French economist admired by Xi Jinping says he won’t cut sections on inequality in China
The latest book by the French economist Thomas Piketty appears unlikely to be sold in mainland China after he refused requests to censor it.
Although the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, expressed admiration for Piketty’s earlier work, Capital and Ideology, which was published last year, it has not made it to the mainland China market due to sections on inequality in China.
Continue reading...Late twist in the tale as former librarian claims titles including The Twits and The Subtle Knife were intended for management
The school librarian who stacked the shelves behind Boris Johnson’s podium with titles including The Twits, Betrayed and The Subtle Knife has admitted that she never intended the message for the prime minister, but for the management of the school from which she resigned in February.
Related: Books seen behind Boris Johnson tell their own story
Continue reading...Author ‘follows my conscience’ after head of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights group says her views are transphobic
JK Rowling is returning the Ripple of Hope award given to her last year by the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) organisation after its president, Kennedy’s daughter, criticised her views on transgender issues.
The award, which is for people who have shown a “commitment to social change”, was presented to Rowling in December for her work with her children’s charity, Lumos. On receiving the award, Rowling called it “one of the highest honours I’ve ever been given” and said “Robert Kennedy embodied everything I most admire in a human being”. Previous winners include Barack Obama, archbishop Desmond Tutu and Joe Biden.
Related: UK's only trans philosophy professor to JK Rowling: Harry Potter helped me become a woman
Related: JK Rowling: from magic to the heart of a Twitter storm
Continue reading...Philipp Hainhofer’s Das Großes Stammbuch, signed by influential 17th-century Europeans, acquired by Herzog August Bibliothek
Almost 400 years after Augustus the Younger tried and failed to buy the “extraordinary” Das Großes Stammbuch – a “friendship book” signed by some of the most powerful figures of 17th-century Europe – for the library he was building in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, it has finally landed on his shelves.
Duke Augustus, a German member of the House of Welf who died in 1666 aged 87, was instrumental in collecting some of the hundreds of thousands of books that form the Herzog August Bibliothek, one of the world’s oldest libraries, which is named after him.
Continue reading...TES writer spots carefully chosen titles lined up behind PM as he gives speech at school
The prime minister’s address to the nation’s children as they prepare to return to classrooms was upstaged by Twitter tongues wagging over a school librarian with a sense of humour.
As Boris Johnson told children at Castle Rock school in Coalville, Leicestershire, that exam results had almost been derailed by “a mutant algorithm”, eyes turned to the bookshelves behind him, lined with titles like The Twits, Betrayed and The Subtle Knife.
It has been noted that the Subtle Knife; Glass Houses; The Toll (about a monstrous dictator); and Guards Guards (about a shady villain installing a puppet king) are all there too. It looks like it's been carefully curated!
Continue reading...The 29-year-old Dutch author becomes youngest winner of £50,000 prize, for ‘virtuosic’ debut with translator Michele Hutchison
The 29-year-old Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become the youngest author ever to win the International Booker prize, taking the award for their “visceral and virtuosic” debut novel, The Discomfort of Evening.
Rijneveld, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, beat titles including Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree to win the £50,000 award for the best fiction translated into English, which will be split equally with their translator, Michele Hutchison. At 29, Rijneveld is the youngest winner of the International Booker, and narrowly older than the youngest Booker winner, Eleanor Catton, who was 28 when she won the 2013 prize for The Luminaries.
Related: 'My family are too frightened to read my book': meet Europe's most exciting authors
Related: The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld review – a family’s grief
Continue reading...Author’s estate says timing wasn’t right, while scriptwriter says he is ‘mystified’ by move
The estate of Iain Banks has blamed timing for the demise of a planned Amazon television adaptation of the late author’s beloved Culture series.
The adaptation of the Scottish author’s sci-fi books was announced in 2018, when Amazon Prime Video acquired the global rights to a TV version of Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel. The author’s estate was set to serve as executive producer, but in a statement to the Guardian on Wednesday, it said the “timing wasn’t quite right” for it to go ahead.
Continue reading...Author’s estate says timing wasn’t right, while scriptwriter says he is ‘mystified’ by move
The estate of Iain Banks has blamed timing for the demise of a planned Amazon television adaptation of the late author’s beloved Culture series.
The adaptation of the Scottish author’s sci-fi books was announced in 2018, when Amazon Prime Video acquired the global rights to a TV version of Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel. The author’s estate was set to serve as executive producer, but in a statement to the Guardian on Wednesday, it said the “timing wasn’t quite right” for it to go ahead.
