storied singer-songwriter kicked off his return – and evident farewell – tour in New Orleans on Friday.

Yet, having strummed and crooned his way through some of his catalogue’s more discreet entries, and having reached a part where he treated the audience to a closing salvo of three of his mega hits, Simon made apparent reference to them by letting some lyrics from The Boxer hang in the air.

It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON , had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares , directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) , that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy . Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON .

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first

Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, Nobber , about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection Hostages , described by the Spectator as “DayGlo-Breugelish nightmares”; Ferdia Lennon calls him “one of the most strikingly original Irish writers working today”. His new novel, Eden’s Shore , is a violent seafaring epic centred on a Spanish colony in Latin America at the end of the 18th century.

How did this book begin for you?
It’s a confluence of things I’ve been interested in all my life: Latin American literature, history, revolutionary politics, spirituality. Like Nobber , it’s about a dying town with a proliferation of characters, which I like. That’s not new – it’s Balzac, it’s Dickens – but for some reason we’ve distilled novels down to chamber pieces of six or seven characters; to me, that’s theatre, which I also love, but novels can proliferate horizontally in a way that other forms can’t.

What draws you to set your novels in the past?
You can do things with language and form that might not be as accepted in contemporary work, but I don’t see myself as a historical novelist. Literary fiction seems quite contemporary at the moment; historical fiction seems to be slipping into “genre”, like fantasy. In other parts of the world, it’s just part of literary fiction. We’re living through a moment in Irish literature with a lot of very good Irish writers who are all very different and talented, but maybe they’re not experimenting in genre as much as they would do elsewhere in the world. Because I find myself an Irishman among these people, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s different.’ In the 1960s in America, or Latin America in the 50s and 70s, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the lads.’

There are some pretty grisly scenes here. What were they like to write?
The nuts and bolts of novel formation are difficult for me – setting up a scene, getting from one place to another – but give me someone picking bullets out of someone’s gut and I think: here we fucking go. I’m writing for these moments where the body becomes real. Like, the eyeball scene... you should’ve seen the 300 words that were deleted; you’d have been seeing it for the rest of your life. I love my cousin to bits, but he had this fear of eyes as a child; mention the word “eye” and you’d see him kind of flinch. I tapped into that.

Old pals Ewan McGregor and Michael Grandage prepare for their new play, My Master Builder, by chuckling about everything that could go wrong and has

For today’s Observer New Review I had the not-exactly-onerous assignment of spending an hour with the actor Ewan McGregor and director Michael Grandage, as they prepared to put on a new play, My Master Builder , in London’s West End. The two men go way back, and mostly they were cracking each other up with knockabout old stories – much of which there wasn’t room for in my article. McGregor recalled one of his first roles on stage, as Orlando in As You Like It , and how when Simon Callow – multiple Olivier and Bafta award winner – played the part in 1979, he walked out on stage at the National Theatre only to promptly forget the first line of the play.

“If you’re a woman and you’re about to have a baby, everybody tells you nightmare stories about childbirth,” said McGregor. “And when you’re an actor about to do a play, everybody tells you terrible things that have happened on the stage.”

Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess’s adventure based on the world’s favourite video game feels like one big cash-in

It’s a curious choice of title. A Minecraft Movie implies that this cynical intellectual property-rinsing exercise is one of numerous film adaptations of the enduringly popular sandbox video game. Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine. What becomes clear is that one of the key elements in the game’s popularity – the latitude it affords gamers to create their own experience – is a big stumbling block for any film adaptation of Minecraft .

In the absence of a single fixed storyline the screenplay can follow, A Minecraft Movie has a cobbled-together feel, borrowing a device from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – and, in Jack Black, a star – and superimposing an all-purpose quest-for-an-artefact structure on to a colour-saturated backdrop of cube-shaped vegetation, pink sheep and lax building regulations.

In UK and Irish cinemas

The Germany-based American novelist on being cheered up by a gulag memoir, the best Wagner around and how to encourage a nightingale into your garden

Nell Zink was born in California in 1964 and grew up in rural Virginia. Before becoming a published novelist in her 50s, she worked a variety of odd jobs including bricklayer, technical writer and secretary, also running a postpunk zine. In 2014, with the help of Jonathan Franzen, she published her debut novel The Wallcreeper , followed closely by Mislaid , which was longlisted for a National Book Award. Her seventh novel, Sister Europe , out 24 April, charts the unravelling of a Berlin high-society party – Vogue called it “a worldly hangout novel of 21st-century manners”. Zink, a committed birder, lives outside Berlin.

New podcast series will show what coal-trimmers had to endure as they powered the ill-fated ship in 1912

Clinging to an overturned raft in the perilous, frozen waters of the north Atlantic, Jimmy McGann witnessed the horror of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. He was one of its soot-covered coal-trimmers, toiling in blazing heat, shovelling coal into furnaces that powered the mighty vessel.

Jimmy stayed aboard with the captain until the ship’s last moments and, although he survived history’s most famous maritime disaster, he died a few years later from pneumonia.

The radio DJ talks about missing grungy old music festivals, doing all the cleaning at home, and being brought up without ambition by his dad, John Peel

Music was playing before I was even born. I was born into the sound. My dad [radio presenter John Peel] used to make these mixtapes. We had three TDK 90s and we would drive around France in our battered, crappy Peugeot 505 estate, travelling the world musically through these cassettes.

As teenagers we used to get called crusties – we had long hair. It was that grunge era, early 90s. And then rave culture started and me and my friends got really into hardcore and jungle, and we got called ravers, but as an insult. I look back at that with great pride.

Village Underground, London
The laser-focused spoken-word performer returns to the musical stage with new tracks focusing on their identity, but wider concerns are never far away

“This has been a performance piece about how technology is going to be the death of us all,” jokes rapper, poet, author and playwright Kae Tempest as a keyboard player and a technician wrestle with malfunctioning equipment. We’re just two tracks in; Tempest assures us that if the electronics are not back up soon, they’ll do the whole show a cappella .

They could, too. The teenage Tempest cut their teeth battle-rapping in south London, turning to slam poetry when more direct avenues into hip-hop refused to open easily to a young, blond slip of a thing. You suspect they have never wasted the opportunity when handed a mic. Given Tempest’s extended output over more than a decade of albums, works of fiction, poems, plays and nonfiction, with prizes and accolades for many of them – you can’t imagine them ever being at a loss for words either.