Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine, about humanity’s attempts to conquer death through technology, wins £30,000 prize
Irish debut author Mark O’Connell has won the Wellcome book prize for his exploration of transhumanism, a movement that seeks to use technology to solve “the modest problem of death”, as O’Connell puts it.
Related: To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell review – solving the problem of death
Continue reading...Exhibition to reveal truth about books hidden in 17-storey tower said to include pornography
To avoid disappointment, an exhibition opening this week at the Cambridge University library should carry the warning sign: “These books contain no pornography”.
Despite undergraduate folklore there is no secret stash of pornography among the 200,000 books in the 17 floors of the tower, which rises 157 feet above the library. The building, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was completed in 1934 to mixed reviews, with the former prime minister Neville Chamberlain calling it “a magnificent erection”.
Continue reading...Recreation forms part of immersive six-month project at National Trust’s Blickling Estate exploring importance of books
In the cellars of one of England’s grandest country houses will be a recreation of a university library destroyed by militants in Mosul, Iraq. In a nearby corridor are copies of a bestseller censored by the Pentagon. Upstairs a book banned in China has been inserted in a bookcase of innocuous 19th century volumes.
The displays are at the National Trust’s Blickling Estate, part of an immersive six-month art project exploring the importance of books, which opens to the public on Tuesday.
Project to digitise and publish his marginalia online will allow scholars to see his cutting remarks on Ralph Waldo Emerson
Despite writing a shelf-full of books, including his own autobiography, the great Victorian intellectual John Stuart Mill remains a man of mystery to scholars. However, a new side of Mill has now come to light, hidden in the margins of his library.
It turns out that Mill was an inveterate annotator, scribbling comments, observations and in some cases graffiti throughout his library. More than 140 years after his death, those notes are being collected and published for the first time.
Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 61 – On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Related: On the Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill | Book review
Continue reading...Books of gibberish are listed on Amazon.com for thousands of dollars, with one author claiming his name was used to send almost $24,000 to a fraudulent seller
“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.
Amazon’s self-publishing arm CreateSpace makes it relatively straightforward to publish a title that contains any text, provided that this isn’t “placeholder” or dummy text, and allowing fake books to be sold on the Amazon website at a price chosen by the seller.
Related: For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way
Continue reading...Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race beat books by Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir
Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race has been named the most influential book written by a woman. The 2017 book bested titles including Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
Related: Reni Eddo-Lodge and Juno Dawson - books podcast
Continue reading...Swedish Academy members debate holding back prize for first time since the second world war
The Swedish Academy is discussing whether to cancel the 2018 Nobel prize in literature, following a string of sexual assault allegations. A decision is expected on 3 May.
At their weekly meeting on 26 April, the 11 remaining members of the committee debated the question. “The Swedish Academy yesterday discussed the Nobel prize and came to no decision,” Per Wästberg, who heads the four-person panel that awards the prize, told the Guardian following the meeting.
Continue reading...Chief executive James Daunt, who has guided the retailer back to profit and will remain in post, hails the deal as testament to ‘old-fashioned bookselling’
Britain’s largest book chain, Waterstones, has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by the private investment firm Elliott Advisors.
James Daunt, who has been chief executive of Waterstones since 2011 and who presided over an 80% jump in annual profits in the year to April 2017, will remain in his position following the sale, along with his “key leadership team”.
Continue reading...But it won’t be The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth volume of the series. Instead author has revealed a history of the Targaryen dynasty, due in November
George RR Martin told fans today that the long-awaited sixth volume in his Game of Thrones fantasy series, The Winds of Winter, would not be published this year – but softened the blow by revealing that his “imaginary history” of the Targaryen family in Westeros would be released on 20 November.
Fire and Blood is set 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire and, said its publishers Bantam and Voyager, will chronicle “the Targaryen civil war that nearly ended their dynasty forever”. Martin first mentioned the volume, the first of a planned two histories of Westeros, last summer, saying at the time that he was not sure if it, or The Winds of Winter, would be released first in 2018.