Continue reading...A theatrical reading of the children’s classic, directed by Ned Bennett, will be free online
One has mouldy cereal in his beard and revoltingly hairy ears; the other has a glass eye and a possible case of the dreaded shrinks. Their domestic life involves frogs in the bedsheets, wormy spaghetti and catching birds with the world’s stickiest glue.
They are, of course, The Twits. Roald Dahl’s book about the gruesome twosome, which has long delighted and disgusted kids and grownups, is to be presented as a theatrical reading online 40 years after it was first published. Aimed at children aged six to 12, the reading will be streamed for free on YouTube by London’s Unicorn theatre and available to watch on the Guardian website.
Continue reading...Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, sought to undermine first lady Melania Trump in a series of White House turf wars, according to a new book by a former confidante of the president’s wife.
Related: Melania Trump taped making derogatory remarks about Donald and Ivanka – report
Continue reading...Exclusive: Thomas Young used cut-up method to treat translation of Egyptian relic as mathematical problem, papers show
Nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs when two 19th-century scholars set out to decipher the inscribed texts on the ancient Egyptian Rosetta Stone, one of the British Museum’s most famous treasures.
Now notes have been discovered among one of the scholars’ papers in the British Library that reveal the extent to which the translation was treated as though it was a mathematical problem.
Continue reading...A 12-person committee previously met twice a month to approve or blacklist all books published in the country, for offences including immorality or insulting Islam
After banning almost 5,000 books in the last seven years, Kuwait’s government has relaxed its book censorship laws in a move that has been welcomed by writers and free speech activists.
Kuwaiti state media reported that the country’s parliament had voted 40 to nine in favour of lifting the Ministry of Information’s control over books imported into the country. Previously, the ministry had blacklisted more than 4,000 books since 2014, with titles including Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez falling foul of its censorship committee. All books published in the country had to receive prior approval from a 12-member committee that met twice a month before they could be released, with offences ranging from insulting Islam to “inciting unrest” and committing “immoral” acts.
Related: Dostoevsky book among hundreds banned in Kuwait
Continue reading...Stephanie Winston Wolkoff reportedly taped the first lady’s ‘harsh comments’ and plans to share them in a book, Melania & Me
Melania Trump will speak at the Republican national convention on Tuesday night, in the shadow of an extraordinary report that she was taped making derogatory comments about her husband’s adult children and even Donald Trump himself.
Related: RNC 2020: a two-hour glimpse into the upside-down world of Trump TV
Related: William Barr told Murdoch to 'muzzle' Fox News Trump critic, new book says
Continue reading...Delhi Riots 2020 claims violence was result of Muslim jihadist conspiracy but critics accuse publisher of censorship
Bloomsbury India has pulled a controversial book claiming to tell the untold story of February’s Delhi riots, after the publisher was accused of giving a platform to unsubstantiated allegations and strengthening an anti-Muslim agenda.
The book, titled Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, claims that the riots were the result of a conspiracy by Muslim jihadists and so-called “urban naxals”, a derogatory term used to describe left-wing activists, who had a role to play in the riots. The claim contravenes reports by organisations such as Amnesty International and the Delhi Minorities Commission that Muslims bore the brunt of the violence.
Related: Inside Delhi: beaten, lynched and burnt alive
Related: Delhi police accused of filing false charges over February riots
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s older sister, a former federal judge, can be heard sharply criticizing her brother in a series of recordings released on Saturday, at one point saying of the president: “He has no principles.”
Related: Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump thumps Donald
I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit
Every day it’s something else, who cares
Related: How Donald Trump canceled the Republican party | Sidney Blumenthal
Continue reading...Ian Emerson questions why the Church of England is happy to bless statues of mythical creatures, but withholds this ceremony for same-sex marriages, while Steve Ibbetson points out a sculptural inspiration
How nice to see the bishop of Hull blessing a carving of Aslan and the other stone effigies of characters from Narnia, whose stories apparently “contain incredible truth that helps many Christians today reflect on our own understanding of God and faith” (Yorkshire church to be adorned with Chronicles of Narnia statues, 19 August). Surely this cannot be the same Church of England that refused to bless my same-sex marriage despite my faith of many years being reflected in my love for my wonderful husband Richard and my love for the institution of the C of E expressed in being a communicant member and former churchwarden who gave thousands of hours in its service.
