The Avengers director to move from Marvel to DC as writer, director and producer of the film, which will feature characters from the world of Gotham
Batgirl is to star in her own standalone movie, directed by Joss Whedon.
According to Variety, Whedon will write, direct and produce the film for Warner Bros. No decision on casting has been made.
Continue reading...British Library releases ‘Baines note’ in which playwright Christopher Marlowe scandalously suggests Christian communion should be smoked in a pipe
A controversial document in which the playwright Christopher Marlowe reportedly declared that Christ was gay, that the only purpose of religion was to intimidate people, and that “all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools” is to go on show online for the first time.
The so-called “Baines note”, a star item in the British Library’s Renaissance manuscript collection, offers tantalising evidence about the private life of Marlowe, one of the most scandalous and magnetic figures of the Elizabeth period.
Continue reading...Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Girl of Ink and Stars praised for ‘good, old-fashioned storytelling’ that recalls Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
A novel inspired by childhood travels to the volcanic island of La Gomera and the traditional stories of the Canary islands has scooped the Waterstones children’s book prize for a 27-year-old poet and playwright.
Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s debut The Girl of Ink and Stars was named overall winner of the prestigious award by children’s laureate Chris Riddell at a ceremony in the bookselling chain’s flagship store in London’s Piccadilly.
Related: How celebrity deals are shutting children's authors out of their own trade
Continue reading...Man behind manual for violent rebellion, used in a number of high-profile killings, had long repented publishing and turned to charitable work
The author of one of the most notorious books of the last century died of a heart attack – six months ago. William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook was used by Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in 1995 and the Columbine high school killers in 1999. His death has become public after it was noted in the closing credits of a new documentary about his life.
The writer suffered a fatal heart attack while on holiday with his family in Nova Scotia on 11 July, at the age of 66. Though news of his death was announced to the Facebook group for his charity, the family did not contact the media. News filtered out at the US theatrical release of documentary American Anarchist, which mentions his death as the film closes.
Related: I wrote the Anarchist Cookbook in 1969. Now I see its premise as flawed | William Powell
Continue reading...Stage adventure of JK Rowling’s grown-up wizard prepares to refresh its lineup, while Broadway production is in the works
The new cast has been announced for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the blockbuster two-part West End play that follows the adult tribulations of JK Rowling’s boy wizard.
Jamie Glover, who played the deputy headteacher Andrew Treneman in BBC series Waterloo Road, will take over from Jamie Parker as Harry Potter. Emma Lowndes (Margie Drewe in Downton Abbey) will play his wife, Ginny, and Theo Ancient will make his professional stage debut as their son, Albus.
Sonia Friedman & John Tiffany take us inside the first day of rehearsals as new cast members join #CursedChild in London. http://pic.twitter.com/e821TQJ6rd
Continue reading...Already a screenwriter, the author of All Our Wrong Todays explains his delight in avoiding Hollywood’s filters and using the special effects that only work in books
When Elan Mastai was 26, his mother died. “I think about where I am right now in my life, and it’s hard to imagine it the way it is had my mother not died,” says the Canadian screenwriter, now 43. “I started writing because of that. I started going from wanting to be a writer to actually writing. The last gift my mother gave me was the awareness that I don’t have unlimited time. When you’re young, it’s very easy to be your own worst enemy. It’s very easy to create a lot of obstacles that keep you from going after the things you want to do. It’s very easy to convince yourself that if you don’t try you won’t fail. Losing my mom changed that for me.”
Over the next decade, Mastai built a successful Hollywood career, with writing credits including Alone in the Dark, The Samaritan (released as Fury in the UK) and the Daniel Radcliffe-Zoe Kazan romcom What If. But in 2013, when he started thinking about a story where a man strands himself in an alternate reality, Mastai realised that it wouldn’t be a screenplay, but a novel – a revelation he describes as “a little bit intimidating”.
Continue reading...YouTube star’s collection Nobody Told Me, a verse memoir from ‘the frontline of motherhood’, secures prestigious £5,000 honour
A “funny and serious, humane and consciousness-raising” poetry collection that reports from the “frontline of motherhood” has scooped the prestigious Ted Hughes poetry award for new work in poetry.
YouTuber Hollie McNish beat six other shortlisted poets to the £5,000 prize with her third collection, Nobody Told Me. The collection combines poems and diary entries in a revealing memoir that follows her from when she discovered she was pregnant seven years ago, to when her daughter turned three years old. The prize, which is administered by the Poetry Society, was presented by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Related: Hollie Poetry: woman versus world – one poem at a time
Continue reading...The first look at a new adaptation of the horror classic suggests a nightmarish update with a hint of Stranger Things
The first trailer for the latest version of Stephen King’s It has landed, suggesting that yet another generation of children will be haunted by visions of an evil, sewer-dwelling clown.
It’s the first of a proposed two-part adaptation of the 1986 novel that was originally turned into a mini-series in 1990, starring Tim Curry as Pennywise, a clown that molests and eats children.
Continue reading...Singer to accept prize in ‘small and intimate’ Stockholm setting having turned down invitation to official ceremony last year
Bob Dylan has finally agreed to accept his Nobel literature prize, the Swedish academy in Stockholm has announced, having turned down his invitation to the original ceremony in December.
