As play opens in London, author says it could find a home on Broadway and beyond to reach as many Potter fans as possible
As Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opens in the West End of London, author JK Rowling has said the production could soon go global.
Related: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – follow the midnight launch live!
Continue reading...The year after Marlon James and his indie publisher Oneworld beat publishing giants to win the Man Booker, three small presses are on the 2016 longlist. But what effect does the ‘mother of all prizes’ have on tiny teams?
Alongside heavy hitters such as JM Coetzee and Elizabeth Strout, published by imprints of the international giant Penguin Random House, this year’s Man Booker prize longlist also featured a new face: Graeme Macrae Burnet, whose second novel comes to readers courtesy of tiny independent Scottish press, Saraband.
In the midst of rushing through a reprint after Wednesday’s announcement, publisher Sara Hunt’s phone is ringing off the hook with sales, rights and publicity inquiries. Macrae Burnet’s novel, His Bloody Scotland, “went out of stock straight away,” she says, and she and her one full-time colleague are working round the clock to make sure it will be available to readers next week.
Related: Novel written in a VW campervan makes Man Booker longlist
Related: Leading lights and fresh stars shine in Man Booker prize 2016 longlist
Continue reading...Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho becomes Abebooks’s busiest search term after Tesla chief declares it ‘really quite good’
A forgotten, out-of-print history book from 1929 has sold out across the internet after it was praised by Elon Musk.
The Tesla chief executive and billionaire told Bloomberg on Thursday that he was currently reading a book called Twelve Against the Gods by William Bolitho. “It’s really quite good,” Musk added, sending the price of the now obscure text up from $6.35 (£4.82) on Amazon.com for a secondhand paperback edition, to $99.99, before it sold out at the online retailer. Shortly after, used books marketplace Abebooks reported that it had also sold out, with the 13 copies available quickly snapped up and Bolitho’s book the most sought for on the site all day.
Related: Elon Musk: the new It Boy of Silicon Valley | The Observer profile
Continue reading...Reuniting with Emily Blunt, the actor will play Topsy Tartlet, a supporting role who didn’t feature in the 1964 Julie Andrews version of PL Travers’s book
Meryl Streep is set to sing once more, joining Emily Blunt and Hamilton star Lin Manuel-Miranda in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns.
Sources have told Variety that Streep is being lined up to play Poppins’s cousin by marriage, Topsy Tartlet. Topsy is a maid who, in PL Travers’s Mary Poppins Comes Back, marries Arthur Turvy – so changing her name to Topsy Turvy. The character did not feature in the 1964 film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, which Travers famously hated.
Continue reading...Seventy-six pages and 50 illustrations from the great Latin epic made available to all, part of a project to put all its 80,000 manuscripts online
The Vatican Apostolic Library has digitised one of the world’s oldest manuscripts, an illustrated fragment of Virgil’s Aeneid that dates back 1,600 years.
Created in Rome around 400AD, the Vatican Virgil consists of 76 surviving pages, and 50 illustrations. The fragments of text are from the Latin poet’s Aeneid, his epic tale of Aeneas’s journey from the sack of Troy to Carthage, the underworld and then Italy, where he founds Rome. It also contains fragments from Virgil’s poem of the land, The Georgics, but the original manuscript is likely to have contained all of Virgil’s canonical works. According to Fine Books magazine, it is “one of the oldest [copies of The Aeneid] to survive the centuries”.
Continue reading...Story of married couple contending with a devastated postwar Berlin follows runaway success of Alone in Berlin
Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel Alone in Berlin was the hit book of the summer six years ago, selling 300,000 copies and making a bestseller of an author who had been largely forgotten. Now the late German author’s Nightmare in Berlin, an autobiographical novel beginning on the day the war ends, is to be published in English for the first time.
Released in German as Der Alpdruck (“The Nightmare”) in 1947, the year of Fallada’s death, the novel is the only book other than Alone in Berlin to have been written by the author in the post-war period. It tells of a man, Dr Doll, and his wife, who are taking shelter in the German countryside, haunted by nightmarish images at night, when the Russians invade. They return to Berlin after the end of the war, and attempt to resume their lives, but confronting the reality of life in the devastated city, they fall into morphine addiction, with each dose a “small death”.