FIRE & BLOOD, the history of the Targaryens, will be releasing in hardcover on November 20! Read more about it in my blog post: https://t.co/Y6kdsfEds9 #FireandBlood pic.twitter.com/URFJRzGA9r
Continue reading...The Trump-bashing FBI director’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty, has sold 600,000 in its first week at bookshops
First-week sales of the former FBI director James Comey’s memoir have topped 600,000 copies in the US, eclipsing the initial performances of recent political bestsellers by Michael Wolff and Hillary Clinton.
Comey’s A Higher Loyalty, which publisher Flatiron Books says explores “what good, ethical leadership looks like, and how it drives sound decisions”, and which a Guardian review said likens Donald Trump to “an ignorant thug whose tantrums and rants make up for gnawing personal insecurities”, was published on 17 April. Flatiron president Bob Miller and publisher Amy Einhorn report it has sold more than 600,000 copies so far, with more than 1m copies now in print, making it this week’s number one bestselling title in the US.
Continue reading...The only recorded palimpsest in which a Christian text has been effaced to make way for the Islamic holy text is to go on sale at Christie’s
An “extraordinary” discovery by an eagle-eyed scholar has identified the shadowy outlines of passages from the Bible behind an eighth-century manuscript of the Qur’an – the only recorded palimpsest in which a Christian text has been effaced to make way for the Islamic holy text.
French scholar Dr Eléonore Cellard was looking for images of a palimpsest page sold a decade earlier by Christie’s when she came across the auction house’s latest catalogue, which included fragments from a manuscript of the Qur’an which Christie’s had dated to the eighth century AD, or the second century of Islam. Scrutinising the image, she noticed that, appearing faintly behind the Arabic script, were Coptic letters. She contacted Christie’s, and they managed to identify the Coptic text as coming from the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy – part of the Torah and the Christian Old Testament.
Continue reading...The Second War of the Dog wins Palestinian author $50,000 and an English translation of the book he calls ‘a warning of what we could become in the future’
Ibrahim Nasrallah has won the International prize for Arabic fiction with The Second War of the Dog, a novel hailed by the judges as “a masterful vision of a dystopian future in a nameless country”. Along with the $50,000 cheque – one of the richest prizes in fiction – Nasrallah has also been awarded funds for an English translation of the novel.
Announcing the winner, chair of judges Ibrahim Al Saafin praised The Second War of the Dog for its use of techniques drawn from fantasy and science fiction. “It exposes the tendency towards brutality inherent in society,” he said, “imagining a time where human and moral values have been discarded and anything is permissible, even the buying and selling of human souls.”
Related: Writing of Jordan, dreaming of Palestine
Continue reading...The US civil liberties group created the new resource for writers and journalists after a survey revealed the extent to which trolls cause them to self-censor their work
A rapid rise in the trolling of US writers and journalists has led civil liberties group PEN America to create a “field guide” for dealing with the problem. It follows a survey of writers that found online harassment was posing a “significant threat to free speech”.
The survey revealed that two-thirds of trolled writers had responded to the abuse by refraining from publishing their work and deleting their social media accounts. They also said they feared for their personal safety as a result of the abuse. Over a third of respondents – who include leading US authors and journalists – said trolling had led them to avoid controversial topics in their writing.
Our goal is to equip writers and their allies with resources to push back against online hatred
Continue reading...The initiative has distributed almost 5m books to readers but is to shut following loss of Arts Council England funding and corporate sponsor
An adult literacy publishing scheme credited with helping thousands of adults to learn to read is to be axed after failing to secure funding, despite almost 5m books being handed out in prisons, hospitals and workplaces since it was launched in 2005.
Publishing fast-paced, entertaining books by authors such as Andy McNab, Mark Billingham, Ann Cleeves and Dorothy Koomson, Quick Reads was established to appeal to the one in six adults with reading difficulties, as well as those who rarely pick up a book.
Continue reading...The forgotten stories, discovered among the late writer’s papers, will be published beginning in November with Christmas Story Collection
Two collections of forgotten stories by Noel Streatfeild are to be published for the first time. They were discovered among the late writer’s papers.
Streatfeild, who died in 1986, is the author of some of the best-loved classics of children’s literature, from Ballet Shoes, her tale of the adventures on the stage of the Fossil sisters, to White Boots, about rivalry on ice skates. She began writing children’s books in 1931 after working in munitions factories and canteens during the first world war and as an actor.
