The story that helps children speak out about abuse

Book and animation aim to help children identify the difference between good and troublesome secrets

Some secrets are worth keeping. A surprise birthday party for Granny, absolutely. An uncle peeking under your dress, definitely not. That’s the clear message in Share Some Secrets, a book by children’s author Christina Gabbitas. The story has just been animated by students at Sheffield Hallam University and turned into a free online resource.

If the contents sound somewhat unequivocal, that’s the point. The book, illustrated by Leeds artist Ric Lumb, is designed to encourage children to identify the difference between good and troublesome secrets. In the story, a boy, Billy, encourages his sister, Milly, to tell a teacher about abuse she’s receiving at the hands of Uncle Peter after she reveals that his visits make her sad. In what could have ended up being a harrowing tale, Milly is praised by the teacher. The story ends with a party and the promise that Uncle Peter won’t be making a reappearance in Milly’s life.

Related: Talking to vulnerable children on their terms helps to build trust

Related: Cost should never be a factor in protecting children from harm | Laura Henry

Continue reading...

Gordon Brown: Bankers should have been jailed for role in financial crisis

Ex-PM warns failure to take tougher stand has made it inevitable that rogue bankers will again gamble with public money

Gordon Brown has claimed bankers should have been jailed for their fraudulent and dishonest behaviour during the financial crisis that led to Britain’s deepest post-war recession and his defeat in the 2010 general election.

The Labour former prime minister used the second extract from his memoirs to warn that the failure to take a tougher line with wrongdoing – as pursued by other countries – has made it inevitable that rogue bankers will again gamble with public money.

Related: Gordon Brown memoirs: Barclays' RBS bid in 2008 is a staggering revelation

Continue reading...

Freight Books: award-winning Scottish publisher goes into liquidation

Former Scottish publisher of the year wrote to its authors at the beginning of October, encouraging them to buy back their own books

A liquidator has been appointed for the troubled publisher Freight Books, a one-time star of the Scottish publishing scene that was named Scottish publisher of the year in 2015.

According to documents filed at Companies House, WRI Associates was appointed provisional liquidator of Freight Books on 20 October following a court order. With names on its publishing roster including Irvine Welsh and Janice Galloway, the Glasgow-based Freight had been taken to court by the printing company Bell and Bain over unpaid work. Authors had also been raising the fact that they have not been paid, with several literary agents telling the Bookseller in September that their writers had been owed money by Freight for months. One author, who asked to remain anonymous, described the situation to the Guardian as an “unholy mess” earlier this month.

Continue reading...

Jane Juska, author of bestselling memoir of sex as an older woman, dies at 84

A Round-Heeled Woman, the story of a year of encounters with men met through an ad in the New York Review of Books, was a hit turned into a stage show

Jane Juska, whose search for sex as a retired woman in her 60s became a bestselling memoir and later a play – instead of leaving her “murdered or made sad at the very least”, as she expected – has died in California. She was 84.

Related: Sex confessions of a senior citizen score literary hit

Continue reading...

Mississippi students allowed to read To Kill a Mockingbird – with a parent's note

• Biloxi officials had pulled novel from lesson plan for junior high students
• Parents complained that language in the book ‘makes people uncomfortable’

Junior high school students in Biloxi, Mississippi will be allowed after all to read To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel of race and racism in the American south as part of their regular study – but only with permission from a parent.

Related: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee taken off Mississippi school reading list

Related: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee review – ‘moral ambition sabotaged’

Continue reading...

I can prove that 'William Shakespeare' is buried in Westminster Abbey – scholar

Alexander Waugh says secret clues confirm that author of world-famous plays was Edward de Vere, who lies in Poet’s Corner

William Shakespeare was in fact Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and is buried in Westminster Abbey, not the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, according to a scholar who is the grandson of the novelist Evelyn Waugh.

Alexander Waugh says he has deciphered encryptions in the title and dedication pages of Aspley’s edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets of 1609 that reveal the bard’s final resting place.

Related: Who really wrote Shakespeare?

Continue reading...

The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror novels – reviews roundup

The Rift by Nina Allan; Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer; Our Memory Like Dust by Gavin Chait; The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts

Nina Allan excels at creating subtle, shifting narratives straddling the mundane and the bizarre, the real and the unreal. In her second novel, The Rift (Titan, £7.99), she has produced a lyrical, moving story beautifully balanced between the reality of contemporary England and the ethereal otherness of the alien world of Tristane. Selena and Julie were not only sisters but best friends, and when Julie vanishes aged 17 – the victim of a killer? – Selena’s life and that of her family changes forever. Two decades later, Julie reappears, claiming to have spent the intervening years in an alien world, supporting her story with a highly detailed account of her life there. The Rift is what Allan does best, exploring contemporary society, and what it means to be human, through the tropes of the SF genre. Selena’s survivor’s guilt, her grief and that of her parents, are harrowingly rendered, perfectly counterpointed by the otherworldly depiction of an alien culture that might be just the fantasy of a damaged narrator.