Continue reading...The compilation Chapter and Verse will include five songs never before released, dating back to 1966
Bruce Springsteen has announced a compilation album to serve as an audio companion to his forthcoming autobiography, Born To Run. Chapter and Verse will be released on 23 September on Columbia, four days before Simon and Schuster publishes the book.
Springsteen selected the songs to fit the themes and sections of the book, and the album will be of interest to fans because it features five previously unreleased songs, including material from his pre-fame groups, the Castiles, Steel Mill and the Bruce Springsteen Band.
Related: A Bruce Springsteen show makes you feel like the best version of yourself
Continue reading...Premieres of new films from Ford, Malick and Mel Gibson join highly-anticipated Michael Fassbender/Alicia Vikander romance, Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy and Timothy Spall as Ian Paisley
Related: Venice film festival 2016: full line-up
American cinema has secured a pre-eminent position in the line-up of the 2016 Venice film festival, with new films from Terrence Malick, Tom Ford, Damien Chazelle and Derek Cianfrance among the highlights of the competition that was announced on Thursday.
Related: Festival fever: 40 films we predict will premiere at Venice, Toronto and Telluride
Continue reading...Campaigners condemn strategy to retain four council-run branches, but pass the other 11 to voluntary operations
Derby city council’s plans to hand 11 libraries over to volunteers have been slammed by campaigners as tantamount to destroying them.
Derby has said that “as a result of the government continuing to cut local government funding”, it needs to slash £648,000 from its libraries budget. It has proposed a series of options, of which its preferred choice is to close the city’s central library, relocating it to a new “Derby Riverside library”, and to hand 11 other branches over to volunteers, according to the Derby Telegraph. Under the proposal, just four libraries, including Riverside, would continue to be run by the council, with each community-run library given an average annual grant of £17,500.
Continue reading...Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, described by the author as ‘one of my greatest personal adventures’, is due out in November
Anne Rice is set to reveal her vision of the lost realm of Atlantis in a new novel starring her most famous creation, the vampire Lestat.
The bestselling American author has announced that Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis will be published on 29 November this year. It is Rice’s second novel about the vampire prince in two years: Prince Lestat was published in 2014, following a break of more than 10 years from the world of vampires.
Related: From Lestat to Harry Potter: which characters should be resurrected?
Related: Anne Rice takes a bite out of Stephenie Meyer's sparkling Twilight vampires
Continue reading...Two-time winner JM Coetzee’s latest book is on list along with little-reviewed crime thriller by Graeme Macrae Burnet
A psychological crime thriller will compete with the latest heavyweight novel from the Nobel prize winner JM Coetzee for this year’s Man Booker prize, the judges have revealed as they released details of the 2016 longlist.
In total, 13 novels make the list. Six are by women and seven by men, with four American writers and seven British.
Continue reading...A wave of illustrated books, about what one of the authors described as ‘a golden, racist egg’ for lampooners, have been inspired by his campaign
Earlier this summer, Californians Brad and Amy Herzog came up with an idea for what they’re calling “a picture book for adults about a man-child”: D Is for Dump Trump: An Anti-Hate Alphabet.
“S is for a silver spoon, / right from the beginning. / You can’t start far ahead, / then claim that you’ve been winning,” Brad writes in one of his 26 poems (the book is illustrated by Amy). The letter M, he writes, “is for misogyny. / For years, Trump has shown / a disregard for women / in his talk, his tweets, his tone.”
Continue reading...With the script for the eighth episode of JK Rowling’s wizarding tale due out on Saturday night, retailers around the world are expecting a magical bonanza
On 21 July 2007, it was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that readers were ready to queue for hours to get their hands on: would the boy wizard survive? Or would his nemesis Voldemort?
Nine years later, on 31 July 2016, it could almost be 2007 again: midnight on Saturday sees the release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the script of the new play being performed in London’s Palace theatre. Billed as the “eighth Harry Potter story” by author JK Rowling, Potter fever is at frenzy level yet again: bookshops all over the world are planning out-of-hours openings and pre-orders are smashing records (records previously held, of course, by Rowling).
