The award-winning author and illustrator, who was suffering from lung cancer, is remembered as a ‘remarkable’ woman
The author of the beloved children’s novel Tuck Everlasting has died in the United States after battling lung cancer. Natalie Babbitt was 84 years old.
Babbitt was an author and illustrator. Her husband, Samuel Fisher Babbitt, said she died at home in Hamden, Connecticut, on Monday.
Continue reading...In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World will chart her path from a child of white evangelical parents to an activist who identifies as black
The civil rights activist who provoked anger, mockery and confusion last year after her white parents revealed she had posed as a black woman for years has unveiled a memoir that claims to explore “the discrimination she’s suffered while living as a black woman”.
Rachel Dolezal, 39, resigned from her post as a chapter president for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People last year, after her white parents revealed that for years she had altered her appearance and hidden traces of her biological family from her life.
Related: Rachel Dolezal: ‘I wasn't identifying as black to upset people. I was being me'
Related: Rachel Dolezal identifying as African American is highly unusual, experts say
Continue reading...Cambridge academic Ulinka Rublack’s new book claims the artist best known as a painter of the Tudor heirarchy had earlier used art to criticise the powerful
The 16th-century artist Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of tiny woodcuts, The Dance of Death, should be viewed as dangerous satire and an early form of political cartoon, according to a Cambridge academic.
Related: The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein review – capering skeletons and ruined churches
Continue reading...Author Emily Mandel decided to crunch the data and found if a book with ‘girl’ in the title was written by a man, the girl was more likely to end up dead
From Gone Girl to The Girl on the Train to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the author Emily St John Mandel has crunched the numbers on books with “girl” in their title and discovered that the girl is “significantly more likely to end up dead”, if the author of the book is male.
Mandel, author of the award-winning novel Station Eleven, was curious about the glut of bestselling titles with “girl” in their titles, a publishing trend which has mushroomed since Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series was published, and which continues to grow. In a piece for Nate Silver’s data journalism website FiveThirtyEight, she analysed Goodreads’ database of books that include the word “girl” in their title.
Continue reading...New volume of the author’s erotica, written for a private patron in the 1930s, will not show up in searches except under specific conditions
A new volume of lost writing by the author Anaïs Nin has been consigned by online retailer Amazon to its “adult content dungeon” – which is not as kinky as it sounds.
Instead it means that Amazon has effectively made the new book, Auletris: Erotica, invisible on its platform to anyone who searches for it under an “All Departments” filter.
Continue reading...In the closing years of the 21st century, in a Britain suffering the consequences of global warming and subsequent flooding, society is further divided by the invention of “the fix”, a pill that allows a privileged minority to live vastly extended lives. In Laurie Penny’s Everything Belongs to the Future (Tor, £9.50), the rich and famous co-opt not only the – albeit dubious – benefits of longevity, but dictate the cultural and political mood of the nation. Nina is part of an anarchist cell in flooded Oxford, who, alongside the pill’s inventor, are scheming to subvert the use of the drug. Meanwhile Nina’s lover, Alex, has his own agenda. Penny skilfully presents characters torn by desire, both emotional and intellectual, and packs more into a hundred pages than is found in many a bloated trilogy. Everything Belongs to the Future is a brilliant fiction debut, a searing indictment of the misuse of privilege and a dire warning about the consequences of allowing power to fall into the hands of a self-elected elite.
Continue reading...Trump scandals inspired Danielle Berrin to write a column about her encounter with interview subject Ari Shavit
One of Israel’s most prominent writers, Ari Shavit, has apologised after being accused of sexually harassing a woman journalist during a book tour of the United States.
Shavit, the author of the New York Times bestseller My Promised Land, issued a statement after becoming the subject of intense speculation that he was the unnamed writer referred to in a column by Danielle Berrin. In the column she complained of aggressive and unwanted sexual advances by an interview subject during a professional encounter in Los Angeles.
Continue reading...Charlie the Choo-Choo, written under the pseudonym Beryl Evans, steams out out of the pages of King’s Dark Tower fantasy series and into bookshops – with a warning for Thomas fans
If the Big Bad Wolf or the Wicked Queen aren’t frightening enough for your bedtime reading, then a nightmarish picture book from the imagination of Stephen King might be the answer.
Charlie the Choo-Choo, by one Beryl Evans, makes its first (fictional) appearance in King’s Dark Tower fantasy series, when it is spotted in a display of children’s books by the story’s child hero, Jake. “On the bright green cover was an anthropomorphic locomotive puffing its way up a hill ... its headlight was a cheerful eye which seemed to invite Jake Chambers to come inside and read all about it,” writes King.
Continue reading...The Tinder Foundation argues that these amenities should not receive a ‘get out of austerity free’ card simply because they are libraries
Less than two weeks after peers spoke in the House of Lords about the importance of protecting the nation’s libraries, and as residents in Walsall mourn “absolutely devastating” proposals to close 15 out of their 16 local libraries, a charity has warned that libraries should not “receive an automatic ‘get out of austerity free’ card, merely on the grounds of being libraries”.
‘Digital inclusion’ charity the Tinder Foundation said on Wednesday that libraries should not be protected at all costs, and that those not fulfulling their potential should not receive “a free pass”.
Related: 'There’s nowhere else for children': Walsall locals react to library closure plans
Continue reading...A hypnotic timelapse video shows staff stocking the library’s grand Rose main reading room before its reopening after restoration work. The stunning reading room – roughly the length of two city blocks on its Fifth Avenue location – has been closed for more than two years after a partial ceiling collapse.
Continue reading...Figures show that game-playing vloggers’ print debut sold more than 26,000 copies in its first three days on sale last week
A week after the starting gun was fired on the race to the top of the Christmas book charts, YouTube superstars the Sidemen have emerged in front of the likes of Jamie Oliver and Guy Martin in the battle for the No 1 spot.
Last week saw 219 new books published on what the Bookseller magazine has christened “Super Thursday”, the day on which a small avalanche of books expected to be Christmas hits are published. Bookshops tipped titles including Oliver’s Christmas Cookbook, Alan Bennett’s diaries Keeping On Keeping On and Alan Partridge’s Nomad for the top spot – but this week at least, The Sidemen are out in front.
Related: Super Thursday: battle for UK book charts Christmas No 1 begins
Continue reading...NWA rapper will play Fagin in new musical adaptation of the Dickens story, with Tony-winning director of Broadway hit Hamilton behind the camera
Rapper Ice Cube will play Fagin in a new musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.
The former NWA star will also co-produce the film, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Thomas Kail, who won a Tony award for directing the Broadway hit musical Hamilton, will make his film directing debut.
Related: Ice Cube and Kevin Hart: ‘Hollywood is realising that black people go to movies’
Continue reading...US author Paul Beatty wins the 2016 Man Booker prize in London on Tuesday for his book The Sellout, a satire of US racial politics. It is the first time an American has taken the prestigious fiction award. Beatty tells the audience that writing has given him a life
Continue reading...Former PM will give a ‘frank’ account of his time in Downing Street, including insights into family life and the EU referendum
David Cameron has signed a deal to write his autobiography, saying he will give a “frank” account of his time in Downing Street.
The former prime minister will spend the next year writing the book, which will give an insight into family life at No 10 as well as the inside track on his government.