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2y7SexZ

Elif Shafak joins Future Library, writing piece to be unveiled in 2114

The Turkish novelist follows Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Sjón in creating work for publishing project that will only be printed 97 years from now

The Turkish novelist Elif Shafak is to follow Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Sjón as one of the 100 contributors to the Future Library, an art project that will only be seen by readers in 2114, when the spruce trees to make its paper have been fully grown.

Dreamed up by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, the Future Library is, in Paterson’s words, “a living, breathing, organic artwork, unfolding over 100 years”. Starting in 2014, each year Paterson has approached a writer to contribute a manuscript to the project, with the texts to remain secret until 2114, when the trees in Oslo’s Nordmarka forest, planted as 1,000 seedlings in 2014, will be chopped down, the paper made and the manuscripts finally printed.

Continue reading...

Boris Johnson, Agent of Chaos | Letters

John Davies finds an entertaining book in a secondhand shop

I haunt secondhand shops, looking for books from the golden age of science fiction. Last week I found Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, the New English Library edition of 1972, described on the jacket as “A new novel by the mind-toppling author of ‘Bug Jack Barron’.”

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2yN7uQq

Cambridge student accuses Telegraph of inciting hatred in books row

Lola Olufemi says using her picture on front page story about campaign to ‘decolonise’ the English syllabus was ‘very telling’

A Cambridge University student has accused the media of “a very targeted form of harassment” after she was “flooded” with racist and sexist abuse for criticising the lack of black and ethnic minority authors on the university’s English course.

Lola Olufemi, women’s officer at Cambridge University Student Union, said media coverage of an open letter to the English department, signed by dozens of students, was designed to incite hatred.

Related: Oxford accused of 'social apartheid' as colleges admit no black students

Continue reading...

Russian revolutionaries' children 'read classic fiction, not Marx'

Historian’s research into a Moscow residence for the communist elite shows reading of key Bolshevik texts falling off among the young – sowing seeds of counterrevolution

The Communist party elite and their families eschewed Soviet texts on their bedside tables for the works of western writers such as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and even Oscar Wilde, according to an in-depth study by the historian Yuri Slezkine.

Researching Moscow’s House of Government, a huge apartment block where hundreds of top communist officials lived with their families in the 1930s before Stalin’s Great Purges, Slezkine conducted dozens of interviews, as well as delving through archive diaries and letters. He discovered that far from focusing on the writings of Marx and Engels for their reading, the Bolsheviks and their children preferred expressly anti-revolutionary works by western authors such as Dickens, Defoe, Shakespeare, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Goethe, Kipling and Wilde.

Related: Top 10 books about the Russian Revolution

Continue reading...

Cambridge academics seek to 'decolonise' English syllabus

University condemns abuse directed at group of students who sought to broaden literature studies to include black authors

A group of academics at the University of Cambridge is considering how to implement a call from undergraduates to “decolonise” its English literature syllabus by taking in more black and minority ethnic writers, and bringing post-colonial thought to its existing curriculum.

A statement from the university said that while the teaching forum of academics had no decision-making powers, discussions on how postcolonial literature is taught were ongoing.

Continue reading...

Unseen Harper Lee letters give intimate view of To Kill a Mockingbird author

Set to be sold, correspondence shows her fond regard for friends including Gregory Peck and Vivien Leigh, and records her reaction to Barack Obama’s election

A suggestion made by American president Lyndon B Johnson to the actor Gregory Peck that the US would one day have a black, female president is among a number of illustrious anecdotes in letters written by the author Harper Lee that have come to light.

Thirty-eight letters, written between 2005 and 2010 by the To Kill a Mockingbird author to her friend Felice Itzkoff, are up for auction this week. Addressed affectionately to “Clipper”, Lee’s nickname for Itzkoff, the letters span Lee’s memories of her father, her apparent atheism and her friendship with Hollywood figures.

Continue reading...

Bloomsbury expect Paul Hollywood’s baking book to sell like you-know-what

Bloomsbury will publish The Great British Bake Off judge’s A Baker’s Life, accompanied by a new four-part Channel 4 series, in November

Bloomsbury, the publisher of Paul Hollywood’s new book, A Baker’s Life, is predicting it will be one of the bestsellers this Christmas, thanks in part to the successful reinvention of The Great British Bake Off.

Hollywood’s latest book hits the shelves next Thursday – two days after the final of the first series of Channel 4’s new-look Bake Off airs.

Related: Catch-up viewers put Bake Off in Channel 4’s all-time top 10

Continue reading...

Could science fiction save NHS data and improve our health? | Anne Perkins

The most persistent fear for healthcare in 2100 was about the exploitation of genetic data. But health data could be a huge force for good. We need an open debate now

The NHS lurches its way through funding crises and organisational dilemmas. It faces the challenge of antibiotic resistance and it must ponder the deeply conflicted question of the uses and abuses of new technology. Its short-term horizon is so thronged with urgent problems that it would be a surprise if anyone had the spare capacity to consider how things could look by the end of the century.

A new social enterprise, Kaleidoscope Health & Care, however, decided it would be useful to try to raise the collective medical gaze into the very long term. Last year it organised a science fiction short story competition and invited writers to consider healthcare in 2100. The winners are announced on Thursday.