Related: JK Rowling: ‘Harry Potter’s world is always in my head’
Related: Harry Potter and the curse of middle age: should fictional children ever grow up?
Continue reading...The third global championship in ‘muggle’ version of JK Rowling’s airborne team game draws 21 national teams to Frankfurt contest
In a magical turn of events, Australia won the Quidditch World Cup – a sport inspired by the game played by Harry Potter – after defeating the US team in Frankfurt on Sunday.
Adapted from the fantasy sport played in JK Rowling’s books, the “muggle” version of quidditch uses elements of rugby, dodgeball and tag. There are seven players on each team, five balls and six goal hoops. Each match begins with the referee shouting “Brooms up!” It ends when the “snitch” has been caught, giving the successful team 30 points. A tiny, flying golden ball in the books, in reality the snitch is a tennis ball attached to a player’s shorts.
Related: Quidditch leaves Harry Potter behind as (real) World Cup fever grows
Continue reading...Author and academic will co-write World of Wakanda, saying ‘it’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever done, and I mean that in the best possible way’
Feminist critic Roxane Gay is to co-write the new Black Panther comics series, saying that “the opportunity to write about black women in a Marvel comic was an opportunity I could not pass up”.
Related: Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther review – a promising, subversive start
Related: Roxane Gay: meet the bad feminist
Continue reading...Second volume of pioneering campaigner John Lewis’s autobiographical story, March: Book Two, wins one of the genre’s leading honours
Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama five years ago, the civil rights pioneer John Lewis was presented with a rather different sort of honour in San Diego this weekend: an Eisner award for the second volume in his graphic novel memoir, March.
Tracing the story of how the US congressman became a central figure in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, March: Book Two won the prestigious Eisner prize for best reality-based work. Illustrated by Nate Powell and co-written with Andrew Aydin, the first two books in the series have topped the New York Times bestseller lists and won plaudits from luminaries including Bill Clinton, who called Lewis “a resounding moral voice in the quest for equality for more than 50 years”.
Continue reading...Books, puzzles, pantomime programmes and other rare items among hoard, the gift of an eccentric American collector
A small army of Dick Whittingtons and a tribe of cats have arrived at the Guildhall library in London, which was founded using the real medieval mayor’s legacy, in a bequest from an eccentric American collector.
The treasury includes books, games and puzzles, glass magic lantern slides, pantomime programmes and posters, and a unique copy of a tiny hand coloured early 19th-century book. All are related to the legend of the poor boy leaving the city in despair until he heard the sound of Bow Bells, and was urged by his cat to turn back and make his fortune – and thrice become mayor of London.
Continue reading...Caution evident in buying and selling of politically sensitive material amid fears of growing repression from mainland’s Communist party
The 2016 Hong Kong book fair, the most important event in the city’s literary calendar, opened its doors on Wednesday to familiar long queues and hordes of special security personnel on watch for potential stampedes. Inside, it was business as usual: a large convention hall divided into genres, with one large area just for religious publishers, complete with saffron-robed monks writing calligraphy and dispensing blessings. Media types gathered on the first floor where a local starlet in a low-cut dress posed for photographers in front of a stand devoted to fashion books and magazines.
But this year is the first fair held in Hong Kong since the disappearances of five booksellers from the city in late 2015. For many visitors, the attention is squarely on the few publishers still willing to sell “forbidden books”. What has happened to the five men has profoundly shaken Hong Kong’s book trade: Gui Minhai, owner of the Mighty Current publishing house and the Causeway Bay Books shop, remains in detention in mainland China after having disappeared from his holiday house in Thailand in October 2015, only to reappear in a tearful televised confession in January 2016. Mighty Current editor Lee Bo was also reportedly abducted from Hong Kong and later reappeared in March, as did manager Lui Por. Just two days later, business manager Cheung Chi-ping was released, after he disappeared in October during a trip to see family.
Related: China behaving like 'gangster' state with bookseller kidnap, say Hong Kong politicians
Continue reading...For the first time in its 36-year history, a competition seeking the man who most looks like literary giant Ernest Hemingway was won by a man called Hemingway.