Continue reading...A campaign to prevent the pollution of the Earth’s oceans with plastic, begun by Lauren St John, now has 50 children’s writers involved
Fifty children’s authors, including Michael Morpurgo, Quentin Blake and Jacqueline Wilson, have come together to call on the book trade to ditch plastic and help save the oceans.
The Authors4Oceans campaign wascreated by the award-winning novelist Lauren St John, whose children’s books include the eco-adventure Dolphin Song and the forthcoming seaside mystery Kat Wolfe Investigates. St John devised the project, which is asking publishers, booksellers and young readers to help halt the amount of plastic being dumped in our oceans, after she ordered a drink in a bookshop, and found it came with a plastic straw.
Continue reading...Broadcaster PBS has launched the Great American Read, setting the nation a summer reading challenge
EL James and Dan Brown have been pitted against some of the greatest names in literature, including Joseph Conrad and Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a search to find America’s most loved novel. The two are among those vying for attention on a list arrived at after a public vote by US public service broadcaster PBS.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism, is pitched alongside Brown’s less taxing conspiracy bestseller The Da Vinci Code, in a list of 100 novels to feature in The Great American Read, an eight-part TV series that will conclude in the autumn with a second poll to find the nation’s favourite book.
Continue reading...Three debuts make the six-strong lineup, including British author Imogen Hermes Gowar, while ‘grand old names’ such as Arundhati Roy lose out
From Arundhati Roy to Jennifer Egan, some of the biggest names in literature have fallen by the wayside in the race for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. Instead the judges have plumped for titles they felt “spoke most directly and truthfully” to them.
Three fiction debuts made the six-strong lineup for the £30,000 award: British authors Imogen Hermes Gowar, chosen for her historical novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, which imagines the capture of a mermaid in Georgian London, and Jessie Greengrass for Sight, about the journey to motherhood; and American Elif Batuman for The Idiot, set at Harvard university during the 1990s.
Related: Women's prize for fiction reveals 'outward-looking' longlist
Continue reading...Previously unseen work by the Clockwork Orange novelist and journalist discusses censorship, Hemingway and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
Previously unpublished essays by Anthony Burgess have been discovered almost 25 years after his death.
The writings cover a range of subjects, including Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film, and fellow writers Ernest Hemingway and JB Priestley. They also include an unpublished 1991 lecture on censorship.
Continue reading...After the huge success of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, similar projects for boys are beginning to showcase men like Grayson Perry, Stormzy and Usain Bolt
After harnessing the imaginations of millions of girls with a wave of nonfiction books aimed at empowering women, such as bestseller Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, the book world is now preparing a clutch of inspirational titles for boys, portraying an “alternative type of hero … a man who checks his privilege and who is kind, selfless, courageous and not afraid to stand up for what’s right”.
Related: The triumphant return of Rebel Girls: ‘We are proud our book has become a symbol of resistance'
Continue reading...My father, Peter Nicholls, has died aged 78. He was an academic and literary critic, whose 1979 work The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction mapped the landscape of the field and remains the definitive reference work.
The encyclopedia quixotically aimed at detailing every film, author and theme in the western tradition of science fiction. The entries were accessible and witty. More than a collation of facts, the encyclopedia passed judgments and advanced an argument: that science fiction was the literature of change, making it the truest literary response to the 20th century.
Continue reading...New suit claims Aaron Sorkin adaptation may have to be scrapped over alleged differences between the play and novel, as producers offer to stage disputed work at federal court
In a courtroom drama worthy of the novel itself, producers of the first Broadway adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are suing the author’s estate. They are offering to perform the play for a judge to prove it is faithful to the book after the estate claimed otherwise.
Hollywood producer Scott Rudin’s company Rudinplay filed a $10m (£6.98m) countersuit on 16 April, a month after Lee’s estate filed legal action to stop the production. The estate’s suit claimed that Oscar-winning writer Aaron Sorkin’s script deviated too much from the 1960 novel about race relations in the US south.