Continue reading...Author wins for The Sellout, a satire of US racial politics, making him the first American writer to win award
Paul Beatty has become the first American writer to win the Man Booker prize, for a caustic satire on US racial politics that judges said put him up there with Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift.
The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation.
Related: Booker finalist Paul Beatty and Super Thursday – books podcast
Related: The Sellout rips up the rulebook of what qualifies as award-winning fiction
Continue reading...Paddington’s Finest Hour, a new title in the 90-year-old author’s much-loved series, brings fresh misadventures for the much loved children’s hero
Michael Bond has written a new Paddington book, the latest to feature the marmalade sandwich-munching, duffle-coated ursine icon from “darkest Peru” in a series stretching back nearly 60 years.
Paddington’s Finest Hour, which will be published in the UK and the US in April 2017, and in Australia in March, finds our hero in trouble once more, suffering a run-in with the police, starring in a TV cookery programme and even bestowing one of his celebrated hard stares upon a hypnotist on stage.
Related: Paddington through the ages – in pictures
Continue reading...Children’s laureates Chris Riddell and Malorie Blackman vie with past winners and new faces for the UK’s most prestigious prizes in children’s writing and illustrating
Over 200 books have been nominated for the UK’s two top awards for children’s literature, with 114 in the running for the 2017 CILIP Carnegie medal and 93 contending for the CILIP Kate Greenaway medal.
The awards, which are judged by librarians, were set up to recognise writers (the Carnegie) and illustrators (the Greenaway).
Related: My famous illustrator parents
Related: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Illustrated Edition – in pictures
Continue reading...Actor and comedian Elaine C Smith has published a translation of Julia Donaldson’s children’s classic in the Scottish city’s vernacular
The wee gallus moose squares uptae an auld owl, a sleekit snake an a ginormous gruffalo in a new version of Julia Donaldson’s classic picture book The Gruffalo, now translated into Glaswegian.
Actor and comedian Elaine C Smith, known for her role as Rab C Nesbitt’s wife Mary Doll Nesbit, has written a Glaswegian version of Donaldson’s well-known opening to her children’s story, “A mouse took a stroll through a deep dark wood. A fox saw the mouse and the mouse looked good.” Smith writes, instead: “A gallus moose taen a dauner through a scary big wood. A fox clocked the moose an the moose looked good.”
Related: Roald Dahl gets 'mair serious' Scots translation
Continue reading...Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, is a hit with readers – but gamblers are backing Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing
With hours to go before the winner of this year’s Man Booker prize is announced, former Waterstones bookseller Graeme Macrae Burnet’s tale of murder in a Scottish crofting community, His Bloody Project, is comfortably outselling the rest of the shortlist. But Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing has emerged as the frontrunner at the bookies.
Related: His Bloody Project review by Graeme Macrae Burnet – murder in the Highlands
Related: Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien review – China’s 20th-century tragedy
Continue reading...Lord of the Rings director will write and produce, while his longtime protege Christian Rivers will direct adaptation of steampunk fantasy series
Peter Jackson has found his next project: a film adaptation of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books. The New Zealand director will write and produce the film adaptation of Philip Reeve’s tetralogy about a dystopian steampunk future, with his protege Christian Rivers making his debut in the director’s chair.
Related: Philip Reeve: 'It’s possible that machines might become conscious'
Continue reading...Cash-strapped West Midlands authority proposes drastic cuts to libraries and art gallery, designed to save £86m by 2020
Walsall council is asking residents for their views on its plans to close 15 out of 16 of its local libraries.
The council’s drastic proposals to cut back its libraries, leaving just Walsall Central Library, come as it looks to save £86m by 2020. Cuts are also being proposed to Walsall’s New Art Gallery and other services.
Continue reading...Literary establishment’s alternative to the Man Booker will return as ‘the only major prize to reward what is genuinely the best book of the year’
The Folio prize, the literary award that was established in the wake of criticism of the Booker and suspended last year when its sponsor dropped out, has announced that it will be returning in 2017 and expanding its focus to include non-fiction.
The award’s director said that this was because “readers are less and less interested in the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction”, and that the change in focus would mean it would become “the only major literary prize to reward what is genuinely the best book of the year”.
Continue reading...Writer and activist, and ex-husband of Jane Fonda, became forever linked with Chicago seven trial of anti-Vietnam war protesters
The 1960s anti-war activist Tom Hayden, whose name became forever linked with the celebrated Chicago seven trial, Vietnam war protests and his ex-wife, actor Jane Fonda, has died. He was 76.
Continue reading...Co-creator of Preacher and artist on Judge Dredd, born in Luton in 1962, mourned by comic community
Steve Dillon, the comic book artist known for his work on Preacher, The Punisher and Judge Dredd, has died aged 54, his brother has said.
Continue reading...It is a novel lauded in the Netherlands as a modern classic, while its author is a literary titan. But British readers are unlikely to have heard of The Evenings or Gerard Reve.
Nearly 70 years after the novel’s publication and 10 years after Reve’s death, it has finally been translated into English. Set in Holland just after the second world war, it is a powerful story of an alienated young office worker who is cynical about his loving, middle-class parents and friends.
Continue reading...She has been cited as an inspiration by Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris. Now the American author Shirley Jackson, once memorably described as writing “not with a pen but a broomstick”, is set for a long overdue reappraisal on this side of the Atlantic.
This week sees the release of a new biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, swiftly followed by a graphic novel version of her most famous short story, The Lottery, illustrated by her grandson, Miles Hyman, and the publication of Dark Tales, a collection of her most chilling short stories. And the revival does not stop there: next year will see a film of her book We Have Always Lived In The Castle, with rising stars Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario, alongside Sebastian Stan and Crispin Glover.
Related: Out with vampires, in with haunted houses: the ghost story is back
Continue reading...Boys might claim it’s a simple matter of preferring to read magazines or the latest musings of their friends on social media rather than the classics. But two of the largest studies ever conducted into the reading habits of children in the UK have put those excuses to bed.
Boys, of every age, no matter the nature of the literature before them, typically read less thoroughly than girls.
Continue reading...The old-style model of publishing was: you wrote your book; you got an agent; your agent got you a publishing deal; you got published. Then the hard work began – getting noticed, getting reviews, sales, awards, bestseller lists, film deals. Finally, you relaxed on your yacht off Cap d’Antibes. Of course, very few writers made it to the end of that sequence.
The world has changed. Nowadays publishing is simultaneously easier and much, much harder. Easier because anybody can e-publish their book and present it to a global market with a couple of mouse-clicks. And, boy, are people presenting their works, uncountable rivers of e-books flowing over the cliff-face of the internet. Which is why it’s harder too, of course: with so much “content” out there, how is anyone to attract readers? Some manage it. Andy Weir initially published The Martian on his own website because nobody else was interested, and then watched it become first a global bestseller (quickly snapped up by a conventional publisher) and then an Oscar-nominated movie. But who else can pull off such a trick?
Related: The best recent science fiction novels – review roundup
Continue reading...Decision to make the DC superhero an honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women led to a petition and silent protest by employees
“This is the most fun the UN has had, I’m pretty sure right?” Diane Nelson, president of DC Entertainment said at a ceremony appointing Wonder Woman as the United Nations’ honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls. The ceremony was meant to honor the fight for gender inequality and the 75th anniversary of the character.