Related: The day I went fishing and drinking with Hemingway in Havana
Continue reading...Aspiring screenplay writers have been offered a chance to launch their careers by leading director Sir Ridley Scott and renowned actor Idris Elba.
Continue reading...American academic’s 2009 work Why Kids Kill ‘provides an interior view of the mind of rampage school shooters’
As German authorities try to determine what could have led an 18-year-old student to murder nine people at a shopping centre in Munich, one of the pieces of the puzzle they will be considering is a book called Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.
A copy of a German translation of the 2009 work, by the American academic Peter Langman, was found by police in the suspected gunman’s bedroom.
Related: Munich McDonald's attack: gunman researched school killing sprees before rampage – live
Here's book found in #Munich shooter's flat written by US academic Peter Langman. English and German translations. http://pic.twitter.com/AVjEroEEJW
Related: My son, the Columbine high school shooter: ‘a mother is supposed to know’
Continue reading...Zounds! S’blood! BoJo’s Bard biog shuffles off this mortal coil! On Monday it was announced that Boris Johnson’s widely anticipated biography of Shakespeare is on ice, indefinitely. Originally scheduled for release this October – rather late for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death back in April – Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius “will not be published for the foreseeable future”, says its publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. Regrettably for those inclined to schadenfreude, they declined to confirm reports that Johnson will be forced to pay back his advance. Et tu, Boris, et cetera.
Among professional Shakespeareans – think the conspirators in Julius Caesar, only with sharper daggers – there has been a mixture of glee and remorse. On the one hand, many thought the biography wasn’t likely to be very good. On the other, everyone would have had a great deal of fun saying so. Even before the announcement, speculation was rife that not a word had actually been written, and that several prominent academics had been begged for last-minute assistance. Hodder won’t be drawn on these rumours, either.
Continue reading...The cast and crew talked Battle of the Bastards, the Iron Throne and vodka shots at a panel event where the audience pushed for hints about next season
Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers for season six of Game of Thrones
Asked what millions of anxious fans of Game of Thrones should do during the extra-long wait for the penultimate, truncated season of their favorite TV show, co-creator DB Weiss said: “You can always re-watch and start over at the beginning.”
Related: Game of Thrones coming back in summer 2017 for seven-episode season
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Continue reading...From 2001 to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, these awesome structures loom large over the genre, loaded with inscrutable significance
We humans love things we can’t explain. Witness the vast array of outlandish claims made about Stonehenge, from ancient calendar to alien stargate, when in all likelihood it was just a big clock or an early marketplace, a neolithic branch of Tesco.
When the unknown is also alien, the mystery only grows more magnetic. Think of that iconic opening to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: a family of apes wake one morning to find a black monolith looming over them; that had its origins in Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Did some super-advanced civilisation intercede in the early evolution of intelligent life on earth? Or was the monolith just filming a very special edition of Life on Earth?
Related: Reaching for the stars: a brief history of sci-fi space travel
Continue reading...I Let You Go, the former police officer’s new book, sees off shortlisted authors including JK Rowling and Mark Billingham
Police officer turned crime author Clare Mackintosh has seen off JK Rowling’s alter ego Robert Galbraith and two-time winner Mark Billingham to win the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award for her debut novel, I Let You Go.
Mackintosh, who worked for 12 years as a police officer, began writing full-time after leaving the force in 2011. I Let You Go, which was selected as the winner from a longlist of 18 books and a shortlist of six, is about a woman who moves to a remote part of Wales after her child is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the detective who is investigating the case. A New York Times review called it “cunning” and “genuinely shocking”.
Continue reading...Tony Schwartz, co-author of the tycoon’s business memoir The Art of the Deal, receives cease-and-desist letter after speaking out against the presidential hopeful
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, after Schwartz told media he felt a “deep sense of remorse” for having portrayed the mogul in a positive light in the book.
On Monday, the same day a lengthy interview with Schwartz was published in the New Yorker about his time with Trump, the general counsel and vice-president of the Trump Organisation Jason D Greenblatt issued the warning to Schwartz, which has been published in full on the New Yorker website.