“The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend,” Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the academy, wrote in a blog post. “The academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel prize in literature.
Related: Bob Dylan Nobel prize speech: this is 'truly beyond words'
Continue reading...Novelist who began writing to relieve the stress of her psychiatry job says literary success will not stop her listening to ‘real voices’ in hospital
A bestselling debut novelist who wrote her book in a hospital car park as stress release from her job as a psychiatrist is to return to the NHS. Her decision comes despite a £300,000 deal for her second book and a contract for two more novels.
Joanna Cannon, whose first book The Trouble With Goats and Sheep has now sold more than 100,000 copies in paperback in the UK and has been optioned for film by the makers of the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, said she was returning to the health service because she missed her patients.
Continue reading...Judges hail vintage year as major authors including Sebastian Barry and Rose Tremain contend alongside unfamiliar names for £25,000 honour
Sebastian Barry and Francis Spufford are to replay their battle for the Costa book of the year award after both were shortlisted for the 2017 Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. The two feature on a shortlist that pits high-profile authors against virtual unknowns in what the judges described as one of the best years they have seen for the £25,000 award.
Related: Sebastian Barry on his Costa-winning novel Days Without End – books podcast
Continue reading...The novelist, playwright and screenwriter won the Booker prize in 1976 for Saville
This Sporting Life and Saville writer David Storey has died at the age of 83.
Storey wrote a string of award-winning novels, including Flight into Camden and Passmore, and the plays The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, The Contractor, Home, In Celebration and The Changing Room.
Continue reading...In 1662 the French noblewoman Madame de La Fayette, published anonymously what is thought to be France’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Montpensier. Drawing on her knowledge of history and experience of Louis XIV’s court, de La Fayette penned a short, complicated tale of love, adultery, jealousy and betrayal that ends in tears and tragedy, set a century before, at the time of the wars of religion.
The book was an instant success, even if the critics attacked the then unnamed author of mixing fact and fiction in dubious fashion and slandering historical figures along the way. La Princesse de Montpensier is credited with inspiring Stendhal more than a hundred years later and Eugène Fromentin two centuries on. It is also the stuff of modern-day romantic pot-boilers and soap operas.
Continue reading...US military scholars have rarely been as willing as their British counterparts to find fault with leadership and execution – even when those failures cost thousands of allied servicemen’s lives.
But as commemorations of the first world war’s centenary continue, US military scholars, as their European counterparts did decades earlier, are going back to the original records and looking more closely.
Continue reading...The trailer for the much-hyped DC Comics superhero movie sees Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman join forces
The first full trailer for the much-anticipated superhero-team movie Justice League has been released onto the internet.
Directed by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s Zack Snyder, Justice League has been heavily hyped as DC Comics’ answer to Marvel’s The Avengers, which provided a gateway into multiple character spin-off movies and allowed its superhero “universe” to mushroom. Justice League features the likes of Batman, Aquaman and Wonder Woman, and is due to be followed by films giving each character solo outings. Wonder Woman, released in June, stars Gal Gadot, while Aquaman should be arriving in December 2018. The Batman has been beset by well-publicised production troubles, and is not likely to start shooting until next year.
Continue reading...From Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood, feminist science fiction writers have imagined other ways of living that prompt us to ask, could we do things differently?
Margaret Atwood’s evergreen dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is about to become a television drama. Published in 1985, it couldn’t feel more fresh or more timely, dealing as it does with reproductive rights, with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States, with the demonisation of imagined, pantomime villain “Islamic fanatics”. But then, feminist science fiction does tend to feel fresh – its authors have a habit of looking beyond their particular historical moment, analysing the root causes, suggesting how they might be, if not solved, then at least changed.
Where does the story of feminist science fiction begin? There are so many possible starting points: Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 book The Blazing World, about an empress of a utopian kingdom; one could point convincingly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an exploration of how men could “give birth” and what might happen if they did; one could recall the 1905 story “Sultana’s Dream” by Begum Rokeya, about a gender-reversed India in which it’s the men who are kept in purdah.
Related: Margaret Atwood: Haunted by The Handmaid's Tale
What makes Atwood's novel so terrifying is that it's all plausible. In fact, everything has happened somewhere before
Related: Feeding the Hunger – female writers are storming the male citadels of sci-fi
Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side. Everyone’s shining city on a hill is someone else’s hell on earth
Continue reading...Human rights groups call for release of men arrested by security forces at Minsk literature festival, and others held as protests rock authoritarian state
Human rights organisations have called on Belarusian authorities to drop all charges immediately against writers, publishers and journalists who have been arrested following a wave of nationwide protests.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said security forces had detained or otherwise obstructed at least 32 people in recent weeks. It was joined by Pen America in protesting against the arrests.
Related: 'We are not slaves': Europe's most repressive state is reawakening
Continue reading...Patrick Gale, Mark Billingham and Francesca Simon among writers suggesting government scheme will do little to rescue sector that has been hit hard by cuts
Authors Patrick Gale and Mark Billingham have slammed a government fund to support innovation in public libraries as “a sop, a smokescreen and a whitewash” that does nothing to help the fundamental crisis facing the sector. They were joined by Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon in criticising the ability of the £4m scheme to rescue the beleaguered sector.