Ian Emerson
London
• How wonderful to have an almost full-page article on the new carvings for the outside of St Mary’s church in Beverley. But how strange to have no mention of its most famous interior carving, that of the “messenger rabbit” reputed to be the inspiration for the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The rabbit would have been familiar to Lewis Carroll from family visits to the area by the Dodgson family.
Steve Ibbetson
Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire
The mostly single-sentence novel Ducks, Newburyport scoops £10,000 award for its piercing portrait of Trump’s America
Lucy Ellmann has won the UK’s oldest literary prize, the James Tait Black award, for her novel Ducks, Newburyport – almost four decades after her father achieved the same feat.
Ellmann was announced the winner of the £10,000 fiction category on Friday afternoon, with her 1,000-page, mostly single-sentence novel set inside the consciousness of an Ohio mother living in Donald Trump’s America. Published by tiny Norwich independent Galley Beggar Press, Ducks, Newburyport was also shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2019 and won the Goldsmiths prize for inventive fiction.
Related: Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann review – pushes narrative to its limits
Continue reading...Bill Gaines revolutionised the 1950s comics industry with EC Comics’ taboo-busting crime tales, stupendous sci-fi plots … and war stories that didn’t flinch from the truth
Continue reading...St Mary’s church in Beverley commissions sculptures of CS Lewis characters to replace medieval carvings
Narnia’s mythical creatures and talking beasts, which have enchanted children for 70 years, have found a new home at a 12th-century parish church in east Yorkshire.
Aslan the lion, the White Witch and Mr Tumnus the faun are among 14 handmade stone carvings being installed on the outer walls of St Mary’s church in Beverley to replace medieval carvings that have crumbled away.
Related: CS Lewis’s lost letters reveal how wife’s death tested his faith
Continue reading...Vietnamese-American author and poet joins Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Karl Ove Knausgård to lock away work in Norway to be published in 94 years time
Ocean Vuong is to become the seventh author in the Future Library, an ongoing art project that sees contemporary writers pen works that will remain unread until 2114, when they will be opened and printed on 1,000 trees currently growing just outside Oslo.
The writer and poet, who was born in Saigon and now lives in Massachusetts, is the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the TS Eliot prize-winning poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
Related: Into the woods: Margaret Atwood reveals her Future Library book, Scribbler Moon
Maybe I'm being too grim but my main concern is will readers be there? Or will they be in a bunker?
Continue reading...More than 70 signatories including Poland’s Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Margaret Atwood and Mike Leigh accuse president Duda’s government of using LGBTQ+ people as ‘a scapegoat’
Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Margaret Atwood, JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler are among more than 70 signatories to an open letter by authors, actors and directors condemning the rise of homophobia and transphobia in Poland under president Andrzej Duda.
Related: Duda's victory in Poland helps draw a 'pink line' through Europe | Mark Gevisser
Continue reading...American Crisis will be released on 13 October, three weeks before election day, when Trump will face Joe Biden
New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who has gained a national following through his management of the coronavirus pandemic, is writing a book that looks back on his experiences and includes leadership advice and a close look at his relationship with the Trump White House.
Related: Kristin Urquiza, who lost father to Covid, condemns Trump in powerful DNC address
Continue reading...Show delayed by lockdown set to open at London library in September
Like any good spell book it’s got all the important magical recipes; how to escape demons, obviously, as well as safe travel, catching thieves, successful love-making, and the more mundane problems of how to overcome fever, diarrhoea and swallowing a bone.
Now the small 16th-century spellbook containing 125 recipes is about to go on public display at the British Library as part of its delayed Hebrew Manuscripts exhibition.
Continue reading...Writer tells Edinburgh festival audience she wants to focus on short stories and theatre
Hilary Mantel has spent the last 15 years consumed by Tudor intrigue and writing award-winning historical fiction, but fans should not expect much more in that vein.
“I haven’t got another big historical novel in view,” she told the Edinburgh international books festival on Sunday. “I think that’s quite important to say, so I hope people will stop writing to me with suggestions. It’s lovely that people have the appetite for it but considering the pace at which I proceed, I would like some life before it’s too late.”
Related: Hilary Mantel up for third Booker prize as 2020 longlist announced
Continue reading...Crime author argues ministers who read only political biographies are limited in vision
The most impressive political leaders during the coronavirus crisis have one thing in common, one of Britain’s most popular novelists believes: they all read fiction.
In contrast, the leader of one of the most “shambolic” responses is reading endless biographies of men who have gone before him, the “queen of crime”, Val McDermid, lamented at the Edinburgh international book festival.