Related: Art of the Deal co-writer says Trump could 'end civilisation' if elected
Continue reading...Young fan’s endorsement of ‘the greatest author in human history’ welcomed by the comics legend, who uses it to adorn new novel Jerusalem
He might have a reputation for being cantankerous, but a letter has emerged online that reveals a softer side to comics heavyweight Alan Moore.
The Letters of Note website has published correspondence from 2013 between Moore, now 62, and a primary-school boy, then aged nine, who calls the writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta “the greatest author in human history”.
Continue reading...Late Discworld writer’s book will be adapted for the big screen by his daughter Rhianna Pratchett, who made her name writing video games such as the critically acclaimed reboot of Tomb Raider
Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, an adventure about a nine-year-old girl who teams up with a troupe of small, kiltedblue men to defeat an evil queen, is being made into a film by the Jim Henson Company.
Pratchett’s story, set in Discworld, but aimed at a young adult audience, will be adapted by his daughter, award-winning video game writer Rhianna Pratchett.
Continue reading...The Melancholia actor is to make her directorial debut with a version of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel
Kirsten Dunst is to make her debut as a director with an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Dakota Fanning has been announced in the lead role of Esther Greenwood, a young woman who takes an internship at a magazine in New York before suffering a breakdown and returning home to Boston.
Related: Basic question: did Sylvia Plath write like a 21st-century teenager?
Continue reading...John Crowley set to enter the big league with Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and a screenplay from the writer of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brooklyn director John Crowley is nearing a deal to follow-up his Oscar-nominated drama with an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Goldfinch.
For Crowley, the Warner Bros film would mark his highest-profile project to date. Prior to making Brooklyn, which netted three Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actress for Saoirse Ronan, the Irish film-maker was best known for helming the small-scale dramas Intermission and Boy A. The latter won Crowley the Bafta for best director in 2007.
Related: Brooklyn review – this fairytale of New York casts a spell
Continue reading...Note praising a 1964 issue of Marvel’s Fantastic Four emerges online, with the 16-year-old Martin’s attention to plotting already in evidence
“Ho-hum! Another month, another bunch of classics, but then what can else can one expect from you chaps?” begins a letter from the then 16-year-old George RR Martin to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics.
The Game of Thrones author’s letter, which was published in Fantastic Four volume one, issue 32 in 1964 and has now emerged online, initially praises Lee’s “sparkling script” and Kirby’s “sublime” art in their latest issue of the superhero comic, but then points out a plot hole.
Related: George RR Martin: Game of Thrones characters die because 'it has to be done'
Continue reading...Brontë Society secures treasured heirloom belonging to the sisters’ mother, with letters, poems and short stories by family members tucked inside
A book containing unpublished work by Charlotte Brontë – and one of the few surviving possessions of her mother after her property was lost in a shipwreck – has returned to the family’s home in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Related: The secret history of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's private fantasy stories
Related: Charlotte Brontë: national treasure for 200 years
Continue reading...Brontë Society secures treasured heirloom belonging to the sisters’ mother, with letters, poems and short stories by family members tucked inside
A book containing unpublished work by Charlotte Brontë – and one of the few surviving possessions of her mother after her property was lost in a shipwreck – has returned to the family’s home in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
Related: The secret history of Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë's private fantasy stories
Related: Charlotte Brontë: national treasure for 200 years
Continue reading...The two plan respectively to direct and script an adaptation of French writer Delphine de Vigan’s novel about a writer and an obsessive fan
Roman Polanski and Olivier Assayas are teaming up to make an adaptation of Based on a True Story, Delphine de Vigan’s novel about a writer struggling to complete a new book after suffering the unwanted attentions of an obsessive fan.
Assayas, writer and director of Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, will script the film, while Polanski will direct, according to AlloCine. De Vigan, a bestselling author in France, has described the story as one that questions the reader’s relationship with fiction.
