Ex-fixer’s book to provide ‘direct evidence of Donald Trump’s lies and crimes’, attorney says
The Trump administration has dropped its attempt to stop Michael Cohen, the president’s former fixer and personal attorney, writing a tell-all book.
Related: Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’
Continue reading...Author whose novel This Mournable Body was announced as a finalist earlier this week, was held during anti-corruption protests
Tsitsi Dangarembga, the award-winning Zimbabwean novelist who was nominated for the Booker prize longlist earlier this week, has been arrested during anti-corruption demonstrations in Harare.
Dangarembga, whose novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the UK’s premier fiction award next to Hilary Mantel and Anne Tyler, documented her arrest in the city’s suburb of Borrowdale on Twitter. After protesting on social media about the arrest of journalists in Zimbabwe, she tweeted earlier today: “Friends, here is a principle. If you want your suffering to end, you have to act. Action comes from hope. This the principle of faith and action.”
Continue reading...Fans will have chance to join one-to-one signings with writers such as Ian Rankin and Ali Smith
It is the bane of the book festival: a long, slow queue to get a book signed by a favourite author, perched in the corner of a warm and stuffy tent. But this year’s Edinburgh book festival is offering something far more intimate: the chance of a one to one signing with a famous writer from the comfort of your armchair.
After the cancellation of all the city’s summer festivals due to the coronavirus pandemic, the book festival has moved entirely online, hosting 140 book readings and, for the first time, online book signings.
Related: Edinburgh festival fringe sets stage for summer of online shows
Continue reading...Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola’s picture book about a science-mad young black girl trying to distract her brother from his phone takes £5,000 award
Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola have won the Waterstones children’s book prize for their “utterly joyful” picture book about a science-loving black girl, Look Up!, at a time when only 4% of British children’s books contain a black or minority ethnic main character.
Following the adventures of Rocket, a little girl who is trying to convince her phone-obsessed teenage brother to look up at a meteor shower, Look Up! was named winner of the £5,000 award, chosen by Waterstones booksellers, on Thursday night.
Continue reading...Tilda Swinton’s voice echoes back coolly from billions of years hence in Jóhann Jóhannsson’s brief essay on humanity’s future destiny
Two years after the death of the Icelandic film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, his only movie as director has become available in the UK on streaming platforms. It is a 70-minute cine-novella or essay film: a meditation on humanity’s future existence and what it means, or will mean, to be posthuman.
The score is by Jóhannsson, working with sound artist and composer Yair Elazar Glotman, and this eerie, breathy soundtrack works well with its unearthly images. Last and First Men is inspired by the 1930 novel of the same name by British SF author William Olaf Stapledon, narrated by a figure from humanity’s final evolutionary form billions of years in the future. This voice is performed with crisp lack of affect by Tilda Swinton.
Continue reading...Misplaced apostrophe in the self-published book’s subtitle has been amended after widespread ridicule
Donald Trump Jr has quietly shifted the apostrophe in his forthcoming book’s title after being widely mocked for making a grammatical error.
Trump Jr’s Liberal Privilege, due out on 25 August, was initially subtitled “Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible”. But after it was pointed out that this would generally refer to only one Democrat, and prompting some speculation that this is what he meant to do, the US president’s son has reissued images of his book cover with the new subtitle “the Democrats’ Defense of the Indefensible”.
Related: Triggered review: Donald Jr proves himself the Trump kid with real political chops
Continue reading...Amateur photographer Alberto di Lenardo’s work was, for many years, hidden away in a secret room. Now the unguarded moments he captured are being published in An Attic Full of Trains
Continue reading...More than 80 writers sign an open letter protesting against Jeddah’s plan for the 2022 Worldcon, saying it is antithetical to everything SFF stands for
A group of more than 80 science fiction and fantasy authors are protesting at the possibility of one of the genres’ biggest conventions being held in Saudi Arabia in 2022, saying that “the Saudi regime is antithetical to everything SFF stands for”.
Led by fantasy author Anna Smith Spark,writers including Charles Stross, Juliet McKenna, Stan Nicholls and Catriona Ward have signed an open letter objecting to Jeddah’s bid to host the World Science Fiction Convention in two years’ time.
Continue reading...Peter Strzok briefly served on Mueller’s team but was removed after DoJ inspector general flagged derogatory texts about Trump
The former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the Russia investigation but whose text messages about Donald Trump made him a target of the president’s wrath, is releasing a book.
Related: Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’
Continue reading...Author of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy vies with 12 other contenders in a field marked by a high number of debuts
Hilary Mantel’s “masterful” conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, has been longlisted for the Booker prize, putting the British novelist in the running to win for an unprecedented third time.