Continue reading...Prize sponsor apologises for putting Frederick Douglass on cover of Martin R Delany biography, while expert in Edith Maude Eaton says author may have never written story at all
Women’s prize sponsor Baileys has apologised for putting an illustration of the wrong black abolitionist on the cover of a book in a series republishing female authors who wrote under male pseudonyms – a project that has received mixed reactions since it launched earlier this week.
The Reclaim Her Name campaign, announced on Wednesday, sees 25 titles being republished as free ebooks to celebrate 25 years of the Women’s prize for fiction, with print editions donated to selected libraries around the UK. More than 3,000 pseudonymous writers were considered by a team of researchers commissioned by Baileys. Selected authors included Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, and Fatemeh Farahani, who published poems in 19th-century Iran as Shahein Farahani.
Related: ‘George Eliot’ joins 24 female authors making debuts under their real names
Continue reading...A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker; The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky; The Space Between the Worlds by Micaiah Johnson; The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez; and Seven Dials by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam
In Sarah Pinsker’s debut novel, A Song for a New Day (Head of Zeus, £18.99), liberty and creative endeavour are compromised by political and socioeconomic reality. Pinsker presents a frighteningly real near-future US in which social gatherings have been proscribed due to terrorist attacks and viral plagues. Corporation StageHoloLive transmits virtual music events for the masses, while musician Luce retains some semblance of artistic integrity by playing at illegal underground venues. Meanwhile, Rosemary is a naive recluse, cocooned in virtual reality: when she is offered a job as a talent scout for StageHoloLive, she must leave her comfort zone. Pinsker movingly charts Rosemary’s coming of age story as her world and Luce’s collide.
Continue reading...Book by president’s former lawyer will be released in September after justice department gag order to stop publication was dropped
A teaser for Michael Cohen’s book about his time as Donald Trump’s lawyer and fixer and his fall from grace was released on Thursday, after the US justice department had issued a gag order to stop the book’s publication that was later dropped.
The book, entitled Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J Trump, is slated to be released sometime in September, ahead of the presidential election in November.
The day has finally arrived. I have waited a long time to share my truth. To read the foreword and pre-order my book DISLOYAL, visit https://t.co/Va4Rt0Zear
Related: Michael Cohen released from prison again after ACLU files legal challenge
Continue reading...The wife of the early colonist, Elizabeth, is the subject of Grenville’s new novel: a dance between history and fiction that was the topic of our book club
Kate Grenville may have featured the corrupt early colonist John Macarthur in her new work of Australian historical fiction, A Room Made of Leaves, but that doesn’t mean the author believes he should be celebrated.
In a wide-ranging conversation about history, fact and fiction for Guardian Australia’s third monthly online book club – a Melbourne writers’ festival event that was hosted on Zoom – Grenville in fact agreed that Macarthur was “a royal shit”.
Related: The Australian book you should read next: The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Continue reading...Novel about vampire Edward was shelved for 12 years after online leaks but has become an immediate bestseller – and author ‘wants to write more’
Stephenie Meyer has revealed she has plans for at least two more books in her vampire saga Twilight, as the latest instalment Midnight Sun shot straight to the top of the charts in both the UK and US, where it has sold more than 1m copies in a week.
Midnight Sun, a retelling of Meyer’s first Twilight story that swaps perspectives from the human Bella to her vampiric love interest Edward, has sold more than 1m copies in all formats in the US since it was released on 4 August. Megan Tingley at Meyer’s publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, told USA Today that the figures were “breathtaking”.
Related: Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer review – dusk falls on Twilight saga
Continue reading...Characters are tethered to a virtual world of surveillance and misinformation in an exhausting satire on technology
This novel starts off annoying in one way, becomes annoying in a whole other way, and ends up as probably the most annoying book of 2020. But what did you expect? Booker winner DBC Pierre has always been a literary brat – explosive, funny, exhausting, hurling the stuff of the universe together and daring the reader to make sense of it all. And if in the end the book is too obvious in its sloganeering and too opaque in its storytelling, well, you can’t say Pierre hasn’t gone all out in trying to give you a good time.
Meanwhile in Dopamine City is set in the imminent future, in an unnamed company town that functions as a kind of city state. The characters are tethered via their phones and devices to a virtual world of judgment, surveillance and misinformation – so far, so Facebook. This parallel plane of gamification and punishment is the Dopamine City that gives the book its title. “Every second an arm like a blade combs the surface of the earth for dopamine, yours and mine, our whims and arguments, our relationships with others, our attempts at love, our anger, our caring, to embezzle it as revenue for a dozen male college dropouts,” warns Dr Cornelia Roos, a sceptical technologist hired by the company to figleaf its activities.