Continue reading...The 24-year-old poet, with a background in biochemistry, wants young people in the capital ‘to see poetry as part of their every day’
The 24-year-old Somali-British poet Momtaza Mehri, who has been chosen as the new young people’s laureate for London, is hoping to spend her year in the role convincing young people “to see poetry as part of their every day, rather than in some dusty tome, or academic niche interest”.
Mehri, who has a background in biochemical science and wrote the poetry chapbook sugah. lump. prayer, has been shortlisted for this year’s Brunel African poetry prize and won last year’s Out-Spoken Page poetry prize. As laureate, Mehri hopes to encourage young people to voice their concerns and experiences through poetry.
Continue reading...Film, broadcasting, publishing and performing sectors nowhere near representative of UK
Working-class people continue to be hugely under-represented in the arts, and the people at the top – mostly well-paid, middle-class white men – are least likely to see it. This conclusion was reached in a new report published today, billed as the first sociological study on social mobility in the cultural industries.
The study used data from interviews with 237 people who work in the creative industries to shine light on a problem that the report’s authors said is a longstanding one.
Related: Middle class people dominate arts, survey finds
Continue reading...Film-maker became key figure of the Czech new wave before emigrating to the US and establishing a successful career in Hollywood
Miloš Forman, the Czech-born director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, has died at the age of 86. Czech news agency CTK reported that Forman died on Friday in the United States after a short illness. His wife, Martina, told CTK: “His departure was calm and he was surrounded the whole time by his family and his closest friends.”
Forman was born in the Czech town of Caslav in 1932; after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, his mother died in concentration camps. After being raised by relatives, Forman joined the Prague Film Academy, and began writing scripts in the late 1950s, gradually moving up the ranks in the postwar Czechoslovak industry. His debut as director, Black Peter, about a teenager in his first job, incurred the dislike of the Communist authorities for its irreverent attitude, but after its prizewinning appearance at the Locarno film festival enabled Forman to continue directing.
Continue reading...The normally secretive members of the Swedish Academy are embroiled in all-out war – but the collapse of this self-important bulwark of patriarchy and privilege is not over yet
The Nobel Prize for literature has been shaken by the worst scandal in its history. In a row which brings together sexism, money and privilege, along with levels of spite that would shame a kindergarten, three of the 18 members stepped down last week, in protest because they lost a vote to exclude a fourth member, Katarina Frostenson, a poet whose husband stands accused of 18 separate instances of sexual harassment, including rape.
By Thursday night, the resulting public scandal had led to departures of both Frostenson and the permanent secretary Sara Danius – who had been among her accusers – after they were forced out after a three hour meeting.
The obvious answer would be mass resignations and starting again – but it turns out that you cannot resign
Continue reading...Body that awards Nobel prize for literature in crisis over claims involving husband of member
The body that awards the Nobel literature prize is in crisis following a string of resignations over a growing scandal of alleged sexual abuse and other misconduct involving the husband of one of its members.
Amid mounting public anger and division, the normally discreet Swedish Academy appointed a new head on Friday after Sara Danius, the first woman to hold the post since its foundation in 1786, stepped aside following an emergency three-hour meeting in Stockholm on Thursday night.
Related: Nobel prize judges quit over handling of sexual misconduct allegations
Continue reading...Fierce bidding wars between publishers saw several big deals happen for politically charged novels at this year’s fair, as new books from Jeanette Winterson and Caitlin Moran were also revealed
• What will you be reading next year? A roundup of London book fair
From a distance, the only thing that separates Donald Trump from the fake-tan smeared impersonator posing at London book fair is that this one is holding a book. The Trump-a-like has been brought in by Penguin Random House to promote The President Is Missing, a thriller co-written by James Patterson and former US president Bill Clinton. Holding up a fake copy of the book – it isn’t due until June – in the middle of a fake Oval Office (complete with Russian dolls on the table and Diet Coke in the drinks globe), the similarities between Trump and his doppelganger stop at pout and paunch alone; everyone is pleased to see him, and stretch for selfies.