Related: Biopic of psychologist who created Wonder Woman heading to big screen
Related: Wonder Woman, the sexualized superhero
Related: Wonder Woman writer confirms superhero is queer
Continue reading...‘It’s not for the black person to be more open-minded. It’s for the white person to be less racist,’ says Booker winner in essay arguing it’s ‘time to stop talking’ about diversity in publishing
Marlon James, the author of the Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, has said that it’s “time to stop talking” about diversity, arguing that “it’s not for the black person to be more open-minded. It’s for the white person to be less racist.”
In an essay posted on the Literary Hub on Thursday, the Jamaican novelist suggests that “we too often mistake discussing diversity for doing anything constructive about it”, with the same points raised on panels about diversity year after year.
Related: Claudia Rankine: why I'm spending $625,000 to study whiteness
Continue reading...A US publisher claims to have produced the world’s longest graphic novel – a 2,000-page adaptation of the Old and New Testaments
There may be demons, plagues and the all horrors of the apocalypse, but there’s no room for any spandex superheroes in a graphic novel that its publishers are claiming is the longest ever produced. The only superpowers that feature in the 10,000 panels of the Kingstone Bible are wielded in the good fight, as the greatest story ever told gets a 12-volume comic-book adaptation.
Christian publisher Kingstone has been working on the project for seven years, using more than 45 illustrators to pull together what it is calling “the most complete graphic-novel adaptation of the Bible ever published”, at over 2,000 pages, in either 12 paperback volumes or three larger hardcover volumes.
Continue reading...M in the Middle draws on ups and downs of Limpsfield Grange schoolgirls’ lives and how autism is different for girls
A novel told from the point of view of a teenage girl with autism, written by schoolgirls with autism, has been published after the students – frustrated by their experience of a world that rejects and ignores them – decided to take matters into their own hands.
The pupils at Limpsfield Grange school, the country’s only state-funded residential school for girls with special needs, mined their own most painful – and uplifting – experiences to write M in the Middle, a young adult novel created with the help of their creative writing teacher, Vicky Martin.
Related: ‘Autism is seen as a male thing – but girls just implode emotionally’
Related: Is the NHS failing women with autism?
Continue reading...J Scott Campbell’s drawing of Riri Williams in a crop top in her dorm room criticised by fans for ‘age-inappropriate objectification’
Marvel has pulled a forthcoming comic cover after it was criticised for “sexualising” the 15-year-old girl who is the new Iron Man.
The variant cover showed Riri Williams, a science genius who reverse engineers one of Iron Man’s suits in her dorm room at MIT, in a revealing crop top, and drew sharp criticism online. “It’s as though they decided a teenage girl’s face was fine, but let’s attach a more grown-up body to that face, because she’s not a true female superhero until you can imagine having sex with her,” wrote Teresa Jusino at comics site the Mary Sue, calling on Marvel to “stop sexualising female teenage characters like Riri Williams”.
Continue reading...The notation that Dylan had won the Nobel prize in literature has now been removed from his website
It took Bob Dylan the best part of a week to acknowledge that he had been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, and even then only in the most dismissive way – an update to a page on his website plugging a new collection of his lyrics. But now it appears even that paltry nod went too far for the mercurial music legend.
The simple words “winner of the Nobel prize in literature”, which appeared on the page for The Lyrics 1961-2012, have now been removed. Bob Dylan, Nobel laureate, is once again plain Bob Dylan.
Related: Why Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel literature win
Continue reading...Nine Dots award invites book proposals from writers exploring whether digital technologies make politics impossible
A new literary award with a prize pot of $100,000 (£82,000) puts the Baillie Gifford’s £30,000 and the Man Booker’s £50,000 in the shade. But the entry that takes the inaugural Nine Dots prize will differ from the season’s other prizewinning books in one crucial respect: it won’t exist.
Drawing its name from a puzzle that can be solved only by lateral thinking, the Nine Dots prize is asking for responses to the question: “Are digital technologies making politics impossible?” Established writers and debut authors are invited to send 3,000-word answers, along with an outline showing how they would develop their argument into a short book. The award, judged anonymously by a 12-strong panel of academics, authors and journalists, also includes a book deal with Cambridge University Press.
Continue reading...London show will feature newly-found work from Finnish artist popularly known for her hippo-like valley-dwellers
Newly discovered artwork by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson which was sitting uncatalogued and unrecognised at the British Cartoon Archive is to go on display next year at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.
Jansson is best known for her blobby superstars the Moomins, who became so much more famous than their creator that they decorated the tail fins of Finnish planes, and even the wristwatch of former president Tarja Halonen.
Related: Frank Cottrell Boyce: Five things to learn from the Moomins
Continue reading...The Boss told BBC that he wrote the ‘big ballad’ I’ll Stand By You for the franchise, inspired by when he read the novels to his son, but ‘they didn’t use it’
Bruce Springsteen couldn’t cast a spell over the the producers of the Harry Potter film franchise, after he confirmed rumors that he had wrote a song for the series that was rejected.
The Boss made the admission during a Wednesday interview on BBC Radio 2 when asked to address a rumor that he had written a song called I’ll Stand By You for one of the Harry Potter films.
Related: Bruce Springsteen: 'Donald Trump is undermining the entire democratic tradition'
Continue reading...Twitter users have seized on a tweet describing the Republican nominee’s vague debate responses as ‘like a book report from a teenager who hasn’t read the book’
Inspired by Donald Trump’s responses during the third presidential debate, Twitter users are humorously attempting to explain great works of literature through the Republican’s eyes using #TrumpBookReport.
Related: Guardian US and WNYC debate party kicks off US membership program
I've never had a problem finding Waldo, Never. Ask anyone. I always find Waldo. #TrumpBookReport
There was a Lion, okay? King of the Jungle. And the Witch? Lemme tell you, nasty. And the Wardrobe, so luxurious. The best. #trumpbookreport
"TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? Believe me-if those mockingbirds had guns they wouldn't have been killed."#TrumpBookReport
Little Women? Look at their Facebook page. That Jo walked in front of me, and I don't think so, folks, I don't think so. #TrumpBookReport
Fault? These stars are a disaster. A disaster, let me tell you. Believe me, I'm going to make stars great again. #TrumpBookReport
Those poor heights. They were wuthering. Wuthering so bad. Bigly wuthering. I'll make them great again. #TrumpBookReport @AntonioFrench
Nowhere does it say that anything actually happened between Lolita and Humbert, it was just boy talk. #TrumpBookReport
Lady Macbeth. Nasty woman. Blood coming out of her wherever. #TrumpBookReport
Gatsby? He says he was great. I don't know. People are saying maybe not so great. I'll make Gatsby great again. #trumpbookreport
It took Low Energy Harry Potter 7 books to defeat Voldermort. Sad! I would have beat him in the first book! #TrumpBookReport
Voldemort was a good man. A good man. People say I'm like him, that's good. But Hermione was a nasty, nasty woman. #TrumpBookReport
Oedipus. Tremendous leader. The best. I've always said that if Jocasta were my mother, perhaps I'd be dating her. #TrumpBookReport
Continue reading...The Trinidadian writer joins Alice Oswald, Ian Duhig and Denise Riley among the final 10 vying for the UK’s richest poetry prize
After landing the £15,000 Forward prize for best collection in September, the Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo is in the running for the UK’s richest award for poetry, the £20,000 TS Eliot award.