Continue reading...After the lockdown, hundreds of delayed titles are expected this autumn including many household names vying for Christmas success
From Richard Osman’s first crime novel to Caitlin Moran’s new memoir, almost 600 hardbacks are due to be published on 3 September in a “massive bun fight” of new titles, as books delayed over the summer due to Covid-19 finally make it on to shelves.
Autumn is the busiest time of the year in books, with publishers bringing out their biggest titles in the hope of hitting the Christmas jackpot on what has been dubbed “Super Thursday” by the book trade. But this year, the closure of bookshops for more than two months due to the pandemic means that many of the titles held back over the summer are now due to hit shelves this autumn, with a series of what trade magazine the Bookseller called “mini-Super Thursdays” lining up across September and October.
Continue reading...Bob Woodward’s second book on the Trump White House has a title, Rage, and promises to reveal the secrets of “25 personal letters exchanged between [Donald] Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that have not been public before”.
Related: It Was All a Lie review: Trump as symptom not cause of Republican decline
Related: Paul Begala on Trump: 'Nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars'
Continue reading...At livestreamed event actor says it was thought before March people would not observe rules
The actor Sir Ian McKellen has said that the British government “underestimated” the public by initially doubting they would behave responsibly and observe lockdown rules during the coronavirus outbreak.
Speaking at a livestreamed event on Wednesday night, McKellen said that it was thought, before lockdown came into effect in March, that people would not have the patience and discipline to respect the rules for long enough. However, he observed, “people are very happy to obey orders, in this democracy, if they see it’s coming from a sensible place. The government didn’t quite trust us to be grown up.”
A Live Stream with Armistead Maupin in Conversation with Ian McKellen is available to watch online until 14 August
Continue reading...Libraries find ways to keep in touch with regulars, from phone calls to delivering books to live-streaming author talks
When Melbourne’s Yarra Plenty regional libraries first went into lockdown in March, shut the doors and left the remaining unborrowed books on their shelves, staff were sent home with a phone.
“One of the hardest things about lockdown was people being separated from their community,” said Lisa Dempster, Yarra Plenty’s executive manager of public participation.
Related: Arts industry could wait three more months for Coalition's $250m Covid-19 rescue package
Related: Global arts crisis: how does Australia’s federal stimulus compare?
Continue reading...The Reclaim Her Name project, marking 25 years of the Women’s prize for fiction, will introduce titles including Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans
Middlemarch is to be published for the first time in almost 150 years under George Eliot’s real name, Mary Ann Evans, alongside 24 other historic works by women whose writing has only ever previously been in print under their male pseudonyms.
Evans adopted the pen name of George Eliot in the mid-19th century, in order to ensure her works were taken seriously. Middlemarch, originally published in eight parts in 1871-72, has never been released under her real name. Evans said she was “resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation”, while her partner George Lewes said “the object of anonymity was to get the book judged on its own merits, and not prejudged as the work of a woman, or of a particular woman”.
Related: Women's prize at 25: what it is like to win by Zadie Smith, Naomi Alderman and more
Continue reading...Michael Rosen is among the customers whose holiday rental was re-let to others
Scores of holidaymakers, including the author Michael Rosen, have had their trips cancelled at the last minute after Europe’s leading holiday rentals group re-let the accommodation they had booked to new customers.
Customers of Cottages.com and Hoseasons, both part of the Awaze Group, have discovered that their bookings have been cancelled, often at the last minute and sometimes after arriving at their accommodation.
Related: Hoseasons and Cottages.com owner changes refund policy after complaints
Continue reading...Author, who was in intensive care for 47 days, says he has written Rigatoni the Pasta Cat after returning home to the ‘friendly blanket’ of writing
Despite spending nearly seven weeks in intensive care and having to learn to walk again after contracting Covid-19, Michael Rosen has written a new book in the weeks since he left hospital, describing his return to creativity as akin to being wrapped in “a very friendly blanket”.
The former children’s laureate, who spent 47 days in intensive care before going home in June, said he took just “a couple of days” to pen Rigatoni the Pasta Cat, the latest in his comic fiction series illustrated by Tony Ross.
Continue reading...The Society of Authors, which raised £1.1m for writers struggling but ineligible for government help, says money is low but crisis remains acute
Almost £1m has been given out to nearly 700 authors since the end of March, to help those facing financial crisis through the coronavirus pandemic. But the Society of Authors has warned that funds are now running low, and that losses for writers are set to continue into next year.