Clinton and Patterson’s thriller is possibly the starriest book at the fair, despite being announced months ago. But this publicity stunt is emblematic of the cash and publicity pizazz on display at London book fair each year. A lot of what we end up reading coming through the fair 18 months before, to be snapped up by publishers and eyed by film and TV studios for possible adaptations. And Trump-a-like aside, it seems politics was never far away from anyone’s mind this year, with many of the biggest deals going to feminist fiction: novels starring female leads, navigating dangerous worlds with agency, off the back of the huge success of the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale and conversations born of #TimesUp and #MeToo.
Publishers have room for one big debut, one literary book to win them a prize and everything else is genre
Continue reading...Novels from South Korea, Spain, France, Poland and Hungary also in running for £50,000 prize
An Iraqi first-time author’s “horrific” reimagining of Frankenstein set loose in war-torn Baghdad is up for the Man Booker international prize for fiction in translation, competing against two previous winners, Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai and South Korea’s Han Kang.
Ahmed Saadawi, who won the “Arabic Booker” – the International Prize for Arabic Fiction – in 2014 for his novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, is up for the £50,000 prize, shared equally between author and translator, along with his English translator, Jonathan Wright.
Related: Awards for women, writers of colour, small presses – why are there so many books prizes?
Continue reading...Alex Malarkey claims he has been financially exploited over bestselling account of meeting Jesus ‘concocted’ by his father
Alex Malarkey, the American boy who disavowed his bestselling account of meeting Jesus after an accident, has launched a lawsuit against the book’s Christian specialist publisher. While the publisher has “made millions of dollars”, the suit alleges, it has “paid Alex, a paralysed young man, nothing”.
The car accident that almost killed Malarkey happened in 2004 in Ohio, when he was six years old. Two months later he woke up from a coma to find himself paralysed from the neck down. He and his father, Kevin, a Christian therapist, wrote The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven together. According to Chicago’s Tyndale House, the firm that brought the book out in 2010, Malarkey wrote of “the angels that took him through the gates of heaven itself. Of the unearthly music that sounded just ‘terrible’ to a six-year-old. And, most amazing of all … Of meeting and talking to Jesus.”
Continue reading...Playwright Barney Norris will collaborate with the Booker prize-winning author on a production opening in Northampton in 2019
Twenty-five years after it was made into an Oscar-nominated film, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day is to be adapted for the stage. Ishiguro will collaborate on the adaptation, by playwright and novelist Barney Norris. It will tour the UK after its world premiere at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate in February next year.
Ishiguro won the Booker prize in 1989 for his poignant novel about a journey undertaken by an English butler, Stevens, who looks back over his life in service at Darlington Hall. It became a film in 1993, produced by Merchant Ivory, and earned eight Oscar nominations. Anthony Hopkins starred as the butler and Emma Thompson played Miss Kenton, Darlington Hall’s former housekeeper, with whom Stevens is reunited. The novel was inspired by PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and, more surprisingly, as Ishiguro explained in an article for the Guardian, by Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and the Tom Waits song Ruby’s Arms.
Continue reading...Young resident’s application for a judicial review is latest in a series of tests to council’s decision to close 21 libraries
Northamptonshire county council is facing a series of legal challenges over plans to close 21 libraries, after a young resident applied for a judicial review of a decision campaigners say will have a “devastating impact” on families.
The action joins a separate case launched by residents in support of local libraries, as well as a formal complaint submitted to the secretary of state for culture, Matt Hancock, by the libraries body Cilip, which suggests the council has failed to meet its statutory duty to provide a “comprehensive and efficient” library service. The closures, which councillors approved in February, have been branded “monstrous” by the Northampton comics author Alan Moore.
Related: Northamptonshire residents are angry. We won’t give in to cuts | Natalie Bloomer
Related: Library cuts hurt us all, but are hurting homeless people most
Continue reading...Autonomous (Orbit, £8.99) is the debut novel from Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and co-founder of the SF website io9. It’s 2144 and in a hi-tech, down-at-heel US – a hybrid of Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy – “Jack” Chen manufactures illegal drugs for the poor. She also pirates a drug known as Zacuity, designed to aid concentration. When she learns that it has lethal side-effects undisclosed by its makers, the Zaxy Corporation, Chen turns whistleblower and must flee the ruthless agents of the International Property Coalition. What could easily descend into a routine run-around chase caper is given moral and intellectual depth by Newitz’s examination of corporate behaviour and the limits of personal freedom. A grim dystopia which asks pertinent questions about the role of artificial intelligence and the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry, Autonomous is thrilling and stimulating.