Though Billingham welcomed investment in libraries, he said: “It is hard not to view this as a smokescreen – a sop – to those who have long fought the cause of libraries while their funding nationwide continues to be slashed.” Describing himself as increasingly depressed at the state of the sector, Gale told the Guardian: “This is a kind of whitewash and it makes me cross.”
Continue reading...Timothy Snyder’s manual for resisting populism, On Tyranny, to be pasted in full on a street in east London
In what is believed to be an industry first, the entire text of a book billed as “a practical guide to resisting the rise of totalitarianism” is to be fly-posted along an east London street next week.
Related: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – review
Continue reading...Crime writer who wrote the series starring the famously tempermental detective between 1975 and 1999, died at his home in Oxford on Tuesday
Colin Dexter, the creator of the infamous detective Inspector Morse and his adventures solving crimes in Oxfordshire, has died at the age of 86.
His publisher Macmillan said in a statement on Tuesday: “With immense sadness, MacMillan announces the death of Colin Dexter who died peacefully at his home in Oxford this morning.”
Continue reading...Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid joins Richard in the studio to talk about his latest novel, Exit West: the story of Saeed and Nadia, a couple who leave an unnamed city in search of a new life. Mohsin shares how he came up with the idea of doors that act as wormholes into alternative universes and locations, why he left Saeed and Nadia’s city anonymised and why the conversations around Brexit and Donald Trump have left him energised.
Plus Claire, Richard and Sian discuss the line between speculative fiction and science fiction, and how literary fiction writers are adopting sci-fi tropes in their novels – and why that might be so.
Continue reading...Novelist and feminist has attracted criticism for her comments on trans women, but says hostility of backlash serves to ‘close up debate’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist and feminist, has condemned a “language orthodoxy” on the political left after she endured a vitriolic backlash over comments about transgender women.
The author of Half of a Yellow Sun plunged into a row about identity politics when she suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticised for implying that trans women are not “real women”.
Related: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Can people please stop telling me feminism is hot?'
Related: Identity is the issue of our age: so why can’t we talk more honestly about trans women?
Continue reading...The much-respected literary figure, who helped champion writers from Norman Mailer to Zadie Smith, died after a short illness
Revered New York Review of Books editor Robert B Silvers, who served as founding editor of the magazine for more than 53 years, died on Monday morning.
Silvers, 87, passed away “after a short illness”, according to a statement from the Review.
When we started, our publisher said we should have a survey to find out what readers want. But Barbara [Barbara Epstein worked as co-editor with Silvers until her death in 2006] and I both said, no, we must pick the subjects and writers we believe in; we won’t take dictation. If it’s interesting, people will go on subscribing. If it’s not, they’ll say: to hell with it.
Bob Silvers gave me my first job in journalism and taught me so much about writing and thinking. I can't believe he's gone. http://pic.twitter.com/MMvmvjedKX
Bob Silvers embodied what it meant to live a life of books and ideas. For 54 years through the Review, he let so many others in on that.
Continue reading...Chef agrees to work exclusively with broadcaster for another 3 years, with Jamie’s Quick & Easy showing this autumn
Jamie Oliver has struck a new multi-million pound “golden handcuffs” deal with Channel 4, including a new TV series, that will tie him exclusively to the broadcaster for the next three years.
The agreement, which will extend his exclusive relationship with Channel 4 to 17 years, is a fillip for the celebrity chef after he was forced to shut six underperforming restaurants earlier this year.
Baccalauréat lists Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier after protests about sexism in lycée system
A female author has been included in the list of compulsory study books for France’s prestigious literature baccalauréat for the first time since the modern-day exam was introduced more than 20 years ago.
The move follows petitions protesting about the sexism and “excess of testosterone” in the exam syllabus.
Shirt featuring the Smiths lyric ‘I wear black on the outside’ and a picture of the author has been removed from sale after backlash in music press
A Morrissey tour T-shirt pairing an image of black author and civil rights campaigner James Baldwin with one of Morrissey’s most famous lyrics has landed the former Smiths singer in yet another controversy.
Music press attacked the merchandise produced for the singer’s forthcoming tour of the US and Mexico, which features a headshot of the Another Country writer coupled with the lyric from the song Unloveable: “I wear black on the outside / ’cause black is how I feel on the inside.”
Related: Morrissey, this joke isn't funny anymore | Tom Clark
Continue reading...The Pulitzer prize-winning author-columnist was the brash embodiment of the old-time, street smart New Yorker
The author-columnist Jimmy Breslin, a Pulitzer prize-winning chronicler of wise guys and underdogs who became the brash embodiment of the old-time, street smart New Yorker, died on Sunday. He was 87.
Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge, said.
Related: Mayor Morrissey? Don't laugh, stranger celebrity mayors have won before
Continue reading...Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange who was born 100 years ago this year, described himself as “a graphomane”. When not composing music, he was indefatigably at work on many genres: novels, short stories, children’s books, plays, film scripts, poems and countless book reviews, many of them for the Observer.
Burgess was the hack’s hack, and also that creature now as fabled as the hippogriff, “a man of letters”. In 1961, for instance, he published no fewer than three novels. Once, he even reviewed one of his own books pseudonymously.