The authors’ body set up its coronavirus emergency fund in March, warning that writers were facing “unmanageable” losses as events were cancelled, school visits were called off and bookshops were closed. With donations from organisations including Arts Council England and the TS Eliot Foundation, the pot reached £1.1m. But on Monday, the Society said that it has given out £954,000 of that fund and now needs to raise more money to help writers survive.
Continue reading...Broadcaster Ruth Watson’s archive, spanning centuries, is up for auction, revealing some radically different tastes – and some startlingly similar ones
The perennial British argument over the best way to make a cup of tea dates back to at least the 17th century, when a cookbook warned that “the water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely”.
Published in 1677, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt also contains at least 50 recipes for making metheglin, a type of mead made with herbs and spices, as well as ones for stepony, a raisin wine; bragot, an ale flavoured with honey and spices; and a somewhat less tempting tea made with eggs.
Continue reading...A socially distanced audience will sit among objects recalling Northern Ireland’s prolonged conflict and the pandemic in a piece about mourning
In a verse dedicated to his aunt, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote of a “sunlit absence”. That striking image of loss has now directly inspired a theatre production that will pay tribute to those who died during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Anything Can Happen 1972: Voices from the Heart of the Troubles is set to be staged at Derry Playhouse this autumn. The theatre usually seats 150 but social distancing means the vast majority of its red chairs will be left empty, with space for only 20 or so people. The Playhouse is inviting audiences to contribute significant objects or photographs that connect them to loved ones lost during the Troubles or the pandemic. These will be placed on the empty chairs around audience members and illuminated, creating a kind of spotlit absence. Kieran Griffiths, the director of the Playhouse, says this cross between installation and theatre production is also a way of “spotlighting our missing audiences and our theatre community in mourning”.
Anything Can Happen 1972: Voices from the Heart of the Troubles is part of the Peace IV Programme, funded by the EU, to support peace and reconciliation.
Continue reading...Inspired by the author’s unconventional love life, thousands of men and women wrote to ask for her advice on sex and sexuality, hidden correspondence reveals
She was the feminist icon made famous by her 1949 seminal treatise, The Second Sex, and her open relationship with fellow writer Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she swapped sexual partners. Now a vast trove of 20,000 letters reveals that Simone de Beauvoir sparked an extraordinary outpouring of emotion from readers in Britain and across the globe.
Far from ordinary fan mail, these are letters filled with an exceptional author-reader intimacy. Both men and women sought her advice on everything from marriage to mistresses, sexual confusion to sex, abortions to affairs.
Related: Simone de Beauvoir's 'too intimate' novel to be published after 75 years
I found an outpouring of projection, identification, expectation, disappointment and passion
Related: 'You are my destiny': Simone de Beauvoir's mad passion for young lover revealed in letters
Continue reading...Depicted as a warmonger, the future PM had a very modern dislike of media criticism, reveals new book
It is one of the earliest examples of a politician accusing the media of fake news. And it illustrates that, despite having been a journalist himself, Winston Churchill had an ambivalent relationship with the press, praising it on occasions, attacking it on others.
Churchill had been incensed by a picture published on the back page of the Daily Herald on 4 June 1929, that showed him outside 11 Downing Street carrying a book with the title War clearly visible. The caption suggested that war was “one of his favourite subjects”.
His refusal to back down when proven wrong is reminiscent of today’s politicians who label criticism as 'fake news’
Related: Under Boris Johnson, Putin and Trump the world has uncanny parallels to 1945
Continue reading...Poet laureate joins Michael Rosen and Imtiaz Dharker to criticise Ofqual announcement that poetry will be optional next year
Poet laureate Simon Armitage and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen are among the top UK poets decrying the government’s decision to make poetry optional for GCSE students next year, describing it as “a dangerous first step”.
Ofqual announced on Tuesday that, due to the impact of coronavirus on education, it would allow exam boards to change their assessment criteria for GCSE English literature next summer. While students will still be assessed on a Shakespeare play, they will only have to focus on two out of the three remaining areas – poetry, the 19th-century novel, and fiction or drama from the British Isles after 1914.
Related: Making poetry optional in GCSE English literature is out of tune with the times
Continue reading...Novelist asks CEO of social media platform to remove quote he claims far-right groups have falsely attributed to him
Salman Rushdie has asked Twitter to remove a post with an Islamophobic quote that he claims has been falsely attributed to him, after it circulated alongside a photo of the author’s face this week.