Continue reading...Exact location of the poet’s coffin had been forgotten until recent excavation uncovered the vault
It probably wouldn’t have surprised his long-suffering friends, but the remains of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge have been rediscovered in a wine cellar.
Literary pilgrims have long paid their respects at the memorial plaques to Coleridge in the church above, unaware his lead coffin was lying behind a brick wall closing one end of the 17th-century cellar. The space was incorporated into the crypt of St Michael’s when the church was built in 1831 near the top of Highgate Hill in north London.
Continue reading...Book combining interviews, anecdotes and testimony from friends of Indigenous activist wins $50,000 award
Alexis Wright knew there was no way she could capture a personality as significant as that of Indigenous activist Leigh Bruce “Tracker” Tilmouth in a conventional biography, so she didn’t try.
Instead, over the course of six years, before his death in 2015 and afterwards, Wright compiled a mosaic of interviews, anecdotes and testimony from those who knew the man, and brought it all together in a volume of close to 600 pages.
Related: Tracker by Alexis Wright review – a weighty portrait of a complex man
Related: Hey, Ancestor! by Alexis Wright
Continue reading...‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ gathering of winners in London in July will include rare joint appearance from mother-daughter honorees Anita and Kiran Desai
From Hilary Mantel to Kazuo Ishiguro, 15 past winners of the Man Booker prize will be uniting for the first time to take part in a festival this summer to mark 50 years of the prestigious literary award.
Taking place from 6 to 8 July, the Man Booker 50 festival will feature more than 60 speakers, with unusual pairings and panels: Mantel and Pat Barker will discuss whether historical fiction can shed light on the present; Alan Hollinghurst and Marlon James will compare their portrayals of gay sexuality; Anne Enright, David Grossman and James, meanwhile, will discuss the future of the novel.
Related: Golden Man Booker prize launched to find the best ever winner
Continue reading...Artistic director Indhu Rubasingham explains how, after its £7m facelift, the theatre will give a platform to ‘stories we don’t hear’
In the six years since Indhu Rubasingham was appointed its artistic director, the Tricycle theatre has achieved three West End transfers, two Olivier awards, a Liberty human rights award and the distinction of mentoring hundreds of London’s teenage refugees through its Mind the Gap programme. Now, almost two years since it closed for a £7m facelift, the building is preparing for its most dramatic flourish. The Tricycle is no more: Rubasingham is relaunching it as the Kiln theatre.
“It’s an opportunity we could only take at this moment,” she says, visibly excited as she gives me a hard-hats-and-fluoro-tabards tour of the refurbished space, which is still five months from being curtain-ready. “It’s been bubbling in my head and I never thought it would happen but it’s the next part of the story for this building. Kiln as a word is associative with Kilburn. Kilns have a relationship with cultures across the world, they are a physical thing, melting pots associated with heat and cooking.”
New writing is risky, but it is the best way to capture what people are thinking or talking about now
Continue reading...The American Library Association has recorded an increase in ‘direct attacks on the freedom to read’, made by parents objecting to sex, profanity and LGBT characters in YA and children’s books
There was an increase in the number of attempts made to censor books in the US in 2017, with the number of challenges – “documented requests to remove materials from schools or libraries” – that were recorded by the American Library Association jumping from 323 in 2016 to 354.
The ALA attributed the “revitalised effort” of parents and community members to have certain books removed from schools and libraries to an increase in “blanket bans”, where entire topics – for example, all LGBT titles – are pulled from shelves. The ALA also said there had been a rise in individuals preemptively removing books without following policy, “because they are trying to (unsuccessfully) avoid controversy”.
Related: Netflix show condemned for 'romanticising' teenager's suicide
Continue reading...Edited by his son Christopher, Tolkien’s tale of a reluctant hero defending a city was written while the author was in hospital after the Battle of the Somme
JRR Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin, his tale of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces which The Lord of the Rings author called “the first real story” of Middle-earth, will be published in August.