Related: What can sci-fi teach us about the future of health? | Ara Darzi

Related: Technology and innovation are key to saving the NHS | Alan Milburn

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2i1YUD9

Pablo Neruda: experts say official cause of death 'does not reflect reality'

Panel of 16 experts says that when the Nobel prize-winning poet died in 1973, there was no indication of the cancer that was supposed to have killed him

A team of international scientists say they are “100% convinced” that Chile’s celebrated Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda did not die from prostate cancer, his official cause of death.

Neruda died aged 69 at the Santa María Clinic in Santiago, on 23 September 1973 – 12 days after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup toppled the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. In 2013, Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation of Neruda’s remains after his chauffeur, Manuel Araya, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that the poet had called him in desperation from the hospital to say that he had been injected in the stomach while he was asleep.

Continue reading...

Moomins and more: UK show to exhibit Tove Jansson's broader work

Britain’s first major retrospective of Finnish artist at Dulwich Picture Gallery aims to enhance her reputation as serious artist

Half way through the first major UK retrospective of paintings by Tove Jansson, which opens this week at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, visitors will recognise some little blobby creatures in a glass case – the Moomins.

The stars of some of the most famous children’s books of the 20th century, they have become deeply familiar in their incarnations as fridge magnets, soft toys, on the tail fins of Finnish planes and in a newly opened museum in Finland. They have also appeared in cartoon strips and animations, with a new film coming at Christmas, and a new animated series is promised in 2019 featuring the likes of Kate Winslet, Rosamund Pike and Will Self.

Related: New Moomin museum opens in Finland

Related: The Moomins: Tove Jansson’s feminist legacy

Continue reading...

Hokkaido releases manga comic to combat North Korean threat

Weeks after missiles overflew Japanese island, officials produce comic advising residents what to do in event of test launch

Schoolchildren take cover beneath their desks, while a farmer jumps out of his tractor and crouches face down in a field. Off the coast, the crew of a fishing boat hide behind their vessel’s wheelhouse.

The characters are fictional, but they are playing out a scenario that in recent months has become frighteningly real: a North Korean missile strike.

Much of the regime’s domestic legitimacy rests on portraying the country as under constant threat from the US and its regional allies, South Korea and Japan.

Continue reading...

Philip Pullman launches La Belle Sauvage and says sequel is finished

Author reveals that first book in new trilogy, The Book of Dust, is bleaker than previous books and could be known as ‘His Darker Materials’

After waiting 17 years for his follow-up to the His Dark Materials trilogy, fans of Philip Pullman won’t have to wait as long next time, he revealed on Wednesday. He was speaking ahead of Thursday’s midnight launch of La Belle Sauvage, the first volume in a new trilogy, The Book of Dust, where he told press the second volume was already complete.

Speaking in the Oxford’s 17th-century Bodleian library, which itself features in his hugely anticipated – and heavily embargoed – novel, Pullman also told press that La Belle Sauvage is a darker book than its predecessors.

Continue reading...

Mystery over Christ’s orb in $100m Leonardo da Vinci painting

Crystal sphere in Salvator Mundi artwork lacks optical exactitude, prompting experts to speculate over motive and authenticity

A new biography of Leonardo da Vinci has raised “a puzzling anomaly” in a rediscovered painting that is estimated to fetch $100m (£75m) at auction next month.

Related: Only Leonardo da Vinci in private hands set to fetch £75m at auction

Continue reading...

Broomsticks and dragon bones in British Library's Harry Potter magic show

Manuscripts for JK Rowling’s books mix with a centuries-old mermaid and a witch’s crystal ball in hotly anticipated exhibition

It’s all true, and the incontrovertible proof has gone on display in the British Library. Side by side with original manuscripts and illustrations for the Harry Potter books, in an exhibition that opens on Friday and has already sold a record 30,000 tickets, there are dragons’ bones, a mermaid, a step-by-step illustration (on a scroll six metres long) of how to create a philosopher’s stone, a black crystal ball owned by a 20th-century witch known as Smelly Nelly, and a broomstick on which another west country witch regularly startled Dartmoor walkers.

Even JK Rowling, on a preview visit to the exhibition combining a history of magic with her creations, was astonished to come face to face with the tombstone of one of her characters. She tweeted the image, writing: “Guess what this is? I’ve just seen it and was mesmerised…”

Continue reading...

Top 10 imaginary drugs in fiction

From the mind-bending potion in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Don DeLillo’s cure for the fear of death, these are some of the most potent hits in literature

Science-fiction writers are always looking for ways to bring about change, whether in society, in the nature of the physical world or in the human mind. And making up new drugs is a powerful way of inducing alteration on all these levels.

In my own work I’ve invented drugs such as Vurt, Metaphorazine, Lucidity, Wave, Haze and many more. My latest novel A Man of Shadows sees people enjoying a concoction called kia, shortened from chiaroscuro, a time-altering drug created from a flower that blossoms only at dusk.

Related: Top 10 books about consciousness

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xOHTH9

Man Booker prize goes to second American author in a row

George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo described as ‘unique’ and ‘extraordinary’ by head of 2017 judging panel

The American short story writer George Saunders has won the Man Booker prize for his first full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.