Measures of Expatriation, which explores identity and the alienation of the expatriate, is one of 10 collections in the running for the prize. It is up against collections from Alice Oswald, Ian Duhig and Denise Riley, all of which also appeared on the Forward shortlist. Oswald’s Falling Awake examines mutability; Duhig’s The Blind Road draws from both Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the life of the 18th-century polymath Blind Jack Metcalf; and Riley’s Say Something Back revolves around her late son and includes her long poem about grieving and loss, A Part Song.
Continue reading...Historical and contemporary fiction go head-to-head as UK authors Tanya Landman and Alex Wheatle vie with US writer Brian Selznick and Australian Zana Fraillon for the only children’s book award judged by children’s authors
Tanya Landman, who won the Carnegie medal last year for her historical novel Buffalo Soldier, has made the shortlist for the Guardian children’s fiction prize for Hell and High Water, set in 18th-century England.
Landman’s novel, one of four titles shortlisted for the award, follows the story of Caleb and his father, showmen for a Punch and Judy show. When Caleb’s father is falsely accused of a crime and transported to the colonies, Caleb is determined to find out the truth. Judge and winner of last year’s prize David Almond called it “beautifully written and wonderfully paced”, adding that Landman “handles a complex, wide-ranging plot with vivacity, verve and skill”.
Related: Enter the Guardian young critics competition 2016
Continue reading...Actor would join Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Lin-Manuel Miranda in Mary Poppins Returns, set 25 years after events of original
Colin Firth is in negotiations to join the sequel to Mary Poppins, playing the president of a bank.
According to a report by Variety, Firth would take the role of William Weatherall Wilkins of the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, at which George Banks, the children’s father, works in the first film.
Continue reading...The Roald Dahl character is being revived for a forthcoming screen outing from the producer of the Harry Potter franchise
A new film is being planned around the character of Willy Wonka, the eccentric chocolatier at the center of Roald Dahl’s children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.
The revival is being brought to the screen by Harry Potter producer David Heyman, according to Variety. The Secret Life of Pets writer Simon Rich is handling the screenplay.
Related: Gene Wilder, star of Willy Wonka and Mel Brooks comedies, dies aged 83
Continue reading...Christie’s to sell weapon fired in torrid affair between French poets in 1873 that inspired A Season in Hell and other classics
The most famous gun in French literature, the revolver with which the poet Paul Verlaine tried to kill his lover, Arthur Rimbaud, is going under the hammer, Christie’s has said.
Verlaine bought the 7mm six-shooter in Brussels on the morning of July 10, 1873, determined to put an end to a torrid two-year affair with his teenage lover.
Related: How 555 nights in jail helped to make Paul Verlaine a ‘prince of poets’
Related: Rimbaud and Verlaine’s London home should have its blue plaque now | Letters
Continue reading...Report finds average earnings for British authors are just £12,500, with legal protections among the worst in Europe
As publishing prepares for the Christmas rush, with a blizzard of titles due for launch this week on “Super Thursday”, a European commission report has shown that life is less than super for many authors in the UK, with average annual incomes for writers languishing at £12,500.
This figure is just 55% of average earnings in the UK, coming in below the minimum wage for a full-time job at £18,000 and well below the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s minimum income standard of £17,100.
Continue reading...Beren and Lúthien, a story of the perilous romance between a man and an elf, is one of a number of texts by the author brought ‘together for the first time’
JRR Tolkien’s legend of the mortal man Beren and the immortal elf Lúthien – a story that meant so much to the Lord of the Rings author that the characters’ names are engraved on the headstone shared by him and his wife – is to be published next year.
The Middle-earth tale tells of the love between the mortal man and the immortal elf. Lúthien’s father, an Elvish lord, is against their relationship, and so gives Beren an impossible task to fulfil before the two can be married, said HarperCollins, which will publish Beren and Lúthien next May. The pair then go on to rob “the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril”, or jewel.
Related: JRR Tolkien's first fantasy story to be published this month
Continue reading...Beth Macy’s Truevine tells the story of albino black boys displayed as circus freaks in racially segregated Virginia, and DiCaprio’s production company is negotiating rights to the book
Leonardo DiCaprio is reportedly looking to produce and star in a film about two young black brothers in the racially segregated southern US who were kidnapped and displayed as circus freaks.
The boys appeared as monstrous performers such as 'sheep-headed cannibals' or 'ambassadors from Mars'
Related: Before the Flood: Leonardo DiCaprio hopes his new film will inspire climate action
Continue reading...Volumes covering athletics, surfing, football, cricket, horse racing and swimming are in the shortlist for this year’s William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, the world’s richest and longest-running prize for sports writing.
Related: Adrian Doherty: the lost star of Manchester United’s class of 92 | Daniel Taylor
Continue reading...Emily Blunt’s thrilling commute outpaces Tom Hanks’s globetrotting adventures in Inferno in a clash of book adaptations
Resisting the challenge of Tom Hanks’s globetrotting symbologist in Inferno, The Girl on the Train hangs on to the top spot, with a gentle decline from the previous weekend of 34%. After 12 days, the murder mystery has grossed an impressive £13.7m, which compares with £9.8m for Gone Girl at the same stage of its run. Gone Girl enjoyed a lot of staying power, ending up with £22.4m in the UK – more than double the number it had reached after two weekends.
Continue reading...Brendan Gleeson also confirmed for the second film about the misadventures of the marmalade-loving bear from deepest, darkest Peru
Hugh Grant will appear in the forthcoming Paddington film, it has been announced, with Brendan Gleeson also joining the cast.
Grant will play Phoenix Buchanan, a celebrity who lives on the same road as the eponymous bear and his adoptive family, the Browns. Buchanan is described by the production company as “a vain, charming acting legend whose star has fallen somewhat in recent years”.
Related: Paddington review – bear baits Ukip with fluffy immigrant tale
Continue reading...Michael Almereyda is set to adapt the 1985 story of professor of Hitler studies forced to confront his mortality when a toxic black cloud appears above his town
Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise is to be adapted for the big screen by Michael Almereyda, the writer-director best known for Hamlet and Experimenter.
Related: Don DeLillo's White Noise: a novel way of dismantling consumerist excess
Related: Don DeLillo: ‘I think of myself as the kid from the Bronx’
Continue reading...Walking Dead artist says now familiar label marks off the term comic as restricted to children, when the form is ‘literally for everyone’
The Walking Dead artist Charlie Adlard has been appointed as the UK’s new comics laureate – taking the opportunity to call time on use of the expression “graphic novel”.
Adlard, who has worked on comics including 2000AD, Mars Attacks, The X-Files, Judge Dredd and X-Men, as well as being the artist behind the popular zombie series The Walking Dead, was appointed to the role at the Lakes international comic art festival in Kendal, Cumbria at the weekend. He is the UK’s second comics laureate, following Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, who was appointed in 2014. The role is intended to “raise awareness of the impact comics can have in terms of increasing literacy and creativity”, and can go to a comics creator, writer or artist.