Related: Anthony Burgess at 100: high art, low entertainment
Continue reading...The Jhalak prize, set up to address UK publishing’s long lack of diversity, goes to Jacob Ross’s crime novel The Bone Readers
The inaugural Jhalak prize for black, Asian and minority ethnic writers (BAME) has been won by Jacob Ross with his “thrilling, visceral and meditative, and always cinematic” crime novel The Bone Readers.
Ross’s winning book shadows Digger, a plainclothes officer working in a rogue police force on the small Caribbean island of Camaho, who can read bones under LED lights. It is the first in a quartet, while also being the British Grenadian writer’s first foray into crime writing: Ross is the author of two short story collections and the acclaimed 2009 novel Pynter Bender.
Related: The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross review – into a Caribbean island’s sordid underbelly
Continue reading...Walcott, who died in Saint Lucia, was famous for his monumental body of work that wove in Carribean history, particularly his epic Omeros
The poet and playwright Derek Walcott, who moulded the language and forms of the western canon to his own purposes for more than half a century, has died aged 87.
His monumental poetry, including 1973’s verse autobiography, Another Life, and his Caribbean reimagining of The Odyssey, 1990’s Omeros, secured him an international reputation which gained him the Nobel prize in 1992. But this was matched by a theatrical career conducted mostly in the islands of his birth as a director and writer with more than 80 plays to his credit.
Related: Derek Walcott: 'The Oxford poetry job would have been too much work'
Continue reading...Tweets claim the US president’s quote to impress the Irish PM on the eve of St Patrick’s Day is a poem by a Nigerian poet – but is it?
Did Donald Trump quote a Nigerian poet, thinking he was reciting an Irish proverb? Sorry to disappoint – but probably not.
Appearing with Irish prime minister Enda Kelly on Thursday, Trump said: “As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of that proverb – and this is a good one, this is one I like. I’ve heard it for many many years and I love it.
Have literally never heard this in my entire life. https://t.co/3gSBhbvdl2
With all due respect to the president's reputation for scrupulously checking his sources, I don't think this is an Irish proverb. https://t.co/1EvGGMsE9r
"Irish Proverb" me hole. https://t.co/dWLregquCs
We combed Yeats, Heaney, Kavanagh, Joyce. They google "famous Irish proverbs" and pick one from a Geocities page. https://t.co/CiJ7KVA0gT
Continue reading...Sony Pictures announces supervillain adventure will hit cinemas in October 2018 but no word on casting
Spider-Man’s nemesis Venom is to appear in his own standalone film, due in cinemas in October next year.
Variety reports that the enemy of Marvel’s web-slinging superhero will be brought to the big screen by Sony Pictures. There’s no word on who will play the sharp-fanged villain, but screenwriters Scott Rosenberg (High Fidelity) and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) will write the script. The film will be released on 5 October.
Related: Six reasons not to write off Drew Goddard's Spider-Man v Sinister Six movie
Continue reading...“No one informs on the informer,” Jakub Procházka’s father smugly informs him. Jakub’s father is what’s commonly referred to as a secret policeman (although they actually weren’t that secret in Czechoslovakia), but despite rounding up citizens who aren’t big on communism, he nevertheless has a clandestine fascination in Elvis Presley. You only have to read a few lines of Jaroslav’s Kalfar’s debut novel to realise that you are undoubtedly in the land of the satirist Jaroslav Hašek and film‑maker Jiří Menzel.
Jakub is the Bohemian spaceman of the title: in 2018 a proud Czech Republic fires him off from a launchpad in a potato field to investigate a mysterious cloud of cosmic dust that has appeared between Venus and Earth. There really was a Czech spaceman, Vladimír Remek, who in 1978 became a cosmonaut courtesy of the Russians, and Kalfar makes a joke or two at the expense of Moscow’s space programme.
It's as if an episode of Star Trek has crashed into Milan Kundera’s The Joke
Related: 2018, a space odyssey: Jaroslav Kalfař's strange debut is out of this world
Continue reading...Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Ruta Sepetys also make shortlist, while children’s laureate Chris Riddell is nominated for Kate Greenaway illustration medal
Two years after he died, children’s author Mal Peet may be set for a posthumous Carnegie medal win, after making the shortlist with his co-author Meg Rosoff.
Rosoff, who finished Peet’s novel Beck, a coming-of-age tale about a mixed-race boy in America during the 1900s, told the Guardian: “I was really worried about doing justice to his amazing writing, so this is a nice confirmation that I did an OK job.”
Related: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Illustrated Edition – in pictures
Continue reading...Early in Paul Cornell’s psychological horror novel Chalk (Tor, £14.50), something appalling happens to Andrew Waggoner, a mild-mannered schoolboy who suffers continual bullying. After a Halloween disco he’s attacked by five fellow pupils who drag him into nearby woods, tie him to a tree and mutilate him. Later that night, his tortured psyche gives birth to a Hyde-like alter ego that proceeds to do terrible things; as he tells Andrew: “You can only be healed when your revenge is complete.” What follows, seen through the eyes of the book’s unreliable narrator, is the story of Waggoner’s revenge. The setting is the West Country in the 1980s, and Cornell brilliantly delineates not only the insular milieu of rural England but the brutal materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, in a slow-building novel of retribution and cycles of abuse. Cornell has described Chalk as not being about the triumph of a victimised martyr but about “how the bullied often become the bullies, and a desperate attempt to escape that”. Superb.