His novel is based around a real event: the night in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln buried his 11-year-old son Willie in a Washington cemetery. Imagining the boy trapped in the Bardo – a Tibetan Buddhist term for a kind of limbo – Saunders’ novel follows the fellow dead, also trapped in the graveyard and unwilling to accept death, who observe the boy as he desperately waits for his father to return.

Related: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders review – extraordinary story of the afterlife

Related: George Saunders' victory disproves Booker lore that favourites never win

Related: George Saunders and the Baileys women's prize – books podcast

Continue reading...

Indigenous poet Ellen van Neerven abused by year 12 English students

Writer faces racist and vulgar posts on Facebook after her poem Mango is used as a sample text in Year 12 exam

The head of the New South Wales education standards authority has said he is “appalled” after an Australian poet became the target of online abuse from high school students because one of her pieces was used in end-of-year exams.

Ellen van Neerven, an Indigenous writer and poet who won the prestigious David Unaipon Award in 2013, became the unwitting target of angry school students on Monday after one her poems, Mango, was used as a sample text in the New South Wales year 12 higher school certificate English exam.

The poem, and question. http://pic.twitter.com/qOR1h2NK72

Students "venting" about Ellen must already know that "venting" is chatting to your friends, not @-ing an author on their personal accounts.

These are not children, they are young adults who are presumably meant to go on to university after this exam. They are clearly unprepared.

Continue reading...

Man Booker prize 2017: Ali Smith leads sales, George Saunders ahead at bookies

On the eve of the UK’s leading fiction award, Autumn dominates sales of the shortlisted novels, but Lincoln in the Bardo is tipped to take the final prize

Ali Smith is outselling the US writers on the Man Booker prize shortlist with just one day left before the winner is announced – but American author George Saunders remains the favourite at the bookmakers.

According book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan, Smith’s novel Autumn is the commercial winner so far among the six titles shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction with almost 50,000 copies sold. From the US, Paul Auster’s 4321 comes in second with nearly 15,000 sales. Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, debut British novelist Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, and British/Pakistani Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West have all sold about 10,000 copies each. History of Wolves, by the American first-timer Emily Fridlund, has sold the least, with a figure of 3,410 copies.

Related: What makes a Man Booker novel? Six shortlisted authors share their secrets

Continue reading...

UK’s north-south divide dates back to Vikings, says archaeologist

Watford Gap discovered to be key geographical divide between invaders and Anglo-Saxons

The north-south divide has been the butt of jokes in Britain for years, but research has shown the Watford Gap, which separates the country, was in fact established centuries ago when the Vikings invaded Britain.

According to the archaeologist Max Adams, who made the discovery while researching his new book, the Northamptonshire-Warwickshire boundary known as the Watford Gap is a geographic and cultural reality that can be traced back to the Viking age.

Related: Why England’s north is still waiting for its powerhouse | Andy Burnham

Continue reading...

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee taken off Mississippi school reading list

• Official: ‘some language in the book makes people uncomfortable’
• Story of racism in the US south has been removed from schools before

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s classic novel about racism and the American south, has been removed from a junior-high reading list in a Mississippi school district because the language in the book “makes people uncomfortable”.

Related: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: a classic with many lives to live

Continue reading...

'I dream of being an accountant': Wall of Dreams shines refugees' hopes over London

As a huge projection over London’s Southbank Centre illuminates the wishes of the city’s displaced people, participants explain some of their stories

Mohammed, a gangly 17-year-old who fled Syria with no hope of seeing his family again, dreams of being a footballer. Drita saw a side to humanity no 16-year-old should during her journey from eastern Europe. Now, she has pinned her hopes on becoming a teacher.

Abu has a dream too. The 18-year-old longs to stand in his grandmother’s kitchen in South Sudan, mouth watering in anticipation of her cooking. It is a dream he has consigned to fantasy. “I can’t see me being able to go back,” he says.

Four boys, hoodies up, ribbed each other, but another said: “I want to write poetry. I like it.”

Related: Man Booker prize 2017 and poet Kayo Chingonyi – books podcast

Continue reading...

Bertie Wooster returns as a spy in Jeeves sequel by Schott's Miscellany author

Ben Schott says ‘it’s like being lent the Crown Jewels’ after PG Wodehouse estate approves trivia bestseller to write Jeeves and the King of Clubs

Bertie Wooster, PG Wodehouse’s “mentally somewhat negligible” English gentleman with a heart of gold, is set to be reimagined as a British spy by Ben Schott, the author of the bestselling collection of trivia Schott’s Original Miscellany.

Schott, whose forthcoming Jeeves and the King of Clubs is sanctioned by the PG Wodehouse estate, called it “an incomparable honour to follow in the patent-leather footsteps of the greatest English-language humorist”.

I made the universal gesture of a man swinging a mallet. ‘Cricket?’ ‘Croquet.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ It’s jarring to encounter such a world-view so early in the morning, and it took every ounce of the Wooster grey matter to marshall a coherent answer. ‘Croquet is a little like chess,’ I explained, ‘played on grass. With balls.’

Continue reading...