Continue reading...Terrifying children into good behaviour turned into an excellent business model for late 17th-century author William Darton
A book aimed at preparing UK children in the Georgian period for the many dangers of life – such as playing with loaded guns, crashing into rivers in hot air balloons, riding a horse over the parapet of a bridge, and keeping a fully-grown lion in the bedroom – is going on sale for £2,000.
The author, William Darton, appeared to think terrifying children into good behaviour was an excellent business model: he wrote, engraved the illustrations, and published the book in 1801, along with two equally gruesome companion volumes.
Continue reading...David Ireland’s The World Repair Video Game shortlisted in fiction category alongside Steve Toltz and Charlotte Wood
A novel with a print run of only 350 copies is among the works shortlisted for the $80,000 fiction prize in the Prime Minister’s Literary awards.
David Ireland’s first novel in two decades, The World Repair Video Game, was published by Tasmanian-based literary journal Island firstly as a serial and then as a limited-edition hardcover. The three-time Miles Franklin award winner has been shortlisted along with Forever Young by Steven Carroll, The Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton, Quicksand by Steve Toltz, and the Stella prize-winning The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood.
Related: Tim Winton on class and neoliberalism: 'We're not citizens but economic players'
Related: Bookmark this: from Fielding to feminism – October's literary highlights
Continue reading...Second outing for heroine who fought sexual violence with help of Hindu goddess Parvati will highlight issues surrounding acid attacks on Indian women
Two years after unveiling a comic about a rape survivor turned superhero who takes on her abusers, film-maker Ram Devineni is using a sequel to highlight the acid attacks that maim and scar hundreds of women in India every year.
Priya’s Shakti was the first Indian comic book of its kind, using augmented reality technology to tell the story of a young rural woman who is gang-raped and consequently shamed by her family and community.
Related: Benjamin Dix: ‘I’m the custodian of some of the darkest stories in the world’
For survivors of rape and acid attacks, to see themselves represented in art and pop culture is pretty cool
Continue reading...Non-fiction prize judges select books by Svetlana Alexievich, Margo Jefferson, Philippe Sands and Hisham Matar
Books by two journalists, one a Pulitzer prizewinner, the other a Nobel laureate, have made it to the shortlist announced on Monday for the £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction.
One is a study of life in the Soviet Union just before the system collapsed, by the Belarusian campaigning journalist Svetlana Alexievich, which won her last year’s Nobel prize for literature. The other is a memoir of life growing up in a privileged black district of Chicago by the Pulitzer prizewinning critic Margo Jefferson.
Continue reading...It is first time one of the controversial Scottish writer’s books will be made into a TV drama
The author of Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh, is adapting his novel Crime for television.
Related: Danny Boyle confirms Trainspotting sequel at Telluride film festival
Continue reading...In 2002, Cathi Hanauer published The Bitch in the House, a bestselling compilation of 26 life stories by women who felt they were carrying a disproportionate load in the home and in their lives.
They were angry and disillusioned, sexually unfulfilled, financially over-burdened, their menfolk were lazy and unappreciative, and their children messy – and that was just the start.
Continue reading...As her reimagined version of Shakespeare’s Tempest is released, the acclaimed author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Maddaddam talks about how the world of 2016 is starting to look alarmingly like something from one of her books
Related: Margaret Atwood selects Tutul for Pen writer of courage award
On Thursday, just as I am saying goodbye to Margaret Atwood at the end of our interview, I get a text message. “Oh,” I say. “Bob Dylan’s won the Nobel prize.” She is about to have her photograph taken, and is arranging a rakish grey felt hat atop her steely curls. She looks at me, opens her mouth very slightly, and widens her eyes. They are the faintly unrealistic blue of a Patagonian glacier.
Related: A perfect storm: Margaret Atwood on rewriting Shakespeare’s Tempest
Related: The month in comics: Margaret Atwood unleashes an eco-friendly superhero
Continue reading...Harry Potter author reveals intentions at event in Leicester Square, saying it was always her and director David Yates’s intention to do more than one film
JK Rowling has revealed she has planned scripts for at least four further Fantastic Beasts films. The author made the announcement to thousands of delighted fans who had gathered for a special event celebrating next month’s release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Speaking at the event at Cineworld’s Empire Imax cinema in London’s Leicester Square, alongside actor Eddie Redmayne and director David Yates, she said: “We always knew it was going to be more than one movie, and we said a trilogy as a placeholder. But I’ve done the plotting properly and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be five movies.” Yates added that the next film will see Redmayne’s character, the animal-loving Newt Scamander, visit another of the world’s major capital cities.
Continue reading...‘You cannot sit on the fence. This is the biggie,’ say organisers of the Lakes international festival, due to to take place on Friday
The indomitable Gaul Asterix is set to go head-to-head with quiffed cub reporter Tintin in what is being described as a “clash of the titans” at the Lakes international comic art festival.
Tintin expert Benoît Peeters, Lancaster University’s new visiting professor in graphic fiction and comic art, will be putting the case for creator Hergé, while Peter Kessler, the Bafta award-winning producer and author of The Complete Guide to Asterix, will be speaking up for René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo at the festival in Kendal, Cumbria, on Friday evening. With an online poll currently giving Asterix 63% of the vote and Tintin 31% (6% of respondents were apparently unable to decide between the characters), the Lakes festival’s organisers were clear that “you’re either an Asterix or a Tintin fan. You cannot sit on the fence. You have to choose. This is the biggie.”
Related: Asterix interview: 'it’s definitely more ambitious and topical'
Related: Original Tintin comic artwork sells for more than €1m
Continue reading...The acclaimed L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Naples featured in the book and film – now a branch is opening in north London
Naples’ most famous pizza joint, L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele – featured in the bestselling travel memoir Eat Pray Love – is set to open a branch in London.
“I love my pizza so much,” author Elizabeth Gilbert wrote on her visit to the restaurant, where she ordered a margarita with double mozzarella, “that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.”
Continue reading...Peers including John Bird, Ray Collins and Gail Rebuck slam budget cuts as ‘appalling’ and a ‘disaster’ during a heated session in Westminster
John Bird painted a grim picture of the UK with a reduced library service, warning the House of Lords on Thursday that cuts would result in “disorder, crime, problems for schools and the fact that children will not be able to get a job because they will not have the skills and abilities”.
Opening a debate on libraries, bookshops and booksellers, the Big Issue founder told the house that “we have lost more than 500 [libraries] since 2010”, and almost 9,000 librarians. Describing the UK’s public library service as essential, he called on the government to “supply some emergency relief money to stop local authorities doing this dastardly deed, this process of philistinising our communities”.
Continue reading...Screenwriter Billy Ray reportedly working on adaptation of classic novel about the delusional, romantic knight
A film based on Miguel de Cervantes’ classic picaresque tale Don Quixote is in development at Disney, it has emerged.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, screenwriter Billy Ray is working on an adaptation of Quixote that recalls “the madcap and fantastical nature of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies”. If successful, it could become the basis for a Pirates-style franchise. Ray, writer on Captain Phillips and The Hunger Games, is also on board as producer.