The Fall of Gondolin will be the second “new” Tolkien work to be released in two years, following the release of Beren and Lúthien in May 2017. Edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien, and illustrated by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings artist Alan Lee, its announcement came as a surprise even to Tolkien scholars: Christopher Tolkien, who is now 93, had described Beren and Lúthien in a preface as “(presumptively) my last book in the long series of editions of my father’s writings”.
Continue reading...The Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao addressed his essay to an unnamed reader who asked him at a signing if he had been sexually abused
The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz has revealed in an essay in the New Yorker that he was raped by “a grownup that [he] truly trusted” when he was eight years old.
The Dominican American author, who has explored the subject of sexual abuse in his fiction, has not previously spoken publicly about his own experience. But in an essay titled The Silence, Díaz addresses a reader who approached him years earlier at a book signing and asked if he had been sexually abused himself. At the time, Díaz did not reply.
Continue reading...Exclusive: exhibition looks back on London cultural centre’s legacy through 50 years of archive material
An innovative new exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre gives visitors a performer’s perspective of its newly renovated brutalist venues, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room.
Concrete Dreams, which opens on Tuesday, is a tour through 50 years of archive material, imaginatively presented in dressing rooms, bathrooms and other backstage areas.
Continue reading...With seats on the jury intended to be for life, no one has ever technically left the secretive Swedish Academy – but Peter Englund, Klas Östergren and Kjell Espmark have all resigned
Three members of the secretive committee that selects the winner of the Nobel prize for literature have resigned from the jury in protest at how it has handled the sexual harassment allegations made against a man with close links to the board.
Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, and the authors Klas Östergren and Kjell Espmark, all separately resigned from the 18-person jury on 6 April. Membership of the Swedish Academy is intended to be for life, so no one has technically left it before; in 1989, three judges quit when the academy did not denounce Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for the death of author Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. At the time, the academy declined to accept their resignations.
Continue reading...Author has worked with playwright Rona Munro for complex cop’s stage bow
Rebus, the abrasive, hard-drinking and brilliant Edinburgh detective created by Ian Rankin, is to be the star of a new stage play.
The author has collaborated with playwright Rona Munro for a new crime story to be solved by the dour detective, the protagonist of 24 books that have sold more than 30m copies across the world.
Continue reading...Stuart Cosgrove’s Memphis 68, the second in a trilogy that was originally self-published, wins the Penderyn music book prize
Memphis 68: The Tragedy of Southern Soul, the second volume of an obsessively researched trilogy of histories about key years in US black “music cities”, has won its Scottish author the prestigious Penderyn music book prize.
Stuart Cosgrove was presented with the £1,000 award at the Laugharne Weekend books and music festival on Sunday, a remarkable result for a book in a trilogy that was originally intended to be self-published while its author was executive producing Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage in 2012.
Continue reading...Immortalised for its beauty by Henry David Thoreau, the Massachusetts pond is under threat from increased human activity and climate change according to a new study
The water of Walden Pond, which Henry David Thoreau described in 1854 as “so transparent that the bottom can easily be discerned at the depth of 25 or 30 feet”, is no longer quite so clear according to a new study.
The Massachusetts pond was made famous in Walden, the transcendentalist writer’s account of the years he spent next to it in order to “live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life”. The pond has been greatly affected by human activity. Everything from forest fires in the 19th century, to wood-cutting operations, the use of pesticides in the 1960s and increasing tourism have affected the water quality, according to the paper. Over half of the phosphorus in the lake in the summer “may now be attributable to urine released by swimmers”, while a footpath to Thoreau’s cabin “caused large amounts of soil to wash into the lake”.
Related: In Thoreau's footsteps: my journey to Walden for the bicentennial of the original de-clutterer
Continue reading...Bookseller says footfall declined after terrorist attacks, as it posts £88,791 loss on sales of £26.6m
The family-owned bookseller Foyles slipped back into the red in 2017 as it counted the cost of higher business rates as well as flooding in its London flagship store.