Mantel’s 900-page novel, which opens after Anne Boleyn has been beheaded in 1536, and traces the final years of Cromwell, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize. Judges chaired by publisher Margaret Busby said that Mantel’s “masterful exhibition of sly dialogue and exquisite description brings the Tudor world alive”.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (US)
Continue reading...Nigerian-British author says £10,000 award for African writing has given her confidence as a black and female experimental writer
Critically acclaimed author Irenosen Okojie has won the AKO Caine prize for African writing, crediting her win with giving her “extra confidence” as a black, female experimental writer who has felt she was “operating on the fringes”.
The Nigerian-British writer won the £10,000 award on Monday afternoon for her short story Grace Jones, following an impersonator of the singer as she mourns the death of her family in a house fire. Judges for the prize called it “a radical story that plays with logic, time and place”, and praised it as “risky, dazzling, imaginative and bold”.
Related: Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie review – weird and wild short stories
Continue reading...Sci-fi preconceptions are challenged by little-known marvels from James Tiptree Jr, Angélica Gorodischer and others
The border between science fiction and mainstream literature is more permeable than booksellers or publishers would have us think. Double Booker prize-winner Margaret Atwood’s recent novels are SF-themed (though she prefers “speculative fiction”), as is Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known novel Never Let Me Go.
Penguin Classics has launched a new science fiction series to further this cross-pollination, seemingly keen for the general reader to broaden their personal canon. Some of the titles are well established – Edwin A Abbott’s mathematical fantasy Flatland, Kurt Vonnegut’s satire Cat’s Cradle – but others are newer, at least in the UK, and less likely to come loaded with preconceptions.
Tiptree’s view of people is not sunny: the strong will subjugate the weak
Continue reading...TV and film projects on the go, novel about to be delivered – yet acclaimed author cannot imagine leaving full-time medicine
After Anton Chekhov and Arthur Conan Doyle, Tade Thompson is the latest in a long line of medical doctors who have become writers. Thompson is a full-time hospital psychiatrist, who writes science fiction, fantasy and crime thrillers that have received rave reviews and prizes, but he has no intention of giving up the day job, somehow fitting in everything by writing in the early hours.
A fierce bidding war has finally concluded over the film rights to his Molly Southbourne novellas, a nightmarish psychological story about a girl who, when she bleeds, creates duplicates of herself who want to kill her.
Continue reading...Prince William said to have feared brother was ‘blindsided’ by lust in his haste to marry
The royal rift that led to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex leaving Britain and stepping back from royal duties began after Prince William feared his brother had been “blindsided” by lust in his haste to marry Meghan Markle, a new book claims.
Harry was offended by William’s advice to “take as much time as you need to get to know this girl”, causing tension between the two that finally led to “Megxit” , according to the authors of Finding Freedom.
Related: Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan book claims royal relations turned bitter
Continue reading...Until the final typescript of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is set to be auctioned, the author had planned to call her Connie Gustafson
The final typescript for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on which Truman Capote scratched out his original choice for the name of his heroine, Connie Gustafson, and replaced it with Holly Golightly, is set to go up for auction.
The manuscript, which is covered with Capote’s handwritten edits, also shows how the author tempered the sexual content of the story before publication, removing lines such as Holly’s admission that: “Boy, I have hit the hay with some real ghastlies just because I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to have somebody hold me”. Later, Capote cuts an exchange between Holly and her flatmate Mag Wildwood, in which Mag reveals that during sex she pictures a statue of her forefather “Papadaddy Wildwood” in his military uniform.
Continue reading...The NT’s online platform offers personalised, interactive adventure tales for young children during the summer holidays
The National Theatre has launched an online story service that will create customised interactive adventures for children around the UK. Madame Kalamazoo’s Magical Mail is designed as an escapist treat for primary school pupils whose summer holidays will this year unfold amid the disruption and uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Parents and guardians are invited to register online and children will then receive an email from Madame Kalamazoo. The mysterious storyteller will send 19 email stories in total and they can be received daily or just at weekends. The tales are personalised, with children as the heroes of adventures set in their own homes. Children can contribute artwork to help move the stories along in what the National calls “an act of collective storytelling with other children across the country”.
Related: I'm an artistic director and I miss the joy of our audiences | Kate Cross
Continue reading...American Psycho and Trainspotting authors set to collaborate for the first time on show about a manipulative American tabloid
Bret Easton Ellis dreamed up the depraved excesses of serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Irvine Welsh is the author who brought us the questionable morals of characters including Sick Boy and Begbie in Trainspotting. Now the pair are set to collaborate for the first time, co-creating a television drama about an American tabloid publication.
Burning Wheel Productions is in final talks with the two authors about a series that will follow a “rambunctious cavalcade of pranksters, conmen and rapscallions – in other words, journalists – being brought together from across the globe to change not only the landscape but the power of the press forever from scandalous rumour to political puppetry”, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Related: Bret Easton Ellis: ‘My ability to trigger millennials is insane’
Continue reading...The streaming service will adapt four novels for its first raft of original shows, with actors including Jared Harris, Cush Jumbo and Dougray Scott set to star
BritBox has announced its first original series, including adaptations of books by Anthony Horowitz and Irvine Welsh. The streaming platform, created by the BBC and ITV, has until now focused on allowing users access to archived content from British broadcasters – but will now welcome four new series.