Related: Don Quixote sent in to jail to cheer up El Chapo
Continue reading...The Icelandic writer joins Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell in creating a work to be locked away in Norway until 2114, as part of Katie Paterson’s art installation
The acclaimed Icelandic author Sjón has been named as the third of 100 writers who will contribute to artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library, an artwork spanning 100 years which will see each manuscript locked away unseen until 2114, when the collection of 100 texts is finally revealed.
Margaret Atwood was Future Library’s first contributor, handing over her piece of writing, Scribbler Moon, to Paterson in 2015. David Mitchell followed up this spring with From Me Flows What You Call Time. Both authors passed on their manuscripts in the middle of Oslo’s Nordmarka forest, where Paterson planted 1,000 trees in 2014. In 2114, the trees will be cut down to make the paper on which the 100 manuscripts will be printed – and, finally, read.
Related: Sjón: I’m one of the few people who’ve had Björk as a backing singer
Related: Katie Paterson, the cosmicomical artist
Am I a writer of my times? Who do I write for? Will there be people in the future who understand the language?
Continue reading...Atwood praises the ‘huge personal courage’ of the Bangladeshi publisher, who survived a machete attack by Islamic extremists and still won’t be silenced
After surviving an extremist attack in his own country and being forced into exile in Norway, the Bangladeshi publisher and writer Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, who is also known as Tutul, was named winner of the International Writer of Courage award by Margaret Atwood, on 13 October.
Speaking in London, he challenged his critics to counter his views in writing, rather than with violence, describing “a strong effort in Bangladesh to turn the wheels of civilisation backwards and repeat the events and lies of a barbaric era”.
Related: Margaret Atwood wins 2016 PEN Pinter prize
Related: Bangladesh blogger killed by machete gang had asked for police protection
Continue reading...Singer-songwriter takes the award for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’
For more than six decades he has remained a mythical force in music, his gravelly voice and poetic lyrics musing over war, heartbreak, betrayal, death and moral faithlessness in songs that brought beauty to life’s greatest tragedies.
But Bob Dylan’s place as one of the world’s greatest artistic figures was elevated further on Thursday when he was named the surprise winner of the Nobel prize for literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Related: Bob Dylan wins 2016 Nobel prize in literature – live updates and reaction
Continue reading...Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel prize for literature, says the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius. Announcing the award on Thursday she says Dylan ‘created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. He is the first songwriter to win the accolade and the first American to win since Toni Morrison in 1993
American novelist Bill Beverly beats Christopher Brookmyre and Mick Herron to scoop two prizes for debut novel Dodgers at Crime Writers’ Association awards
First-time American novelist Bill Beverly has won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year.
Beverly’s Dodgers, about a man who works for an LA drugs organisation and who is sent to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin by his boss, beat Christopher Brookmyre’s award-winning novel Black Widow, as well as titles by Denise Mina and Mick Herron, to win the CWA’s top prize last night. Beverly, who teaches American literature and writing in Washington DC’s Trinity University, and who turned his research on criminal fugitives into the book On the Lam, is a first-time novelist, and also won the CWA’s John Creasey New Blood Dagger, for the best debut crime novel, last night.
Continue reading...DC superhero punching for gender equality to be honoured at her 75th birthday party, attended by Ban Ki-moon and ‘surprise guests’
The United Nations is due to welcome a new honorary ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls: Wonder Woman.
Related: Wonder Woman, the sexualized superhero
Continue reading...Vietnamese-American writer, whose Vietnam war novel also won the Pulitzer, awarded for ‘profound and startling’ debut
The Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Sympathizer has won the Dayton literary peace prize, a unique award that “celebrates the power of literature to promote peace, social justice and global understanding”.
Nguyen’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer this spring, looks at the legacy of the Vietnam war through the story of a double agent. The organisers of the Dayton prize, which is worth $10,000 (£8,000) and was inspired by the Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, called it a “profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut ... both gripping spy yarn and astute exploration of extreme politics”.
Related: Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'Winning the Pulitzer changed the value of my book and myself'
Related: After the A-bomb: Hiroshima and Nagasaki then and now – in pictures
Continue reading...A digital trove of letters, essays and photographs disclose the Nobel laureate’s views on detective fiction, poetry publishing – and his ‘dread’ of the US
A timely essay by TS Eliot, in which he warns that “it is because I care about the future of England, that I must care also for the future of France; and it is because I must believe in the future of England, that I must look with confidence to the future of France”, is being published for the first time in English on tseliot.com, a new website launched by the poet’s estate and Faber & Faber, the publishing house where he was a director.
Featuring hundreds of unpublished letters by Eliot, along with rare material including photographs from the collection of his late wife Valerie Eliot, the site is free to access. Faber press director Henry Volans said he hoped it would show all sides of a writer whom the Nobel prize committee said in 1948 had made an “outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”.
Continue reading...Reissue of the lavish compilation of recipes, Les Diners de Gala, features dishes such as conger eel of the rising sun and frog pasties
Stuck for ideas for Christmas dinner this year? Worry no more. Thanks to an unlikely new celebrity chef, fashionable dinners this festive season are likely to feature thousand-year-old eggs, conger eel of the rising sun and frog pasties (recipe below), all washed down with a cocktail of brandy, ginger and cayenne pepper.
If that sounds a bit more surreal than your standard fare, you’re on the right culinary track. A rare and fantastical cookbook by the painter Salvador Dalí is being reissued for the first time in more than 40 years, and already looks set to be an unexpected Christmas bestseller.
Continue reading...Dull Margaret, a darkly humorous tale illustrated by the artist Dix, is tipped to be a hot property at the Frankfurt book fair
The actor Jim Broadbent is making his first foray into fiction with a graphic novel inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th-century painting of a “strong, intense woman striding determinedly across the landscape”, Dulle Griet.
The Dulle Griet (Mad Meg) painting shows a breastplated woman with a sword in one hand in front of the mouth of hell. Broadbent, known for roles in films from Bridget Jones to Harry Potter, said the image gave him the “initial idea” for his story Dull Margaret, because: “I love the image of this strong, intense woman striding determinedly across the landscape.”
Continue reading...Industry’s lack of diversity ‘is a real issue, and we have been slow’, says Tom Welson, launching a new scheme to attract under-represented communities
The chief executive of the UK’s largest publisher has warned that the books industry will “become irrelevant” if it continues to fail to reflect the society we live in.
Tom Weldon, chief executive of Penguin Random House UK, was speaking as the publisher launched a new scheme intended to discover and mentor authors from the UK’s under-represented communities, whether this means they are writers from a poorer backgrounds, from LGBTQ or BAME (black, Asian, minority ethnic) communities, or writers with a disability.
Related: Report finds UK books world has marginalised and pigeonholed ethnic minorities
Continue reading...Old-fashioned language and quaint illustrations are part of the ageless appeal of a classic children’s book, so stop modernising them: this is a growing plea from the parents of young readers – and it seems publishers are beginning to listen.
Last month’s decision to turn back to the original look and vocabulary of the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton has opened the door for another classic children’s author, a forgotten star of storytelling, to be republished, as written, this autumn. Convinced that the best stories stand the test of time, editors at Pikku Books are to bring out original versions of stories by writer Elizabeth Clark, once a familiar sight on nursery bookshelves.