Provenance by Ann Leckie review – good old-fashioned space adventure

A new saga from the Ancillary Justice author features an aristocratic young heroine in a gender-neutral universe

Ann Leckie’s 2013 debut, Ancillary Justice, flared like a meteor through the skies of contemporary science fiction. A near unanimity of critical acclaim, enthusiastic adoption by fans and a clean sweep of all the major SF awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C Clarke, Kitschies and BSFA – unprecedented for a first novel – made it the genre event of the year.

All the hullaballoo looks, perhaps, a little odd in retrospect. In many ways Ancillary Justice is a good old-fashioned space adventure, set in the ruthless galactic empire of the Radch, which is quasi-Roman with a few British Raj touches (a lot of tea gets drunk). The narrator, Breq, is the last of what was formerly a huge collective consciousness running the spaceship Justice of Toren. The Radch way is to capture individuals, mind-wipe and reprogram them to join these collective entities. Breq, though, is on her own and out for revenge.

Related: Ann Leckie's novel Ancillary Justice wins Arthur C Clarke award

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2i7cVTE

Weinstein Books 'terminated' in wake of assault allegations

Film mogul’s associated publishing imprint is to close in the wake of scandal over multiple abuse allegations

The Weinstein Books imprint is being shut down, following a week of sexual assault allegations against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

In a statement to staff issued on Thursday, Hachette Book Group said it had “terminated” the imprint. A joint venture between the Weinstein Company and the Hachette-owned publisher Perseus, Weinstein Books released around 10 books a year, with titles ranging from books by media personalities to film tie-ins. It was run by two women: editorial director Amanda Murray and publishing director Georgina Levitt.

Related: The Weinstein allegations

Official statement from @morningmika #KnowYourValue http://pic.twitter.com/7OIits1H2g

Continue reading...

Writers step in to defend author accused of plagiarism in New York Times

Jill Bialosky’s Poetry Will Save Your Life was charged with extensive use of others’ writing, but peers say accidental repetitions ‘were not egregious theft’

More than 70 authors, including Pulitzer prize winners Jennifer Egan and Louise Glück, have come to the defence of the editor and poet Jill Bialosky after she was accused of plagiarism, saying that Bialosky’s “inadvertent repetition of biographical boilerplate was not an egregious theft intentionally performed”.

A scathing review of Bialosky’s memoir, Poetry Will Save Your Life, by the poet William Logan in the Tourniquet Review last week accused her of having “plagiarised numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation” when writing biographical details of poets including Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell.

Continue reading...

Miniature book said to have inspired Virginia Woolf's Orlando to be published

Vita Sackville-West’s stamp-sized book about a fashionable sprite who meets famous fairytale figures was written in 1922, four years before Woolf’s novel

A postage stamp-sized book by Vita Sackville-West, featuring a “fashionable and ageless sprite” who may have inspired her lover Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, is to be published for the first time.

Continue reading...

Dan Brown's Origin makes a strong start in UK bookshops

Although not quite the sensation of previous Robert Langdon thrillers, The Da Vinci Code author’s latest mystery sold 100,000 copies in its first week

Dan Brown’s mastery of something like a code for bestsellers has returned to cheer UK booksellers, with more than 100,000 copies of his latest thriller, Origin, sold in the first five days after publication last Tuesday. But while retailers pronounced themselves delighted, there were some indications that his hold on British readers is not quite as sure as it once was – with these figures adding up to only a fifth of the initial success of 2009’s The Lost Symbol.

According to Nielsen BookScan, Origin had amassed 100,095 sales by Saturday. Brown’s publisher, Transworld, said this makes it the fastest-selling original fiction title in the UK since Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015, which sold 168,455 print copies in its first five days. But the Bookseller pointed out that Origin’s first week UK sales were half those of Inferno, which sold 228,961 copies in its first week in 2013, with Inferno’s sales half those of The Lost Symbol, which sold 551,000 print copies in its first week in 2009.

Continue reading...

Kindle Oasis: Amazon finally launches a water resistant e-reader

Premium device switches between ebooks and audiobooks and comes with Bluetooth, longer battery life and aluminium design to tempt readers

Amazon’s Kindle is finally water resistant, with the launch of the new larger 7in Kindle Oasis that merges ebooks and audiobooks into one device.

Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the original Kindle in November, the new top-end device aims to lead Amazon’s e-readers into the next decade with a new aluminium design, longer built-in battery life and a larger, brighter screen.

Continue reading...

MacArthur 'genius grants' go to novelists Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jesmyn Ward

Among 2017’s recipients of the $625,000 honours are two novelists exploring the lives of minority communities in the US

Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jesmyn Ward, two novelists exploring how writers from minority communities must “claim the same rights” as the majority, have landed $625,000 (£470,000) MacArthur fellowships, popularly known as “genius grants”.

The no-strings-attached fellowships, which have previously gone to writers including Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are intended “to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations”. Two novelists were among this year’s selection of 24 fellows, which included mathematicians, historians, computer scientists and anthropologists. Ward was picked for novels “exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South, against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential”. Nguyen was chosen for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam war and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”.

Continue reading...