Crime, adapted by Welsh from his own novel, is the first time his work has been transferred to the small screen. Dougray Scott will star as the troubled detective inspector Ray Lennox, investigating the disappearance of a schoolgirl. “Delighted that BritBox have picked this up,” said Welsh. “Lennox is a compelling character for me, not so much a cop as a broken avenging angel. So don’t expect a run-of-the-mill cop show, and nonces beware.”
Continue reading...Mark Dawson’s purchase pushed his thriller The Cleaner up the Sunday Times chart, but the sales monitor Nielsen has now revised its figures
Author Mark Dawson has lost his Top 10 position in the Sunday Times bestseller charts for his thriller The Cleaner after revealing that he bought 400 copies himself to get a higher position.
Related: An author bought his own book to get higher on bestseller lists. Is that fair?
Continue reading...Nadim Shamma-Sourgen’s words, evoking a ‘whole world full of hugs’, were spotted by the writer Kate Clanchy and will be published next summer
Keats’s first book of poetry was published when he was 21; Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein. But both of their youthful achievements are dwarfed by the newest star in the UK’s poetry firmament: four-year-old Nadim Shamma-Sourgen, who has just landed a book deal.
Nadim’s poems range from Coming Home (“Take our gloves off / Take our shoes off / Put them where they’re supposed to go. / You take off your brave feeling / Because there’s nothing / to be scared of in the house”), to Love (“Everyone has love / Even baddies”).
Continue reading...Figures for last year show sales of £6.3bn, up 20% on 2015, but the Publishers Association says sector needs government support to weather coronavirus
Book sales in the UK hit record levels in 2019, driven by a surge in audiobook and nonfiction titles, according to new figures released as publishers warn of the huge impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on the industry.
Book sales rose to £6.3bn in 2019, up 4% on 2018, when sales fell for the first time in five years, and 20% on 2015. According to the latest figures from the Publishers Association (PA), overall print sales were up 3% to £3.5bn in 2019 and digital sales were up 4% to £2.8bn, driven by a 39% increase in audiobook downloads. Digital formats accounted for 44% of the market in 2019, up from 40% in 2015.
Related: Harry Potter books prove UK lockdown hit despite JK Rowling trans rights row
Continue reading...The Berkshire theatre will ‘conjure some joy’ with a new version of The Hound of the Baskervilles performed by a cast of three
On the trail of a devilish beast in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes is said to “burst into one of his rare fits of laughter” in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale of fog and fangs has been hilariously spoofed on screen with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and in a blissfully silly stage version by Peepolykus. Now, a new comedy version will be performed in the outdoors – not in Devon but Newbury, where it will reopen the Watermill theatre this month.
A version of the mystery, devised by the Watermill company, will be performed by three actors on the back lawn of the rural Berkshire theatre. Socially distanced audiences will watch from an arrangement of 20 tables that each seat up to four people from one party only. Tickets cost £100 per table. The restaurant will serve pre-show dinner and cream teas will be available after matinee performances.
Related: Diary of a theatre under lockdown: 'We're on our third version of worst-case scenario'
Continue reading...Suggestions sought for public history project inspired by similar map of New York led by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Londoners Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson are spearheading a project to reimagine the city’s iconic tube map, by renaming all 270 stops after the women and non-binary people who have shaped the history of each pocket of the capital.
Eddo-Lodge, author of the bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, and the actor and activist Watson, were inspired by a similar project in the book Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which featured a New York City subway map with all the stations renamed after great women. Both Solnit and Schapiro are working with Eddo-Lodge and Watson to help create the City of Women London.
Continue reading...Lawsuit claims Cohen is being held in solitary confinement at New York prison in ‘retaliation’ for drafting book that’s critical of Trump
Donald Trump “cannot imprison Michael Cohen for writing a book”, a senior American Civil Liberties Union official said on Monday night, as the organization filed suit against the federal government.
Related: Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump thumps Donald
Related: The Room Where It Happened review: John Bolton fires broadside that could sink Trump
Continue reading...The author of more than 60 books, which sold more than 20m copies over three decades, died on Friday
Josephine Cox, the proflic author who grew up in poverty in Blackburn and went on to sell millions of copies of her family dramas, has died at the age of 82.
Her publisher HarperCollins said today that Cox died “peacefully” on Friday. The author of more than 60 books, written over a career which spanned more than three decades, Cox sold more than 20m copies of her family sagas, which combined romance and tragedy to dramatic, bestselling effect.
Continue reading...Rethought for the pandemic, this year’s Appledore book festival in Devon will play to audiences in cars, who can flash their lights and listen via radio
Booklovers at the Appledore book festival this September will not be able to subject their favourite authors to the usual detailed questioning after a reading. Instead, the north Devon event is setting out to become the UK’s first ever drive-in book festival, where audience members will need to submit questions in advance, and flash their car lights to alert writers to their presence.