Continue reading...Huge tome of the artist’s pictures has 450 prints dating back to 1953, and is so heavy it comes with its own stand in his trademark colours
David Hockney, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists, has collaborated with a major publisher to create the largest book ever devoted to his art. The volume is so vast that it comes with its own adjustable bookstand and is as heavy as an armchair.
Such is Hockney’s excitement over the project that he has been involved with every stage of its production, from selecting more than 450 works for inclusion to overseeing layouts and colour proofing. “It is an autobiography in pictures, made by a person who loves pictures and makes them,” he said.
Continue reading...Booker-shortlisted author’s novel takes £5,000 award for its ‘darkly funny, marvellously observant’ stories
David Szalay’s All That Man Is, already shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize, has won the Gordon Burn award for a novel praised by judges as a work that “subtly changes the way you look at the contemporary world”.
Related: All That Man Is by David Szalay review – a kaleidoscopic portrait of masculinity
Continue reading...Belfast author takes prize for his novel The Good Son, while transgender writer Juliet Jacques is named first ever runner up for her ‘extraordinary’ memoir, Trans
Northern Irish author Paul McVeigh has won the Polari first book prize for his novel The Good Son, a coming-of-age tale that follows a young boy growing up during the Troubles in 1980s Belfast.
Related: The Good Son by Paul McVeigh review – Belfast boy in the 80s
Related: Juliet Jacques: ‘I spent years pretending to be male’
Continue reading...Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast
On this week’s podcast, we discuss gender dynamics in science fiction with Naomi Alderman, Lauren Beukes and Alastair Reynolds. Naomi and Lauren explain why scifi was invented by women and how the genre lends itself to exploring gender issues, while Alastair shares why he used to make a point of including female protagonists in his books to redress the balance – but often finds himself at the mercy of characters taking hold of the narrative themselves.
Continue reading...Series of sightings of people dressed as clowns and frightening children reported across UK after similar incidents sweep US
It has been three decades since Stephen King unleashed Pennywise, his malevolent clown character in the novel It. No one is quite sure why there have been dozens of sightings across the US in recent weeks, but one thing is certain: the scary clown craze has crossed the Atlantic.
Related: Clown sightings: the day it all began
Related: Stephen King tells US to 'cool the clown hysteria' after wave of sightings
Can't get over seeing a scary clown driving a transit van through Liverpool city centre today, genuinely scared me to death
No! Just no! - Caernarfon boy films creepy clown lurking near children's playground in ... https://t.co/xKraRyWG5k
It happened to me and i'm shaken and traumatised. Please be careful
I HAVE NEVER RAN SO FAST IN MY LIFE. the only thought that goes through your head is 'i'm going to die' its scary and NOT a joke
Continue reading...Merger of SciFiNow publisher Imagine with SFX publisher Future could drive prices higher or reduce choice, says CMA
The choice of reading material on offer to fans of science fiction could be unduly restricted by a merger between two publishers, competition regulators have said.
The Competition and Markets Authority is launching an “in-depth investigation” into the planned takeover of Imagine Publishing, which produces SciFiNow, by SFX publisher Future.
Continue reading...The poet has revealed plans for ‘an odyssey’ that will take in overlooked parts of Scotland and form the basis of a long poem about the country
As the UK lurches towards xenophobia, it is a writer’s responsibility to “tell the time”, says Scotland’s national poet Jackie Kay.
Kay, whose complex relationship with her Scottish identity provides inspiration for much of her work, warned that poets should not shy away from addressing current and acute political divisions.
Continue reading...Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies, Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery and Ibram X Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning among finalists for National Book Award
The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has made the shortlist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, for his investigation into how the Vietnam war is remembered around the world.
Related: Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'My book has something to offend everyone'
Related: Colson Whitehead: 'My agent said: Oprah. I said: Shut the front door'
Daily I sit
with the language
they’ve made
of our language
to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs
like you.
You are what is referred to as
a ‘CASUALTY’
The Underground Railroad, about a black woman trying to escape the horrors of slavery, is the most high-profile novel on a diverse list of less well-known books
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad led the 2016 National Book Award shortlist on Thursday morning as expected. It is no doubt a favorite to win among the very small number of people who are nerdy enough about contemporary literature to actually think about book awards betting odds. It’s so good it’s hard to praise it without whipping out the cliches: it’s an elegant, devastating powerhouse of a book, following a young black woman all over America as she tries to escape the horrors of slavery. When it was published with Oprah’s imprimatur, in August, it was universally acclaimed. It deserved it. That means anyone who follows the whole march of books in a year will expect Whitehead to walk away with the prize.
Related: Colson Whitehead: 'My agent said: Oprah. I said: Shut the front door'
Related: Jacqueline Woodson: 'I don't want anyone to feel invisible'
Continue reading...The creator of the paint-faced villain Pennywise, in his novel It, responds to panic over spate of ‘clown-related activity’ across the country
After instilling a fear of clowns into millions of readers with his malevolent character Pennywise, novelist Stephen King has urged an America alarmed by a flurry of threatening clown sightings that it’s “time to cool the clown hysteria”.
Related: Clown sightings: the day it all began
Related: Why Stephen King's It still terrifies 30 years on
Hey, guys, time to cool the clown hysteria--most of em are good, cheer up the kiddies, make people laugh.
Continue reading...Organisers of the annual celebration have commissioned works giving voice to local landmarks in ‘a lyrical mapping of the English landscape’
From the “worst road in Britain”, the “Essex/Suffolk artery” of the A12, to Leicester’s Golden Mile via a Lincolnshire sausage, a host of poets have adopted the voices of local landmarks in order to mark Thursday’s National Poetry Day.
Channelling WH Auden, who wrote that a poet’s hope is “to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere”, the 40 poets were commissioned by BBC local radio to dream up poems in the voices of local landmarks. Luke Wright takes on Suffolk, plumping for the A12, “England’s crude appendix scar … salt-baked, pot-holed, choked with cars”, which will “take you from the fug and sprawl / to Suffolk’s icy brine and foam”.
Continue reading...From tinting their pages yellow to redesigning fonts, publisher Barrington Stoke is leading the way in dyslexia-friendly books. They and their authors – including Meg Rosoff and Anthony McGowan – explain the practicalities
Mainstream understanding of dyslexia has come a long way from the days when children with reading difficulties were labelled simply lazy or stupid. This week in England and Wales is Dyslexia Awareness Week and according to the British Dyslexia Association, it’s estimated that 10% of the population are affected, 4% severely so. When there is a substantial body of evidence to show that children who read for pleasure achieve better academic results - and have greater levels of personal happiness throughout their lives – what is the best way to entice children to whom books seem inimical tests they’re set up to fail, into rewarding, enjoyable experiences?
Barrington Stoke is an Edinburgh-based publisher that specialises in books for children with dyslexia. Design and presentation are important factors in its output – with careful character spacing, and a bespoke font, called Barrington Stoke Roman, that minimises the chance of a reader confusing letter shapes. Illustrations are strategically placed to create a sense of accessibility, breaking up what may otherwise seem a dense textual barrier. The books are printed on a yellowish, tinted paper that minimises visual stress – a condition that can make printed words appear to dance or jump – and the pages are thicker too, to prevent words and pictures showing through the paper.