Continue reading...An overtime case that will delight grammar nerds everywhere hinges on the absence of an Oxford comma
Never let it be said that grammar doesn’t matter.
In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.
on the one hand I love the #oxfordcomma, on the other hand these sentences truly are SO GOOD http://pic.twitter.com/Gst0OSY0Wo
United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit, No. 16-1901 (March 13, 2017), Judge Barron:
The Oxford Comma is important. http://pic.twitter.com/jhdqfbdfvN
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.
We conclude that the exemption’s scope is actually not so clear in this regard. And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state’s wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers’ narrower reading of the exemption.
AP style fans, we know you'll appreciate an #APStyleHaiku about Oxford commas. You can write, count and share, too. https://t.co/MX1uyYgs7B
a comma before the final “and” in lists: straightforward ones (he ate ham, eggs and chips) do not need one, but sometimes it can help the reader (he ate cereal, kippers, bacon, eggs, toast and marmalade, and tea).
Sometimes it is essential: compare
Continue reading...Book by Donald Trump’s ex-wife will be a story of ‘motherhood, strength and resilience’, according to its publisher
Ivana Trump, the first wife of Donald Trump, is writing a memoir that will focus on the couple’s three children.
According to publisher Gallery Books, Raising Trump will go on sale in September and will be a story of “motherhood, strength and resilience” and will also reflect on her “childhood in communist Czechoslovakia, her escape from the regime and relocation to New York, her whirlwind romance, and her great success as a businesswoman”.
Related: Donald Trump Jr says he has 'zero contact' with father as he runs business
Continue reading...Naomi Alderman’s science fiction story The Power is the sole novel on a 14-book longlist for the political writing award, with accounts of recent and historical developments in Britain dominating
Naomi Alderman is the only novelist to make it on to the longlist for the 2017 Orwell prize for outstanding political writing, in a year when George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is once again troubling the bestseller lists.
Alderman’s The Power heads a 14-strong list of books that span anthropology, politics, memoir and history for an accolade considered Britain’s most prestigious for political writing, which comes with a cash award of £3,000. Described as The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale, Alderman’s dystopian novel examines the roots and impact of misogyny by reversing the gender roles in a future society ruled by women. The novel has also been longlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s prize for women’s fiction, and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust science writing prize.
Related: Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman – review
Continue reading...Naomi Alderman’s science fiction story The Power is the sole novel on a 14-book longlist for the political writing award, with accounts of recent and historical developments in Britain dominating
Naomi Alderman is the only novelist to make it on to the longlist for the 2017 Orwell prize for outstanding political writing, in a year when George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is once again troubling the bestseller lists.
Alderman’s The Power heads a 14-strong list of books that span anthropology, politics, memoir and history for an accolade considered Britain’s most prestigious for political writing, which comes with a cash award of £3,000. Described as The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale, Alderman’s dystopian novel examines the roots and impact of misogyny by reversing the gender roles in a future society ruled by women. The novel has also been longlisted for the 2017 Bailey’s prize for women’s fiction, and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust science writing prize.
Related: Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman – review
Continue reading...Oz’s first novel in a decade joins Kadare’s gruesome Ottoman tale in ‘ferociously intelligent’ selection – but one with very few women
A Chinese satire of communism, a retelling of the Robin Hood myth set in the Republic of Congo and a coming-of-age tale in a still-divided Jerusalem are among 13 books from 11 different languages that are longlisted for the Man Booker international prize.
Books from Europe dominate the longlist, alongside two Israeli novels, and one apiece from Iceland, China, Albania and Argentina. The annual award, which celebrates the finest global fiction translated into English, is worth £50,000, to be split evenly between author and translator.
Related: The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke review – a masterpiece
Related: Translated fiction by women must stop being a minority in a minority
Continue reading...Birnam Wood, which revolves around a US billionaire who has purchased a bolt-hole, comes after Peter Thiel bought South Island property
Eleanor Catton, the youngest ever Booker-prize winning author, has sold the rights to her third novel, a psychological thriller set in rural New Zealand where super-rich foreigners face off with ragtag locals on the eve of a global catastrophe.
According to Catton’s agent, Caroline Dawnay, the novel, entitled Birnam Wood (a reference to a scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth) is set in a remote part of the country where the mega-wealthy have stored caches of weapons in fortress-like homes in preparation for disaster.
Related: Billionaires' bolthole: how New Zealand became an escapee's paradise
Related: Eleanor Catton blasts critics’ ‘jingoistic national tantrum’
Continue reading...Nielsen survey finds UK ebook sales declined by 4% in 2016, the second consecutive year digital has shrunk
Readers committed to physical books can give a sigh of relief, as new figures reveal that ebook sales are falling while sales of paper books are growing – and the shift is being driven by younger generations.