The Appledore book festival has been running annually since 2006, but organisers said that after months of uncertainty caused by the coronavirus, it became clear that this year’s event would not be able to go ahead if social distancing was still in place. Many of the UK’s book festivals, from Hay to Wigtown, have gone online-only in the wake of the pandemic, but the Appledore team came up with the idea of a drive-in festival, to be held in the grounds of the local Skern Lodge outdoor activity centre.
Continue reading...Author ‘over the moon’ after Buckie Thistle raise £900 from signed copy of If It Bleeds, which the club feature in
Fans of Buckie Thistle, a football club on Scotland’s north-east coast and occupying a respectable fifth place in the Highland League, were initially bewildered to discover that Stephen King had referenced their team in his latest work.
It is not immediately apparent whether this small town on the Moray Firth, its harbour crowded with fish processors and smokehouses, bears marked similarities to coastal Maine, where the legendary American horror maestro resides, or is host to any maniacal clowns, haunted cars, or other subterranean suburban horrors that so delight his readers.
As a thank you we sent to him some memorabilia as he is now a fully fledged fan of the Jags . @StephenKing is aware that there is an open invitation to visit Victoria park next time he is in Scotland!! pic.twitter.com/t2DM6e7Mz5
Jake Bugg: the rock star gave then League Two highflyers Notts County a boost with a 10 month-long kit sponsorship for the 2017-18 season. It failed to help in the long run, the team suffering relegation from the Football League for the first time in their 157-year history last year.
Continue reading...Model and activist signs six-figure contract to publish Transitional, ‘a manifesto for how I see society changing for the better, bringing us all closer’
The first book by Munroe Bergdorf, a manifesto on gender by the black transgender activist and model, has been bought for a six-figure sum after a bidding war between 11 publishers.
Bergdorf’s Transitional will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Exploring six different facets of human experience – adolescence, sexuality, gender, relationships, identity and race – the book will draw on Bergdorf’s own experiences, including growing up in a mixed-race family, going to an all-boys school and starting her transition at the age of 24. In it, she will argue that transition is an experience every person faces in every phase in life, “and that only by recognising this can we understand times of change”.
Continue reading...The bombshell family tell-all book by Mary Trump, the US president’s niece, sold almost a million copies by the end of its first day on sale and remains firmly at the top of Amazon’s bestseller list.
Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, referring to Donald Trump, was published on Tuesday and had sold 950,000 copies by the end of the first day, including pre-sales, ebooks and audio books.
Related: Mary Trump’s book: eight of its most shocking claims about the president
Related: Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump thumps Donald
Continue reading...Riccardino, author’s final book of the popular crime series, hits shelves a year after his death
The last whodunnit featuring the famed Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano has hit the shelves in Italy, nearly a year to the day after the death of the author Andrea Camilleri.
Riccardino was first penned in 2005 and then tweaked in 2016, after which Camilleri gave it to his publisher on the promise that it would not be released until after his death. He died on 18 July 2019 at the age of 93.
Related: Me and my detective by Lee Child, Attica Locke, Sara Paretsky, Jo Nesbø and more
Continue reading...Creator of beloved books, which sold tens of millions of copies, has died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
The author Joanna Cole, whose Magic School Bus books transported millions of young people on extraordinary and educational adventures, has died at age 75.
Scholastic announced that Cole, a resident of Sioux City, Iowa, died Sunday. The cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Related: The great escape: 50 brilliant books to transport you this summer
Continue reading...Library says illustrations, beginning when he was seven and continuing through his life as a novelist and illustrator, show he was one of the great ‘writer-artists’
From a sketch of a scheming Steerpike in Gormenghast to one of Jim Hawkins alone on the shore of Treasure Island, more than 300 original illustrations by writer and artist Mervyn Peake have been acquired by the British Library.
Peake, who died in 1968, is best known for his gothic fantasy series Gormenghast, but he was also “arguably the finest children’s illustrator of the mid-20th century”, said the British Library. His own books for children, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor and Letters from a Lost Uncle, as well as his illustrations for classic works of English literature, combined “technical mastery with an innate ability to evoke fear, delight and wonderment in young readers”, said the institution, and “redefined the cosy nature of children’s book illustrations”.
Continue reading...Michael Farris Smith’s book Nick will tell story of Nick Carraway’s life before meeting the millionaire of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel
Nick Carraway, last seen at the end of The Great Gatsby contemplating the futility of trying to move beyond our past, is set to reveal a little more of his own, with author Michael Farris Smith announcing his prequel to F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel.
Related: Top 10 tales about the rich | Sarah Blake
Continue reading...Hungry, flooded and under surveillance, Britain in 2266 feels the impact of civil war and a climate catastrophe
Winner of the Arthur C Clarke award in 2013, Chris Beckett specialises in breathing fresh life into science fiction tropes. In Two Tribes, he presents a dystopian future in which the grim political and ecological landscapes of 23rd-century Britain are shown as logical consequences of what is happening now.