Fifty shades of Xi: scores of books praising president published in China

Blitz on bookshelves comes ahead of next week’s political summit and includes tomes including Xi Jinping: Know More, Love More

“This is the first book I’ve read on Xi,” admits software engineer Wu Huifeng as he leafs through one of the latest tomes of China’s prolific president.

It need not be his last.

Related: All-conquering Xi: China hails its leader in ecstatic Beijing exhibition

Continue reading...

Dr Seuss racism row escalates over illustration of Chinese man

The Massachusetts museum dedicated to the children’s author has agreed to remove a mural showing one his early pictures, prompting charges of political correctness

The Dr Seuss Museum in Massachusetts has become embroiled in an escalating fight over an 80-year-old Seuss illustration of an Asian man, which culminated at the weekend in the local mayor condemning complaints about the picture as “political correctness at its worst”.

On Friday, author and illustrator Mo Willems announced that he and two other authors – Lisa Yee and Mike Curato – would no longer be appearing at a scheduled event at the museum in Seuss’s hometown of Springfield, due to a mural that included a “jarring racial stereotype of a Chinese man who is depicted with chopsticks, a pointed hat and slanted slit eyes”.

. @MikeCurato , @LisaYee1 , and I wont be attending the Oct. 14 Springfield, MA, Seuss Museum event as planned. Here is why: http://pic.twitter.com/TSvnHkFZAj

Related: Melania Trump book donation rejected by school librarian

Continue reading...

Lost in La Mancha's Jean Rochefort, veteran French actor, dies at 87

Rochefort, who scored a major international success in The Hairdresser’s Husband, was also cast as Don Quixote in Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated Cervantes adaptation

Related: After 17 years, has Terry Gilliam finally broken the curse of Don Quixote?

Jean Rochefort, the French actor who played a key role in one of the most ill-fated movie sagas in Hollywood history, has died aged 87, his daughter said on Monday.

Continue reading...

Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage gets accidental early release in Netherlands

Dutch translation of sequel to His Dark Materials was available in shops before copies were recalled ahead of worldwide release on 19 October

With fans around the world having waited almost two decades for Philip Pullman’s highly anticipated sequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy, a few lucky Dutch readers have got their hands on copies of La Belle Sauvage two weeks early – before the novel was promptly recalled across the Netherlands.

La Belle Sauvage, the first in Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, has a worldwide release date of 19 October. But Dutch publisher Uitgeverij Prometheus sent out copies of the long-awaited novel, translated as Het boek van Stof, to bookshops across the Netherlands last week, and lists a release date of 4 October on its website.

This is so odd! Why is the Dutch version of Belle Sauvage released earlier than the original version?! @PhilipPullman http://pic.twitter.com/IOqSzkBlaL

Related: Before His Dark Materials: Philip Pullman's new novel – exclusive extract

Continue reading...

Frankfurt book fair moves the focus back to writer star power

Authors including Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks to appear at world’s largest publishing trade event

Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks are among the big name authors descending on Frankfurt this week as the world’s oldest book fair glams up for the Instagram generation.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is set to formally open the fair with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Tuesday, accompanied by a who’s who of the French literary scene, as part of the country’s turn as the trade fair’s annual guest of honour.

Related: Origin by Dan Brown – a Nostradamus for our muddled times

Related: What lies beneath the brave new world of feminist dystopian sci-fi?

Continue reading...

Unseen letters show Hemingway’s fight against celebrity and ‘bullshit publicity’

‘My private life being an open sewer, I am sometimes a little touchy,’ wrote the author

His prose matched his macho lifestyle, from wartime adventures to big-game hunting, boozing and bullfighting. But Ernest Hemingway was extremely sensitive about his private life, which he described as “an open sewer”, and repeatedly asked family and friends not to reveal details, according to previously unpublished correspondence.

In the fourth of 17 volumes of his letters, to be published by Cambridge University Press, Hemingway writes on one occasion: “If I’m to write at all, I have to keep my private life out of it.” Another letter records that he had forbidden one publisher “ever to use any personal publicity because I want the stuff to be judged as fiction”.

Related: The 100 best novels: No 53 – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

Continue reading...

Ivana Trump: I talk to Donald regularly despite 'insane' divorce

Mother of Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric, preparing to publish a memoir discussing her marriage, says her daughter could be president one day

Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana, has said her daughter Ivanka could run for president, and that she and Trump now speak regularly and have a warm relationship despite the “insane” circumstances of their notorious divorce.

Related: The Trump-Russia dossier: why its findings grow more significant by the day

Related: Donald Trump's lawyer threatens reporter over ex-wife's allegations: 'You cannot rape your spouse'

Continue reading...

'Now it’s the coolest thing': rise of Rupi Kaur helps boost poetry sales

Young rebel poets are bringing about a power shift in contemporary poetry and drawing a wider audience to the art form

Forget page-turners and celebrity memoirs, Brits have rekindled their love of verse.

More than a million poetry books were sold in the last year, the highest number on record, as the popularity of social media sensations such as Rupi Kaur continues to reinvigorate the art form. Sales are up 13%, to £10.5m, according to figures from Nielsen Book Research.

Related: Rupi Kaur: the inevitable backlash against Instagram's favourite poet

Continue reading...