More than 360m books were sold in 2016 – a 2% jump in a year that saw UK consumers spend an extra 6%, or £100m, on books in print and ebook formats, according to findings by the industry research group Nielsen in its annual books and consumer survey. The data also revealed good news for bricks-and-mortar bookshops, with a 4% rise in purchases across the UK.
Related: Books are back. Only the technodazzled thought they would go away | Simon Jenkins
Continue reading...Six books are in contention for the annual award for excellence in science and health writing, including a trainee neurosurgeon’s posthumous memoir and books about the NHS, HIV/Aids and organ donorship
Spanning human origins, national health services, microbial life forms and death, the shortlist for the 2017 Wellcome Book prize has been hailed as one that will “shift perceptions” by chair Val McDermid.
Announcing the six books in contention for the award, which pits fiction against non-fiction, McDermid told the Guardian: “The key thing about these books is that they draw people in to something they otherwise might find a bit scary to read about. There will be people who read one of the books on this list and it will change their lives.”
Author reiterates her support for transgender people, but says it would be ‘disingenuous’ not to acknowledge differences
Nigerian novelist and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has sought to clarify her position after sparking outrage with comments about transgender women that she made in an interview with Channel 4 News. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun came under attack after she failed to call transgender women “real women” in response to a question.
In the interview, broadcast on 10 March, Adichie said “I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”
@Mr_Mokgoroane @AdichieSpeaks The statement's ignorance is presumption that trans women are defined as someone who lived as a man for 30 yrs
Chimamanda being asked about trans women is like Lena Dunham being asked about Black women. It doesn't work. We can speak for ourselves.
Related: Whether trans or cis, let women be what they want to be | Gaby Hinsliff
Continue reading...Mayor says plans to close four of the city’s 13 libraries will be suspended after chancellor’s promise of £27m for social care
Public libraries in Liverpool have been saved from closure after the government promised £27m for adult social care in the city – however, the city’s mayor has warned that the decision is a stay of execution, rather than a permanent reprieve for the beleaguered library service.
The £27m injection is Liverpool’s share of an extra £2bn promised last week by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, to shore up local councils’ social care provision across the country. Four of the city’s 13 libraries were due to close, with others to be transferred to community groups, under plans aimed at saving £1.6m. Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson said the cuts were needed to plug a £90m hole in the local authority’s budgets over the next three years.
Related: 25 million books are missing from UK libraries – but who's counting?
Continue reading...Author says his words were ‘garbled’ in translation and he never suggested UK government and Brexiters resembled Nazis
Ian McEwan has clarified remarks he made about Brexit last week in which he was reported as saying that the British referendum reminded him of Nazi Germany.
In a statement issued to the Guardian on Monday, the author insisted that while he deplored the current intolerant and aggressive political climate, he had never suggested that either the British government or those who voted to leave the EU “even faintly” resembled Nazis.
Chinese publishers have reportedly received orders that the number of foreign titles being printed must be cut to prevent an ‘ideology inflow’
Winnie-the-pooh, Peppa Pig, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and even James and his Giant Peach are feeling the heat in China amid reports of a Communist party crackdown down on children’s literature.
With about 220 million under-14s and a rapidly growing middle class, China is home to a potentially massive market for children’s picture books. More than 40,000 children’s books were reportedly published here last year alone.
Related: The Guardian view on China: political spectacle and substance | Editorial
Continue reading...Speaking on Desert Island Discs, the Irish writer describes how she prepared to take her life
The novelist Marian Keyes has revealed how she battled constant suicidal urges at the height of her mental illness.
The Irish writer opened up to Kirsty Young about her struggle with alcoholism and depression on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday.
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Continue reading...First Republic of Consciousness award to honour small presses recognises the London independent for short story collection Counternarratives by John Keene
Set up to reward “brave, bold and brilliant” small presses for taking risks on “niche fiction”, the inaugural Republic of Consciousness prize has been won by Fitzcarraldo for publishing Counternarratives by John Keene.
Fitzcarraldo, a London-based independent established in 2014, published Keene’s experimental collection of 13 stories and novellas last year. The American writer’s book was the unanimous choice of the six judges, who deemed it a “once in a generation achievement for short-form fiction” and praised its “subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose”.
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Continue reading...An initial look at the penultimate season of HBO’s hit fantasy drama, which returns this summer, suggests dark times ahead
After a dramatic reveal involving a giant melting block of ice, it’s now been confirmed that season seven of Game of Thrones will premiere on 16 July.
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Continue reading...Talk with Thordis Elva and the man who raped her was scheduled as part of the Women of the World festival, but will now go ahead as a standalone discussion
A controversial talk by a rape survivor and the man who raped her has been moved out of a women’s festival to a standalone event next week following protests.
Icelandic writer Thordis Elva was due to speak at the Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday with Tom Stranger, who raped her when she as 16.
Related: Can I forgive the man who raped me?
Continue reading...Expected this autumn, the untitled memoir will reveal details of his childhood, his time as chancellor and prime minister, and his family
Gordon Brown is expected to shed light on his tumultuous relationship with Tony Blair in a memoir that his publishers said would cover “his entire life in politics” as well as “big ideas for today”.