Set in 2266, the story is narrated by Zoe, an archivist for the Cultural Institute, set up to “reconstruct the past”. When she discovers the 2016 diary of Harry Roberts, an architect, she decides to write a historical novel based on its events. The diary describes the collapse of Harry’s marriage following the death of his two-year-old son from meningitis, and how he finds himself torn between two women: Letty, a London arts administrator; and working-class Michelle, a Norfolk landlady. These two women come to embody the two tribes of the Brexit debate following the EU referendum.
Continue reading...The London theatre will present a socially distanced adaption of the Portuguese author’s novel, voiced by Juliet Stevenson
The Donmar Warehouse in London is to reopen this summer for an immersive sound installation exploring the panic caused by an epidemic. Blindness, an hour-long adaptation of Portuguese author José Saramago’s novel, will feature the voice of Juliet Stevenson and will run four times a day, with socially distanced seating for audiences.
Saramago won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998, shortly after the publication of Blindness. The Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst, said the story – in which a city’s inhabitants suddenly begin to go blind – is an “extraordinary allegory about a government’s and society’s response to a pandemic”.
Related: Edinburgh festival fringe sets stage for summer of online shows
Blindness runs at the Donmar Warehouse, London, from 3-22 August.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has been released from a temporary restraining order and is free to discuss her book about the president, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
Related: Top Mueller lawyer to publish insider account of Trump-Russia investigation
Continue reading...Liberal Privilege, which he is self-publishing in August, is subtitled ‘Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible’
Donald Trump Jr appears to have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of the apostrophe: it comes after the “s” when the possessive noun is plural.
The American president’s son’s forthcoming book, Liberal Privilege, is subtitled “Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible”. Unless Trump Jr is referring to only one Democrat, then the apostrophe needs to shift one place to the right to make the title grammatically correct.
Related: Donald Trump Jr's Triggered: a litany of trolling and insults worthy of his father
Continue reading...Donald Trump Jr has announced plans to self-publish a book about Joe Biden. Unfortunately, the cover image he released contained a grammatical mistake.
Related: 'He's in trouble here': can Trump win swing state Wisconsin again?
Do you think we should tell @DonaldJTrumpJr that there’s a typo on his book cover? He means “the Democrats’ defense of the indefensible.” pic.twitter.com/SVSEiThDjn
Continue reading...Scores of women are publishing details of their relationships with the Transmetropolitan writer, who they say offered mentorship in exchange for sexual contact. But they don’t want him cancelled – they want a conversation
‘Stories are what make us human,” comics writer Warren Ellis told an audience on 28 April 2005, as that year’s Toronto Comic-Con began. “They’re an advanced form of play. Cats have play. Sometimes very sophisticated, dramatised forms of play. But they’re not communicated or externalised. So far, only humans use stories to dramatise the way they see the world.”
Two days after that, on 30 April, a 23-year-old woman flew to the convention to surprise Ellis, whom she believed was her boyfriend. The pair had spoken on video chat and email regularly since they first met online in 2004, with some of their conversations lasting through the night. She alleges that Ellis, then 37, never told her that he had a long-term partner, and that he had asked her to keep their relationship secret because of his fame. They had sex in his hotel room that evening.
I have hurt many people that I had no intention of hurting. I apologise
Ellis’s public harem presented a blueprint for others’ behaviour
Continue reading...Research finds more girls than boys have been reading books and say they are enjoying it
Boys have fallen further behind girls at reading regularly and enjoying it during the UK lockdown, a study suggests.
The gender gap in the numbers of children who say they take pleasure in reading and who read daily appears to have widened, prompting fears that boys could be at risk of losing out as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Continue reading...Thomas Chatterton Williams defends letter as critics say it disregards marginalised views
The organiser of an open letter decrying “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism” has said that companies such as Netflix and the New York Times will have to take into account the views of its signatories, after a counter letter accused them of failing to recognise those “silenced for generations”.
A debate about free speech, privilege and the role of social media in public discourse continued over the weekend, as the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who signed the letter along with more than 150 prominent authors, thinkers and journalists including JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, argued that it had “moved the needle”.
Continue reading...A wave of new books try to deal with the murder, deception, torture and racism of a brutal regime
The books tell stories of murder, deception, torture and racism, of events 30 or more years ago that still resonate today, of secrets that few want to hear, and of killers who have never been held to account.
One is by Paul Erasmus, a secret policeman under South Africa’s brutal, racist apartheid regime. For years he has described his misdeeds to investigators, courts, journalists and commissions, but now he is telling his story to a broader audience in a country where many still do not want to confront its bloody history.