Novel rejected as 'too gay' receives flood of crowdfunding support

The Madonna of Bolton by Matt Cain was turned down by mainstream publishers more than 30 times, but has won keen backing from readers

A novel that was rejected more than 30 times by publishers for being “too gay” has been inundated with backing from names including David Walliams, Mark Gatiss and SJ Watson after its author turned to crowdfunding.

Matt Cain’s The Madonna of Bolton tells the story of Charlie Matthews, who falls in love with Madonna on his ninth birthday. The obsession “sees him through some tough times in life: being persecuted at school; fitting in at a posh university; a glamorous career in London; finding boyfriends; getting rid of boyfriends; growing up and family heartbreak”. Launched on the crowdfunding site Unbound this week, it has already racked up 60% of what it needs to be published, with backers also including One Day author David Nicholls and the bestselling writer Lisa Jewell.

They assume it’s only the very intelligent in society who read literary fiction who understand and accept gay people

Related: Alan Hollinghurst: ‘I was fortunate to come along just as gay lit was coming into its own’

Continue reading...

Leonard Cohen's last book, finished 'days before his death', due out next year

The Flame collects unpublished poetry, as well as notebook entries and song lyrics, and offers ‘an intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist’

A book of Leonard Cohen’s final poems, completed in the months before his death and tackling “the flame and how our culture threatened its extinction”, according to his manager, will be published next year.

Describing the collection, The Flame, as “an enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen’s storied literary career”, publisher Canongate said that the Canadian singer-songwriter had chosen and ordered the poems in the months before his death in November 2016. The overwhelming majority of the book, which will be published next October, will be new material, it added.

Continue reading...

Yuval Noah Harari's new book to cover global warming, God and nationalism

The historian’s next book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, will ask ‘what should we teach children today to prepare them for the world of tomorrow’ and promises a sweeping look at the future

Faced with a world stuck in “nostalgic fantasies about going back to the past”, where politicians are “no longer capable of producing meaningful visions for the future”, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari is turning to the present in a new book announced on Thursday.

Random House imprint Jonathan Cape acquired Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, as excitement built around the title ahead of next week’s Frankfurt book fair. It is due to be published next August. Harari said: “If Sapiens was about the past, and [follow-up] Homo Deus was about the future and distant future of humankind, the new book is about the present, and what we need to do to prepare ourselves for the coming revolution of the 21st century.”

Related: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - podcast

Related: Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’

Continue reading...

Johnny Depp says he would have 'taken a bullet' for Gerry Conlon

Hollywood star reveals close friendship with one of Guildford Four, who suggested he play him in film that became In the Name of the Father

Johnny Depp has described his close friendship with Gerry Conlon, saying he would have “taken a bullet” for him, in a moving foreword to a new biography of the man who spent 15 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted as an IRA bomber.

The unlikely friendship between the Hollywood actor and Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, began when the pair met in the US in 1990, the year after Conlon had his conviction overturned and was released from prison. Their friendship was sealed at a gig by the Pogues, where Depp described Conlon and his brother as looking “just like the miscreant, unhinged maniacs I always tended to hang out with”. Depp describes the book, In the Name of the Son, as “a story of a man I loved”.

Related: Gerry Conlon obituary

Related: Gerry Conlon: My ordeal goes on. For others the nightmare is just starting

Continue reading...

Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel prize in literature

The British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel prize in literature

• The Nobel prize in literature 2017 – as it happened

The English author Kazuo Ishiguro has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for his “novels of great emotional force”, which it said had “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.

With names including Margaret Atwood, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice. But his blue-chip literary credentials return the award to more familiar territory after last year’s controversial selection of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s writing, said the Academy, is “marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place”.

Related: Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks

Related: Kazuo Ishiguro’s turn to fantasy

Continue reading...

VS Naipaul: shockingly disloyal to his literary friend, claims Spurling

Biographer Hilary Spurling unmasks ‘vengeful’ posthumous reviews of Anthony Powell novels by onetime fan

A decade after the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul published his autobiography, some of his words have come back to haunt him – and sparked a literary feud involving three of Britain’s foremost writers.

Passages in which Naipaul dismissed the writing of the late novelist Anthony Powell have sparked condemnation from Hilary Spurling, the prize-winning biographer, who accuses him of carrying out an inexplicable “act of vengeance” against a loyal friend.

Continue reading...

British philosopher Onora O’Neill wins $1m Berggruen prize

Cambridge emeritus professor is praised for combining ‘rigour with timely prescriptions for what we really need to do’

A British peer has been awarded a $1m prize for a lifetime’s achievement in the fields of philosophy and public service.

Onora O’Neill was commended by the judges who awarded her the Berggruen prize, not only for the rigour of her philosophical work, but for her efforts to apply it to the real world.

Continue reading...

BBC national short story award goes to Cynan Jones

Praised by judges as ‘genuinely thrilling’, The Edge of the Shoal takes prestigious £15,000 honour

Read Cynan Jones’s winning story here

Welsh writer Cynan Jones’s “perfect” and “terrifying” tale of a man lost at sea, The Edge of the Shoal, has won the £15,000 BBC national short story award.