Foyles said the business rates revaluation had added £70,000 to its running costs while it was forced to close its Charing Cross Road store for several days during the school holidays because of electrical damage caused by sprinklers flooding the basement.
Continue reading...Mobile adventure game Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, which will allow players to become students at the wizarding school, will be launched on 25 April
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, the much-anticipated mobile adventure game that will allow players to become a student at the wizarding school, will be launched on 25 April, developer Jam City has announced.
The game, which was revealed on the Pottermore site last autumn, will also feature six actors reprising their roles from the Harry Potter movies, including Michael Gambon as Professor Dumbledore, Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall and Warwick Davis as Professor Flitwick.
Continue reading...Critics, academics and authors vote to find ‘the new Elizabetheans’, to correct the tendency to champion older authors as the literary establishment
Ali Smith has topped a poll by the Times Literary Supplement of about 200 critics, academics and authors that set out to find the best British and Irish novelists writing today.
Four of the top five places in the TLS’s ranking of what it dubbed the “New Elizabethans” went to women, with Smith followed by Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro and Eimear McBride. The project set out, said the TLS’s editor Stig Abell, to avoid the “tendency to fall back on a group of authors who came to prominence a few decades ago”, with writers such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis all failing to make the list. The literary journal said the poll was carried out “in a spirit of mischief”.
Related: Autumn by Ali Smith review – a beautiful, transient symphony
Continue reading...Author set to adapt Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy series for TV, after years of talks
Neil Gaiman will help bring Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books to the small screen after years of talks about a new adaptation of the gothic fantasy series.
Gaiman, who began discussions with studios about a film adaptation of Peake’s tale in 2015, will produce a television series instead. Set in the crumbling castle of Gormenghast, the books follow the life of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Groan, and the machinations of the monstrously ambitious kitchen boy, Steerpike.
Related: What makes Gormenghast a masterpiece? | Marcus Sedgwick
Continue reading...The literary prize announces that it will no longer list authors by nationality, but by country or territory, after drawing criticism when it bowed to pressure from China
The Man Booker International prize has backed away from its decision to change a Taiwanese author’s nationality to “Taiwan, China” after it was criticised for bowing to pressure from Beijing.
Author Wu Ming-Yi, who has been longlisted for his novel The Stolen Bicycle, was originally described by award organisers as a writer from Taiwan, when his nomination was announced in March. Following a complaint from the Chinese embassy in London last week, his nationality was changed on the prize’s website to “Taiwan, China”.
Related: Man Booker prize criticised for changing Taiwanese author's nationality
Continue reading...Bestselling novelist of 18 books, including The Weight of Water and The Pilot’s Wife, died after ‘a long and very private fight with cancer’
The bestselling novelist Anita Shreve, author of The Pilot’s Wife, has died at the age of 71, after what her publisher called “a long and very private fight with cancer”.
Shreve died on 29 March at her home in New Hampshire in the US. A high-school teacher and journalist before turning to writing fiction full time, Shreve was the author of 18 novels. Her first bestseller came in 1997. The Weight of Water, about a photographer investigating the brutal murder of two Norwegian women on a New Hampshire island more than a century ago, was shortlisted for the Orange prize and adapted into a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow in 2000.
Continue reading...Rudolf Schonegger, 55, given suspended 26-week sentence for theft of signed copy worth £1,675
An Italian bookseller who stole a signed Harry Potter edition worth £1,675 in a “professional, targeted operation” has avoided jail.
Rudolf Schonegger, 55, switched the rare copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for another book at bookshop in central London on New Year’s Eve.
Continue reading...Sir Brian Vickers claims his reputation has been damaged by associates of the New Oxford Shakespeare: they, in turn, dispute his methods
When readers of the Times Literary Supplement open the latest issue, they’re due something of a surprise. There, alongside the advertisements for bursaries and farmhouses to rent, is a small notice from an eminent Shakespeare scholar. After a career spanning more than 50 years, during which he has published more than 40 books, Professor Sir Brian Vickers finds himself in search of a publisher.
According to Vickers, a major reason he has not yet found a home for his complete edition of works by Thomas Kyd is that his “reputation as a scholar has been damaged by a string of hostile reviews by people associated with the New Oxford Shakespeare”.