Continue reading...The screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has written a novel - about a film critic who hates Charlie Kaufman
When Charlie Kaufman was seven years old, he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. He knows because he went as far as to write it down. “Actor, doctor or fireman,” he says, and laughs. He ended up being, at least briefly, one of those things – but he’s best known as the screenwriter and/or director of some of the trippiest and most metafictional films in recent history: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
Now, with the publication of his first novel, Antkind, he’s also the author of a trippy and metafictional book. This isn’t some sort of Hollywood big-name vanity project of the sort on which Sean Penn lately came unstuck: Kaufman wrote the book, he says, because he couldn’t get work in the movies. “I got the contract to write it in 2012,” he says. “The movie and TV business wasn’t really working out for me at the time.”
I’m interested in film critics who have been hostile to my work – this book was an opportunity to respond
Continue reading...The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones; The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith; The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde; The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott and Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis
The prolific Stephen Graham Jones has written more than 20 books in as many years, and his latest, The Only Good Indians (Titan, £8.99), combines literary horror, a slasher-revenge plot and a Native American reservation backdrop to great effect. A decade before the main action of the novel, Blackfeet Indian Lewis Clarke and four friends, on a hunting expedition in Montana, trespass on land belonging to tribal elders and embark on a killing spree, slaughtering a pregnant elk in an act that will have terrible repercussions for the quintet. What follows years later is the manifestation of a spirit creature in the form of a woman with an elk’s head and her bloody revenge on the friends. Aside from delivering the staples of the horror genre, Jones is excellent at depicting the anxiety of Native Americans in contemporary society – and the finale is stunning.
Continue reading...Judges praise Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, which draws on three decades working in schools, as ‘moving, funny, and full of love’
Kate Clanchy’s “moving and powerful” memoir about working as a teacher in the state education system, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, has won the Orwell prize for political writing.
Clanchy, a writer and poet who has been a teacher for 30 years in London, Scotland, Essex and Oxford, beat shortlisted titles including Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and Amelia Gentleman’s The Windrush Betrayal to the £3,000 book award.
Related: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy review – the reality of school life
Continue reading...After coming out of retirement, the cartoonist says digital technology has allowed him to rediscover the fun of drawing
There are taxidermists driving taxis, there are bears picnicking on cub scouts. It can mean only one thing: the return of Far Side creator Gary Larson, publishing his first new work in 25 years.
Larson retired The Far Side, which was syndicated in almost 2,000 daily papers around the world for 15 years, in 1995, saying at the time that he feared that “if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer or at the very least ease into the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons”.
Continue reading...Rapper talks to the BBC about the ‘hundreds, thousands of years of real pain’ suffered by black people
The Black Lives Matter movement represents “hundreds, thousands of years” of “real pain”, Stormzy has told the BBC.
In a short video feature in which the rapper surprised a young fan by painting his bedroom in recognition of his positive behaviour at school, Stormzy said he wanted the movement to “show what it means to be black”.
Related: Exclusive images of Stormzy rehearsing for Glastonbury 2019 - in pictures
Continue reading...Written in 2004 and auctioned for charity, Serpentine sees an adult Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon revisit Trollesund in search of secrets
A previously unseen His Dark Materials story about a teenage Lyra, written by Philip Pullman over a decade ago and that he never intended to publish, will be released this autumn.
Serpentine, out in October, follows Lyra Silvertongue as she returns to Trollesund, the remote town where she first met the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison and aeronaut Lee Scoresby in Northern Lights. A novella, it is set after the end of the trilogy His Dark Materials, but before the start of Pullman’s recent book, The Secret Commonwealth. The story sees Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon “older and a little wiser, and in search of an answer to a shocking, secret condition – their ability to separate – from the witch-consul, Dr Lanselius”, revealed the publisher, Penguin Random House Children’s.
Continue reading...Harper’s letter asserts way to ‘defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion’, but critics accuse authors of censorious mentality
JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to a controversial open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” is leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.
Rowling, whose beliefs on transgender rights have recently seen scores of Harry Potter fans distance themselves from her, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”.
Continue reading...More than 100 authors assert that way to ‘defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion’, but critics accuse them of censorious mentality
JK Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among the signatories to a controversial open letter warning that the spread of “censoriousness” is leading to “an intolerance of opposing views” and “a vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.
Rowling, whose beliefs on transgender rights have recently seenscores of Harry Potter fans distance themselves from her, said she was “proud to sign this letter in defence of a foundational principle of a liberal society: open debate and freedom of thought and speech”. Rowling compared the current climate to the McCarthy years, adding: “To quote the inimitable Lillian Hellman: ‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions’.”
Continue reading...James Corden to produce film and TV series based on Australia’s Real Pigeons children’s books
The humble pigeon may be an unlikely breed of star but an author-illustrator duo from Melbourne have been turning the birds into a crime-fighting troupe of superheroes – and they’re about to take flight to Hollywood.
The children’s television giant Nickelodeon has just signed off on a deal with the English actor and comedian James Corden to produce a film and TV series based on Andrew McDonald and Ben Wood’s children’s book series, Real Pigeons.