Jones’s entry was announced as the winner of the award on Tuesday evening, beating stories by authors including Helen Oyeyemi and Jenni Fagan. It tells of a man who sets out to scatter his father’s ashes from a kayak, leaving a note for his pregnant partner: “Pick salad x.” He is caught up in a storm and finds himself injured, adrift and struggling to survive.

Related: Cynan Jones's top 10 books about the hostile ocean

Continue reading...

Spy caper Kingsman: The Golden Circle still on top as Flatliners flatlines

Horror adaptation It remains second ahead of Goodbye Christopher Robin, while Spice World: The Movie gets a nostalgia UK screening

Declining a relatively slim 32% in its second frame, Kingsman: The Golden Circle added another £4.19m at the weekend in the UK for a 12-day tally of £15.6m. That compares with £8.25m for predecessor Kingsman: The Secret Service after two weekends of play. The original Kingsman film went on to achieve a lifetime total of £16.6m in the UK, so The Golden Circle is only £1m behind it. Director Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass maxed out at £11.8m, Stardust at £15.0m, and X-Men: First Class at £15.1m, so The Golden Circle is a dead cert to become his biggest ever UK hit. (The Golden Circle is also ahead of films that Vaughn produced but didn’t direct such as Snatched and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.)

Related: Kingsman: The Golden Circle – did the shock tactics go too far? Discuss with spoilers

Related: 'Oh, it's you!' said Geri: my quest to meet the Spice Girls

Related: Blade Runner 2049 review – a gigantic spectacle of pure hallucinatory craziness

Continue reading...

Nobel prize in literature set to reveal 2017 winner on 5 October

The Swedish Academy announces date for this year’s laureate, with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami leading bookmakers’ odds

A year after the Swedish Academy shocked the world with its choice of Bob Dylan as the Nobel laureate for literature, the jury is preparing to unveil this year’s winner of the prestigious honour.

The academy, an assembly of 18 Swedes who are elected by secret ballot to their roles and hold them for life, has revealed that the Nobel laureate in literature will be announced on 5 October. More than half of the academy’s members must vote for the eventual winner, who is chosen from about 350 proposals made by literary experts and former Nobel laureates from around the world. Intended to honour Alfred Nobel’s desire to reward “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, the SEK9m (£832,000) award has gone to 113 writers since 1901 – of whom 14 were women, 28 wrote in English and 77 wrote in prose.

Related: Nobel prize in literature won by Bob Dylan – as it happened

Related: Haruki Murakami named 4/1 favourite to win 2016 Nobel prize in literature

Continue reading...

Ex-FBI agent opens cold case review into who betrayed Anne Frank

Vince Pankoke and his team will use new techniques to analyse large amounts of data to solve mystery of diarist’s capture

A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in 1944.

Investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, are to be used by a team of 19 forensic experts led by Vince Pankoke.

Continue reading...

JJ Abrams' Your Name remake fuels fears of Hollywood 'whitewash'

Prospect of Star Wars director remaking universally acclaimed Japanese animation prompts backlash among film fans

The recent announcement that the Star Wars director JJ Abrams is to make a live-action version of the record-breaking animated film Your Name has prompted a backlash among fans of the original, who fear another Hollywood “whitewash” of a Japanese masterpiece.

Makoto Shinkai’s fantasy about a teenage girl living in a picturesque but unexciting village and a Tokyo schoolboy who are drawn together by gender-swapping dreams has proved a global hit since its release in Japan last year and made more at the box office than any other animated film in history.

Continue reading...

Children's authors slam celebrity-heavy World Book Day lineup

Led by David Almond and Anthony McGowan, writers have spoken out against stress on famous names in works chosen for 2018 event

Top children’s authors including David Almond and Anthony McGowan have criticised a celebrity-heavy lineup of titles for next year’s World Book Day, describing the choice of books by famous names including Julian Clary and Clare Balding as patronising and demeaning.

Billed as “the world’s biggest celebration of reading”, more than 1m books by authors including Jacqueline Wilson, Francesca Simon and Julia Donaldson were given away to children for this year’s World Book Day. But when the featured authors at next year’s event were announced on Friday, including Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain and the musician Tom Fletcher as well as Clary and Balding, the Carnegie medal-winning writer Almond led a volley of criticism against organisers for overlooking children’s authors in favour of celebrity names.

Continue reading...

Tim Poston obituary

My friend and colleague Tim Poston, who has died aged 72, had an unorthodox academic career that combined pure mathematics with physics, engineering, computer science and medicine. He also co-authored two science-fiction novels.

He was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, to Ralph, a broadcaster and Anglican priest, and his wife, Mary (nee King), a teacher and later a psychiatric social worker. As his parents moved around for work purposes, Tim was educated at various schools in Britain and abroad before he went to Hull University, where he graduated with a first-class degree in mathematics in 1967. He followed it up with a PhD at Warwick University in 1972, then worked in mathematics and physics research centres around the world, mainly as a research fellow or visiting professor. Among the many cities in which he worked were Rio de Janeiro, Porto, Geneva, Stuttgart, Los Angeles and Bangalore.

Continue reading...

via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2xU6auf