The quote says that Muslims’ “only goal is to destroy the whole nation by terrorism, bomb blasts, population explosion, riots and jihad in the name of Islam”. It’s not the first time this quote has appeared online: it has been attributed to Rushdie without any source by anti-Islam and far-right groups for years, and in 2015 it was traced by a Twitter user to a message posted online. At the time, Rushdie thanked the user for finding the source of “this fake quote that people can’t seem to stop quoting to justify their own bigotry”.
Related: Not the Booker prize longlist: vote now to decide the 2020 shortlist
Continue reading...The bestselling author of the Twilight series on being a fan of Justina Ireland, reading Terry Brooks as a child and wanting to read every book ever written
The book I am currently reading
I just began Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland. I was a huge fan of the first book in the series, Dread Nation, and even on the first page I could tell this one is going to be difficult to put down. I love a book that compels you to read!
The book I wish I’d written
I wish I’d had the experience of writing Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. I know that the only thing more gripping, more immersive than reading a story I love is writing that story. I’m obsessed with the world she created, Weep. I wish I’d lived in it as immersively as she must have. I’ll just have to settle for reading it a million times.
Related: Film review: The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Continue reading...Performance poet, writer and musician said they had previously ‘tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection’
The musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest has changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary.
In the announcement on Instagram, Tempest said they were changing the pronouns they use, from she and her to they and them. Their new name is pronounced like the letter K. They wrote:
I’ve been struggling to accept myself as I am for a long time. I have tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better. I’ve loved Kate. But I am beginning a process and I hope you’ll come with me … [Kae is] an old English word that means jay bird. Jays are associated with communication, curiosity, adaptation to new situations and COURAGE which is the name of the game at the moment. It can also mean jackdaw which is the bird that symbolises death and rebirth. Ovid said the jackdaw brought the rain. Which I love. It has its roots in the Latin word for rejoice, be glad and take pleasure. And I hope to live more that way each day … This is a time of great reckoning. Privately, locally, globally. For me, the question is no longer ‘when will this change’ but ‘how far am I willing to go to meet the changes and bring them about in myself.’ I want to live with integrity. And this is a step towards that. Sending LOVE always.
Continue reading...Writer says production of Dickens classic will debut at Nottingham Playhouse in October 2021 due to uncertainty over reopening of UK theatres
Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol has been delayed for a year by the uncertainty about the reopening of UK theatres. The production, in which Gatiss will play the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley, will open at Nottingham Playhouse in October 2021 and at Alexandra Palace in London the following month.
Gatiss appeared beneath a hood as “the ghost of Christmas past, present and future” to make the announcement in a video message. In the past, he said, he was commissioned to adapt the Charles Dickens classic. The production is not possible during the pandemic, but, “looking into Christmas future, we are going to do it next year. Don’t worry, we’ll be back as shiny as a mince pie.”
A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story with @Markgatiss & @AdamPenford has moved to 26 Nov 2021-9 Jan 2022. If you've already got tickets your booking will be rescheduled to the equivalent date in 2021/22. Your ticketing provider will be in touch with more info https://t.co/GWS88GODFU pic.twitter.com/m9LiKsOHhR
Continue reading...Change was made after a classics student pointed out that the phrase on the original cover of Live Free or Die made no sense
The Latin motto on Fox News anchor Sean Hannity’s new book has been changed after the original was described as “complete and utter gobbledygook” by a classics student.
Hannity’s Live Free or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink, which argues “now is an All Hands on Deck moment to save the Republic”, was published on Tuesday. But as Business Insider pointed out, the Latin motto it uses as a subtitle has been quietly changed from the original jacket.
Continue reading...Retelling of her YA saga from the perspective of vampire Edward Cullen was shelved in 2008 after the leak of a draft manuscript
Twelve years after Stephenie Meyer put Midnight Sun, her telling of the Twilight saga from vampire Edward Cullen’s perspective, “on hold indefinitely”, the novel has finally been published – and is already topping book charts.
Meyer scrapped plans for the book in 2008 after a draft of her manuscript leaked on the internet, saying at the time that “what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention me as a human being”, and that she was setting the manuscript to one side.
Continue reading...Investment banker Lindsay Rechler has rewritten classic story to ‘to explain to my children why their world was turned upside down’
The classic 1947 children’s picture book Goodnight Moon has been reimagined for the coronavirus era as Good Morning Zoom, replacing Margaret Wise Brown’s lights and red balloons with “indoor sports” and “couch-pillow forts”.