Due out this autumn, the as-yet untitled book was acquired by The Bodley Head for an undisclosed sum. It will draw on Brown’s 10 years as chancellor from 1997 and his handling of the global financial crisis in 2008 after becoming prime minister.
Continue reading...Former Labour and Respect MP says he has signed publishing deal for series of tales about a Robin Hood of the high seas
George Galloway, the former Labour and Respect MP, has announced that he has signed a publishing deal for a series of children’s books about an “ethical pirate” who travels the high seas around Indonesia with his family.
Galloway posted on Twitter:
Continue reading...One of the original documents used by German industrialist to save the lives of more than 1,200 Jewish workers during the Holocaust has gone on sale
One of the original “Schindler’s lists”, the documents used by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, has been put up for sale. The document, commemorated in Thomas Keneally’s eponymous, Booker prize-winning novel, was among those drawn up to protect Jewish workers from deportation and death. It is expected to make more than $2.4m.
It is one of only seven, and was compiled with help from Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern, who was portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film of the story. For sale through the Moments in Time auction house, which specialises in rare documents, the 14-page document is the penultimate list and is dated 18 April 1945. It lists 801 male Jews at Schindler’s factory in occupied Czechoslovakia, who had been transported from the Plaszòw concentration camp in Poland.
Continue reading...Bruce Springsteen is snubbed in wide-ranging selection by judges including Tracey Thorn and Thurston Moore
Not many music bills include classic rock alongside grime and avant-garde improvisation, but these are among the subjects of the eight books shortlisted for this year’s Penderyn music book prize. Chosen by a similarly diverse judging panel, which includes Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore, singer Charlotte Church and comedian Stewart Lee, the titles will now contend for the £1,000 overall prize.
Moore said of the list: “This seems to be a vanguard time for serious music journalism as printed word. It’s as if the most engaging music is being made by writers.”
Continue reading...Following outcry over absence of writers of colour, school librarian-nominated prizes announce plans to address equality in ‘broadest possible sense’
Black and Asian authors have welcomed an independent review of diversity in the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway medals, after an exceptional year for children’s books by minority authors failed to make an impact on the prize longlists.
The review of the venerable children’s books awards – which are judged by school librarians – was announced on Wednesday by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip). It is part of a wider diversity and equality action plan by Cilip, which runs the awards, to address the lack of diversity in the information sector.
Related: Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards announce 2017 longlists
Continue reading...Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx and Rose Tremain lead 16 finalists for £30,000 award, only three of whom are first-time novelists
Literary heavyweights including Margaret Atwood and Annie Proulx have been pitted against debut novelists in the longlist for the 2017 Bailey’s women’s prize for fiction, after a record-breaking year for submissions. In one of the most diverse lists of recent years, titles under consideration for the £30,000 award range from speculative fiction and contemporary noir to historical drama.
The 16-strong longlist was chosen from 189 submissions – a substantial increase on previous years, which averaged 150 titles. Though organisers had wanted to reduce the longlist to fewer than the usual 20 books in order to give more focus to each title, the judges pushed for 16 novels to reflect the strength of entries.
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Continue reading...The 85-year-old author is set to bring his most famous character in from the cold, 25 years after espionage classics Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy
George Smiley, John le Carré’s iconic Cold War spymaster, is to return for the first time in 25 years in a new novel by the beloved spy-turned-author.
A Legacy of Spies, due to be published on 7 September, will also see the return of Smiley’s colleagues from the British secret service – or the Circus, as it was known in le Carré’s books.
Continue reading...Organisers of discussion between Tom Stranger and his victim Thordis Elva say they are mulling the ‘most appropriate way forward’
A talk by rapist and his victim, which was planned to take place at a women’s festival in London, may be cancelled after a petition was launched to deny him a platform.
Rapist Tom Stranger was due to appear with his victim Thordis Elva at the 2017 Women of the World festival at the Southbank Centre next week. The two have written a book, South of Forgiveness, about the attack and its impact on their lives.
Related: Can I forgive the man who raped me?
Continue reading...Author of widely discredited study of intelligence says opponents of his lecture looked like they had come from ‘casting for a film of brownshirt rallies’
The controversial author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, has attacked violent protests that left one injured and shut down his speech at an elite US college as “straight out of casting for a film of brownshirt rallies”, after a protest by students descended into aggressive confrontation.
In the two decades since Murray and his co-author Richard J Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve, its linking of black and Latino genetics with intellectual inferiority has attracted vociferous condemnation. Writing for the New York Times when it came out in 1994, columnist Bob Herbert described the book as “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship”, while the Southern Poverty Law Center accused Murray of being a “white nationalist” who used “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor”.
Continue reading...James Daunt, under fire for opening unbranded branches in small towns, said his aim was to give managers autonomy and avoid ‘crushing consistency’
Waterstones managing director James Daunt has launched a scathing attack on high-street rivals, describing the uniformity of booksellers such as WH Smith as “crushing” and “godawful”.
Speaking at a media conference last week in London, Daunt said his decision to open unbranded branches of the bookshop chain was “to convince our own booksellers that they have the autonomy that they do have”.
Related: Are small, unbranded Waterstones stores really a threat to independent bookshops?