Related: The making of Looking for Alibrandi: 'If we didn't get it right, we'd be crucified'
Related: Bluey: The Beach named book of the year at Australian Book Industry awards
Continue reading...With bookshops still closed in parts of the UK, sales have surpassed last year’s numbers, with 3.8m print books sold in the last week
Britain’s readers have been emerging from lockdown to restock their bookshelves, with book sales – and particularly crime novels – booming in the three weeks since booksellers were allowed to open their doors.
The print market continued its healthy run since England’s bookshops reopened on 15 June, with 3.8m books sold in the last week, for £32.6m, up from 3.1m (making £26.9m) at the same time last year. This is a 15% increase in value on last week and 21% year-on-year.
Continue reading...The Guardian has obtained a copy of Too Much and Never Enough, which is due out next week
Donald Trump suffered emotional abuse at the hands of his father, according to a bombshell new book written by his niece.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump will be published next Tuesday, 14 July. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Continue reading...Many stories in The Time-travelling Caveman – written by Pratchett when he was a journalist in the 60s and 70s – have never been published in a book
The final collection of early stories from the late Terry Pratchett, written while the Discworld creator was a young reporter, will be published in September. The tales in The Time-travelling Caveman, many of them never released in book form before, range from a steam-powered rocket’s flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd’s discovery of the resting place of King Arthur. “Bedwyr was the handsomest of all the shepherds, and his dog, Bedwetter, the finest sheepdog in all Wales,” writes the young Pratchett, with typical flourish. The stories appeared in the Bucks Free Press and Western Daily Press in the 60s and early 70s.
Pratchett left school at 17, in 1965, to work at the Bucks Free Press, writing a weekly Children’s Circle story column as part of his new job. He published his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971, when he was only 23. Editions of the newspapers containing the stories sell for hundreds of pounds online. Dragons at Crumbling Castle, a first collection of the stories, was published in 2014.
Related: The art of Terry Pratchett's Discworld – in pictures
Continue reading...The pioneer of dub poetry has been hailed for his ‘political ferocity’ and ‘tireless scrutiny of history’
Linton Kwesi Johnson has won the PEN Pinter prize, with the Jamaican dub poet’s “political ferocity” and “tireless scrutiny of history” praised as “truly Pinteresque” by judges.
Continue reading...Book by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former unpaid adviser to the first lady, will detail their 15-year friendship
A former senior aide to Melania Trump who helped oversee Donald Trump’s inauguration has written an “explosive” memoir detailing her 15-year friendship with the first lady, according to reports.
Related: Mary Trump's book to be published early amid 'extraordinary interest'
Related: Mary Trump's book to be published early amid 'extraordinary interest'
Continue reading...Tell-all book by Donald Trump’s niece will argue president suffered ‘child abuse’ in the early years of his life
A tell-all book by Donald Trump’s niece will be published two weeks ahead of schedule and will argue that the president suffered “child abuse” in the early years of his life.
Related: Bolton: Trump claim he wasn’t told of Russia bounty report is 'not how system works’
Continue reading...In Ghost Ship, Father Azariah France-Williams reveals the barriers and bias faced by ethnic minority clergy in the Anglican church
A few years ago, Father Azariah France-Williams answered a knock at the door. A woman stood before him, asking to borrow space in the church car park for a removal van. They chatted, France-Williams gave permission, and she thanked him.
Related: Top C of E cleric slams church for 'monochrome' leadership
White friends and colleagues are starting to listen. A number have apologised for the times they’ve been complicit
Continue reading...Lawyers seeking to clear path for Mary Trump’s book made argument in filings in New York this week
Lawyers for Donald Trump’s niece seeking to clear her path to publish a book about the family have cited “bombshell” New York Times reporting on the Trumps’ tax affairs as proof a non-disclosure agreement signed in 2001 was based on “demonstrably fraudulent” financial information and should be held invalid.
Related: Donald Trump marks Independence Day with incendiary Mount Rushmore speech – live
Continue reading...‘More African’ covers. Adding racist characters. As authors and industry insiders share their experiences, readers can see how the books they read are changed by white publishers
Publishing is in the middle of a reckoning. In the weeks since the death of George Floyd, as black authors topped UK books charts for the first time, and #Publishingpaidme exposed the disparities in what black and white writers are paid, publishers – long criticised for employing overwhelmingly white workforces who cater for white readers – have been grappling with their record with black authors, editors and agents. And black people in publishing are not holding back, sharing details of the “hostile environment” they’ve been working in.
Last week’s release of the Rethinking “Diversity” in Publishing report confirmed what many people already knew. With interviews with 100 authors, agents and publishing staff, it found that UK publishers still serve a supposed core audience of white, middle-aged, middle-class readers, a mission that changes books by black writers in ways that are invisible to a reader by the time they hold the book in their hands.
As a young black man, I’m just not used to being trusted in that way and it really brought out the best in me
Continue reading...HarperCollins will no longer publish books by the historian and is reviewing his backlist after he said ‘slavery was not genocide’
HarperCollins has dropped David Starkey as an author, saying that the racist views the bestselling historian expressed in a recent interview were “abhorrent”.