I pared my writing style down, using simpler constructions and more direct language. I think it made me a better writer.
Continue reading...The singer’s memoirs, over which he laboured for seven years, sold more than 37,500 copies in the first week on sale and are tipped as a possible Christmas No 1
Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born to Run has sprinted to the top of the UK’s book charts in its first week on sale, overtaking titles including The Girl on the Train and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to make an early bid for the Christmas No 1 spot.
Praised for being “as rich in anecdote and detail as in anguish and doubt” by the Guardian and as a story “delivered with quiet dignity” by the Observer, Born to Run was released on 27 September. Covering everything from Springsteen’s childhood in New Jersey to the rise of the E Street Band and his own personal struggles, the hardback book had sold 37,518 copies by the weekend, putting it top of the UK’s official top 50 bestselling books.
Related: Bruce Springsteen fans line up for the Boss book signing: 'I'd wait for a week'
Continue reading...Alderman’s novel charts the love affair between a woman from an Orthodox Jewish background and the wife of her cousin
Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams are to star in a big screen adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s acclaimed novel Disobedience.
The book, which was published in 2006, is set in north west London and features the return to the Orthodox Jewish family home of Ronit (Weisz) following the death of her father. She then rekindles a romance with her best friend (McAdams), who is now married to her cousin.
Continue reading...Author whose first collection was published this year sees off competition including Booker winner Hilary Mantel
KJ Orr, whose first collection was published this year, has seen off the likes of two-time Man Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel and the poet Lavinia Greenlaw to win the BBC national short story award.
Described by author and judge Kei Miller, as “a near perfect example of how the short story works – a small world that’s perfectly observed”, Orr’s story Disappearances won the £15,000 prize at a ceremony at BBC’s Broadcasting House on Tuesday night. Set in Buenos Aires, the story delves into the mind of a retired plastic surgeon who begins to frequent a cafe to observe a particular waitress while she works. Orr was inspired to write the story while watching a solitary man in a cafe during a trip to Argentina.
Related: KJ Orr's top 10 stories of crossing boundaries
Related: Hilary Mantel: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983
Continue reading...The New York author won the National Book Award for much-loved work The Women of Brewster Place, which was later turned into a miniseries and a musical
Gloria Naylor, whose debut novel The Women of Brewster Place became a bestseller, a National Book Award winner and a TV miniseries released through Oprah Winfrey’s production company, has died at the age of 66.
Naylor’s death was confirmed on Monday to the Associated Press by Cara Reilly, an assistant at the literary agency Sterling Lord Literistic. Fellow authors soon paid tribute on Twitter, with Terry McMillan urging her followers to “read everything Gloria Naylor has ever written” and Tayari Jones thanking her for choosing her for a literary award in 2000 and helping to launch her career.
Continue reading...As the 2016 London Literature festival begins, this year exploring the theme ‘living in future times’, science and sci-fi writers share their visions of humanity’s future. Interviews by Lucy Peters
Related: What's in a number? Richard Dawkins on 40 years of The Selfish Gene
Related: What We Cannot Know by Marcus du Sautoy – review
Related: No kidding: what I learned from becoming GoatMan
Continue reading...Known in her home country as the Iraqi Maya Angelou, the poet Faleeha Hassan is living as a refugee within a deep pocket of Trump supporters in south New Jersey. Hassan emigrated to the US in 2012 after first having fled Iraq for Turkey when her books of poetry landed her on multiple ‘death lists’ published by radicals online
Continue reading...Italian literary and media elites react with anger to the novelist’s alleged outing as Rome-based translator Anita Raja
Follow the money is a journalistic aphorism usually reserved for crooked politicians, thieving chief executives and members of the mafia.
So when the pseudonymous best-selling Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante was allegedly exposed this weekend by an Italian reporter using financial and property records to track her down and identify her, the response among some in Italy’s literary and media elite was one of incredulity, and even anger. Besides, some noted, it wasn’t really a secret anyway, since the name Anita Raja has been floating around for years.
Related: Elena Ferrante: literary storm as Italian reporter 'identifies' author
Related: Elena Ferrante in her own words: ‘To relinquish my anonymity would be very painful’
Continue reading...Presidential candidate chosen to adorn reissue of the Nazi dictator’s oratory in response to report that Trump keeps a copy by his bed
An image of Donald Trump with his arm raised in a salute has been included on the cover of a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches.
Publisher Ishi Press International has illustrated the back cover of Hitler’s collected speeches My New Order: volume one and the front cover of volume two with photographs of the presidential candidate. It declares in the book’s blurb that: “There are clear similarities between the speeches of Trump and the speeches of Hitler”, citing everything from repetition to name calling and a lack of logical justification for views held.
Related: ‘Could he actually win?’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump rally
Continue reading...Beano’s much-loved rascal and his companion Gnasher brought up to date for new series to air next year
Dennis the Menace is to get a CGI makeover for a new generation in a series set to air on the BBC next year.
The mischief-making Beano character and his faithful companion Gnasher will make the 3D leap in the new series for CBBC.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness follows her debut, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker prize in 1997
Twenty years after Arundhati Roy won the 1997 Booker prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, the Indian novelist’s second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is set to be published in 2017, her publisher has announced.
Roy has published a wide range of nonfiction, covering topics from the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to a condemnation of India’s nuclear tests, since she won the Booker in 1997 for her story of twins Rahel and Estha growing up in Kerala. But The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which publisher Hamish Hamilton announced on Monday, will be only her second novel.
Continue reading...The 26-year-old says he wants to use his role to ‘normalise poetry’ for disenfranchised young people and ‘show them how their voices can be heard’
Poet and English teacher Caleb Femi, who has just been named the first young people’s laureate for London, is hoping to re-engage disenfranchised young people through poetry.
The 26-year-old from Peckham was chosen for the role by a panel including the Poetry Society and the Forward Arts Foundation. He will hold the position for a year, during which time he will set out to give Londoners aged between 13 and 25 a “platform to voice their concerns and experiences through poetry”, said Spread the Word, London’s writer development agency, announcing its choice of laureate.
Related: Warsan Shire: the Somali-British poet quoted by Beyoncé in Lemonade
Continue reading...Historian claims the Psalter is ‘undoubtedly’ the property of martyred saint, and that he may have been holding it when he was murdered
A Cambridge academic believes he has discovered Thomas Becket’s personal book of psalms, an ancient manuscript the martyred saint and so-called “turbulent priest” may have been holding when he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.
Dr Christopher de Hamel, a historian at Cambridge University, stumbled across the book during a conversation with a colleague. De Hamel, author of the just-released Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, had said that books belonging to saints were generally not used as relics, and his fellow historian replied that he knew of an exception.
The stricken martyr bent his knees and elbows, offering himself as a living sacrifice, saying in a low voice, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church I am ready to embrace death.’ But the third knight inflicted a grave wound on the fallen one; with this blow he shattered the sword on the stone and his crown, which was large, separated from his head so that the blood turned white from the brain yet no less did the brain turn red from the blood; it purpled the appearance of the church with the colours of the lily and the rose, the colours of the Virgin and Mother and the life and death of the confessor and martyr.
Continue reading...