Continue reading...The Mobile World Congress, which takes place annually in Barcelona, is usually dominated by smartphones. Grabbing headlines this year, however, is the Pilot earpiece and its promise to instantly translate languages: a real-life version of the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Continue reading...Ryan Reynolds’ foul-mouthed character takes aim at his fellow superheroes in a short film that also features Marvel great Stan Lee
Ryan Reynolds has returned as foul-mouthed superhero Deadpool in a tongue-in-cheek short film teasing the sequel to the self-aware comic book movie.
Entitled No Good Deed, the short, which Reynolds launched online this weekend on YouTube, is currently showing in cinemas ahead of X-Men spin-off Logan. It uses the opportunity to take aim at Hugh Jackman’s gruff superhero, with Deadpool launching into a weak impression of Jackman’s Australian accent.
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Continue reading...Brendan Cox says writing book during sleepless nights has been part of grieving process
The husband of the murdered MP Jo Cox is working on a memoir celebrating her life, to be published on the eve of the first anniversary of her death.
Brendan Cox said sleepless nights since his wife’s death had given him time to work on the book, which will include extracts from her diaries and recollections from her family, friends and colleagues.
Continue reading...In March 1939, a hungry and haunted Spanish refugee arrived in England with his wife, a typewriter and a head still roiling with the carnage and squalor they had left behind.
“My life,” Arturo Barea would later recall, “was broken in two. I had no perspectives, no country, no home, no job.”
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Continue reading...The galaxy’s greatest comic celebrated its 40th birthday on earth last Sunday. To celebrate, our readers share their 2000AD memories, photos and memorabilia
On the school syllabus in the Netherlands, this explicit novel – that will offend some – reads wonderfully, but leaves uneasy questions about its treatment of women
It begins with an epigraph from Tintin, in which two villains argue over who is “wickeder”, then opens proper with an unnamed narrator masturbating over nude photos of his departed lover, Olga, and rereading her old letters: “While I’m writing this to you my cunt is making sucking motions, like a baby’s mouth,” reads one. This mixture of sexual candour, uncomfortable analogies and theatrical villainy sets the tone for Jan Wolkers’ Turkish Delight, a Dutch classic about a bohemian sculptor’s obsessive relationship – a new translation of which is about to be published by Tin House Books.
In the age of the internet, lines like “dry cunts with warts inside. Nasty to the touch but nice on the dick,” or “I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, DON’T WIPE YOUR ASS, I’LL LICK YOU CLEAN” may not seem so shocking (they certainly aren’t in the Netherlands, where Turkish Delight is on the school syllabus). There’s even a musical of it. Perhaps more surprising is that these sentiments weren’t that shocking to the Dutch in 1969, when the book was first published. This may be because the picaresque novel of sexual tall tales I, Jan Cremer – by the eponymous author – had already caused enough outrage in the Netherlands five years earlier.
Continue reading...Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel is set a dozen decades hence, in a world where climate change has bitten deep. The waters have risen 50ft, submerging much of New York City. Every street has become a canal; every skyscraper an island, linked by sky bridges and boat taxis.
This is a large-scale novel, not only in terms of its 624 pages, but also the number of characters and storylines Robinson deploys, the sheer range of themes and topics. There are eight main narrative strands, focusing on a group of characters who all live in the same building, the Met Life skyscraper on Madison Square. Each strand elaborates a different type of plot: kidnap; politics small and large; Wall Street; police investigation; polar exploration; even a treasure hunt for buried gold. The premise is reminiscent of John Lanchester’s 2012 novel Capital, with a NY skyscraper instead of a London street, though New York 2140 is considerably broader in scope and ambition.
Continue reading...Survey shows that 25% of eight to 11-year-olds used the tokens given away for the annual celebration of reading to buy their first book
World Book Day provides a quarter of eight to 11-year-olds in the UK with their first chance to buy a book of their own, according to a survey published by the National Literacy Trust.
The poll of 9,000 pupils between eight and 11 found that last year 25% of children had used the £1 book token given away as part of the annual celebration of reading to buy a book for the first time.
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Continue reading...The actor, who has played the president on Saturday Night Live, will work with novelist Kurt Andersen on You Can’t Spell America Without Me
After playing him on the most recent season of Saturday Night Live, Alec Baldwin is taking his Donald Trump impression to a new level, co-writing a satirical book in character.
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Continue reading...Royal Society of Literature survey finds people place high value on books’ ability to promote empathy, but their choices are far from diverse
British readers may recognise the value of literature to encourage social cohesion – but the perspective they gain from novels remains overwhelmingly white, male and middle class, according to a survey of public attitudes to literature released on Wednesday.
A survey of nearly 2,000 people on behalf of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) found that despite 81% of respondents saying they liked literature because it promotes empathy, only 7% of the 400 writers they cited were from black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) backgrounds.
Continue reading...Australian writer who lives in a caravan in Adelaide says surprise Windham-Campbell award will ‘change my life completely’
Now unemployed and living in a caravan in Adelaide, the Indigenous Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann says she “pretty much just cried a lot” when she received an email on Thursday notifying her that she had won a literary prize of US$165,000 (A$215,000).
“It’s going to change my life completely,” she told Guardian Australia after being awarded a Windham-Campbell prize. “I’m pretty emotional.”
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