On Thursday, Starkey told the rightwing commentator Darren Grimes that “slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? You know, an awful lot of them survived.”
Continue reading...As branches prepare to start restoring services, experts warn a ‘perfect financial storm’ will cause further closures
As libraries around England cautiously prepare to reopen from Saturday, experts are warning that local authority shortfalls could be the “canary in the coalmine” for a fresh wave of cuts to libraries across the country.
Last month, reports suggested that an almost £200m shortfall in funding in Leeds could see the city council forced to close all 34 of its libraries if the government does not approve emergency funding – though six branches will soon open for borrowing. In Peterborough, meanwhile, the not-for-profit trust that has run the city’s 10 libraries for the last decade has been hit by “a perfect financial storm” and has handed control back to the city’s council.
Related: UK libraries are set to reopen – but not as we know them
Continue reading...Websites the Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet say they won’t provide links to Rowling’s website or use photos of the author
Two of the biggest Harry Potter fan sites have distanced themselves from author JK Rowling because of her beliefs on transgender rights, calling them at odds with the message of empowerment in her best-selling books.
Websites the Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet said on Thursday they would no longer provide links to the British author’s personal website, use photos of her, or write about achievements that do not relate to the world she created.
Related: Trans activists write to Sun condemning JK Rowling abuse story
Continue reading...That Reminds Me, a semi-autobiographical novel about foster homes and mental health that was published by Stormzy’s imprint, wins £10,000 award
Derek Owusu’s novel-in-verse That Reminds Me, about a turbulent childhood in foster homes and a mental breakdown, has won the Desmond Elliott prize for the year’s best debut novel.
Published by Stormzy’s imprint Merky Books, the book was described by judges of the £10,000 award as a “transcendent work of literature”. The semi-autobiographical novel follows a British-Ghanaian boy, K, as he passes through different foster homes. It explores identity, sexuality, mental health and abuse as K moves from the Suffolk countryside to inner-city London. Owusu began writing it while he was in a mental health facility, creating the character of K to help him understand the breakdown he was going through.
Related: Derek Owusu: ‘Mental health issues that people find scary aren’t being talked about’
Continue reading...A New York appeals court cleared the way late on Wednesday for a publisher to resume distribution to booksellers of a tell-all book by Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, despite the objections of the president’s brother.
Related: US setting new coronavirus case records as 'Russian bounty' row continues – live updates
Continue reading...Tribute is part of ‘feminisation’ of public places in city, where two sisters studied French
A square in Brussels will be named after the Brontë sisters, the first tribute of its kind in the Belgian capital, more than 178 years after Charlotte and Emily arrived in the city to study French.
Councillors in the north-west district of Koekelberg voted to name a square “Place des Sœurs Brontë” in French, or “Zusters Brontë plein” in Dutch, as part of a wider plan for the “feminisation” of public places. The local authority found that the vast majority of its streets and squares named after a person commemorated men.
Continue reading...The philanthropic centre devoted to western civilisation staged its own small tragedy in an error-ridden and subsequently deleted tweet
By any standards, it was a tweet with a few too many errors. By the standards of a multi-million dollar education centre devoted to western civilisation and which partners with universities to fund its own degrees, it was probably better off deleted.
On Thursday, Australia’s Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation stunned its followers on Twitter by introducing them to the little-known Shakespeare play “Macbath”.
Western civilisation aint what it used to be: pic.twitter.com/JDPep9yoOH
Related: Shakespeare in lockdown: did he write King Lear in plague quarantine?
In a famous scene, Lady Macbath attempts to cleanse her conscience with a long soak pic.twitter.com/OQZ5E5mOJz
Don't they know that it is terribly bad luck to call it "Macbath"? For safety, it should be referred to as "The Scottish Plug" https://t.co/h7rVErBsgb
The Ramsay Centre just deleted their tweet and reposted a "corrected" version. Which they've now also deleted. pic.twitter.com/fuXhJ7sFJ6
Autocorrect even idiot-proofs Macbath pic.twitter.com/Fn6GDVo1UF
Just in case anyone missed the full canon of @theramsaycentre 's display of Western Cultural Supremacy, here are all three deleted tweets pic.twitter.com/9w27idR1BO
“Is this an error I see before me?” https://t.co/CN5sQXktq0
No spoilers but Lady Macbath might be able to get the damned spot out. https://t.co/8juLoJ4k2G
Continue reading...Matthew Dooley’s Flake wins the annual award for comedic fiction ‘in the spirit’ of the Jeeves and Wooster creator PG Wodehouse
A graphic novel about ice-cream turf wars in an English seaside town has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comedic fiction.
Flake by Matthew Dooley is the first graphic novel ever to win the award, which goes to a work “in the spirit” of the Jeeves and Wooster creator PG Wodehouse. It has been won in the past by “true comic gems” including Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little.
Continue reading...