Lindsay Rechler, a director at a global investment bank and the mother of two young children, originally self-published a version with illustrations by June Park. It has been acquired by Penguin Random House in the US, where it will be published in October.
Continue reading...The novelist, whose book This Mournable Body was named as a finalist last week, had been arrested while taking part in anti-corruption protests
The Booker-longlisted author Tsitsi Dangarembga has been freed on bail after her arrest during anti-corruption protests in Zimbabwe last week.
The acclaimed writer, who was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize for her novel This Mournable Body, documented her arrest on Friday with another protester, Julie Barnes, in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale. The author was carrying placards calling for reform in Zimbabwe president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, and for the release of Hopewell Chin’ono, a journalist arrested recently during a nationwide crackdown on protesters.
Continue reading...Novelist says details from careless Google search are ‘quite funny’ and he will leave his book as is after reader spots Octoroks and Lizalfos in his new book
John Boyne, the award-winning author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, has acknowledged that a cursory Google led to him accidentally including monsters from the popular video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in his new novel.
Boyne’s A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom opens in AD1 and ends 2,000 years later, following a narrator and his family. In one section, the narrator sets out to poison Attila the Hun, using ingredients including an “Octorok eyeball” and “the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms”.
OKAY. This is a thread, but it’s worth it I promise.
On Reddit today, user u/NoNoNo_OhOhOh posted a page from acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne’s latest book, ‘The Traveller At the Gates of Wisdom.
Note the ingredients. pic.twitter.com/4RTgZxtUT7
Experts find hundreds of errors in the writer’s works, mostly made by editors and typesetters
Ernest Hemingway’s published writings are riddled with hundreds of errors and little has been done to correct them, according to a forthcoming study of the legendary writer’s texts.
Robert W Trogdon, a leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, told the Guardian that Hemingway’s novels and short stories were crying out for editions that are “as accurate to what he wrote as possible” because the number of mistakes “ranges in the hundreds”. Although many are slight, he said, they were nevertheless mistakes, made primarily by editors and typesetters.
Continue reading...A new book reveals how the Canadian war poet Frank Prewett deceived his lover Siegfried Sassoon and the literary elite
He hoodwinked his lover Siegfried Sassoon into believing he was a Native American and convinced Virginia Woolf he would be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
Related: Landmark poems of the last century
He appeals to the primitivist ideas of everyone around him. He goes around topless on a horse, looking gorgeous and fulfilling all their fantasies of being an indigenous person
Continue reading...Architect of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign reveals admiration for Boris Johnson’s aide in interview on dark politics
Steve Bannon, who has previously backed a range of notorious far-right political figures, has publicly endorsed Dominic Cummings for the first time, calling him a “brilliant guy”.
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist also said that Boris Johnson will become an increasingly populist prime minister after jettisoning his political positioning as a “globalist” to “opportunistically jump on Brexit”.
Related: Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech
Continue reading...Debut novelist wins world’s top prize in science fiction for A Memory Called Empire, with Jeanette Ng and Neil Gaiman landing other categories
Debut author Arkady Martine has won the Hugo for best novel during a virtual ceremony hosted by George RR Martin that frequently turned deeply political.
Martine’s novel A Memory Called Empire, about an ambassador who travels to an interstellar city to take up a new post and discovers her predecessor was murdered, took the world’s top science fiction prize at the ceremony on Friday. The most prestigious awards in science fiction, the Hugos have been won in the past by some of the biggest names in the genre, from Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov to Ursula K Le Guin, Arthur C Clarke and, three years in a row, NK Jemisin. The winners are voted for by members of WorldCon, the annual convention that hosts the prize.
Continue reading...Debut novelist wins world’s top prize in science fiction for A Memory Called Empire, with Jeanette Ng and Neil Gaiman landing other categories
Debut author Arkady Martine has won the Hugo for best novel during a virtual ceremony hosted by George RR Martin that frequently turned deeply political.
Martine’s novel A Memory Called Empire, about an ambassador who travels to an interstellar city to take up a new post and discovers her predecessor was murdered, took the world’s top science fiction prize at the ceremony on Friday. The most prestigious awards in science fiction, the Hugos have been won in the past by some of the biggest names in the genre, from Philip K Dick and Isaac Asimov to Ursula K Le Guin, Arthur C Clarke and, three years in a row, NK Jemisin. The winners are voted for by members of WorldCon, the annual convention that hosts the prize.
Continue reading...