Continue reading...The successful YA author attempts adult fiction for the first time, promising a ‘tautly plotted’ thriller about a government spy forced to do one last job
Stephenie Meyer, the author behind the blockbuster Twilight saga, will release a new novel this November. Her publisher, Little Brown, announced on Tuesday that The Chemist, a “tautly plotted” spy thriller, will be released in the US (and presumably the UK) on 15 November. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news.
The Chemist represents a pivot for Meyer towards adult fiction, as this book will be her first to feature an adult protagonist. The main character is deliberately left unnamed in the publisher’s description, though a reference to her “unique talents” suggests that this book will remain firmly in the supernatural genre that Meyer as come to dominate:
She used to work for the US government, but very few people ever knew that. An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn’t even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning [...]
When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it’s her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers. To her horror, the information she acquires only makes her situation more dangerous.
Continue reading...Tony Schwartz, credited as joint author of the presidential hopeful’s bestseller, says he feels deep remorse for ‘putting lipstick on a pig’
The co-author of Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, has revealed he feels a “deep sense of remorse” for portraying the mogul in a positive light and says he believes a Trump presidency may “lead to the end of civilisation”.
The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. It spent 48 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 1m copies. Trump, now the presumptive Republican party presidential candidate, was paid a $500,000 (£375,000) advance by publisher Random House. He split the sum with Schwartz and gave him half the royalties. However, in a new interview with the New Yorker, Schwartz talked extensively about the 18 months he spent working with Trump, and said he would have titled the book The Sociopath.
Related: Authors on Trump: who said what – quiz
I wrote the Art of the Deal. Donald Trump read it.
Related: ‘Could he actually win?’ Dave Eggers at a Donald Trump rally
Continue reading...Readers of Huck, the Kick-Ass author’s latest kindly protagonist, asked to share details of selfless acts for the chance to win original artwork
Comic writer Mark Millar is asking fans to carry out good deeds and share them on social media, in the spirit of his latest comic Huck, about a good-natured superhero whose mission is to do one nice thing a day.
Millar asked readers to post pictures or details of their selfless acts on social media using the hashtag #OneGoodDeed. The Glasgow-based writer of comics such as Kick-Ass, Kingsman and Jupiter’s Legacy has put up a page of original art by the series artist Rafael Albuquerque as a prize for the random act of kindness judged to be the best by the end of July.
Related: Will Mark Millar's plan to bring back nice superheroes turn nasty?
Continue reading...It’s children’s story hour at the Book Nook in Hove and the owner, Vanessa Lewis, is doing a reading of Julia Donaldson’s rhyming picture book The Detective Dog.
Related: The best independent bookstores worldwide, according to readers
Continue reading...Commissioned to produce 24 variant covers for the superhero series, Cho has pulled out after six, citing attempts to censor work for ‘showing too much skin’
In a dispute that may be too much even for the legendary diplomatic skills of Wonder Woman, comic-book artist Frank Cho has quit his job drawing covers of the superhero for DC Comics, citing attempts to censor his work for being too revealing.
Cho, who was asked by DC to create variant covers for a series of Wonder Woman comics, said in a statement to the Bleeding Cool site that his issue lay with writer Greg Rucka.
Related: New Spider-Woman comic cover condemned for 'blatant sexualisation'
Continue reading...The bumbling bear has seen off the boy wizard in a survey to find the UK’s favourite character from childhood reading
The gentle blundering of Winnie-the-Pooh has seen off the magical powers of Harry Potter to be voted the UK’s favourite childhood book character.
A poll of 1,200 people who read at least once a week saw AA Milne’s creation top the list of favourite characters from childhood books, ahead of JK Rowling’s boy wizard. George, Enid Blyton’s tomboy adventurer from the Famous Five, came in third place, with The Hobbit’s Bilbo Baggins and Roald Dahl’s Matilda in fourth and fifth places.
Related: Stop pushing the same 'classic' books on children and trust modern writing
Continue reading...Ken MacLeod has an enviable track record of extrapolating from current trends to produce mind-bending novels of ideas, and in the excellent The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (Orbit, £12.99) he turns his attention to information technology and artificial intelligence. Carlos the Terrorist died in a near-future war, only to find himself brought back to virtual life to fight on the human side against the rise of sentient AIs in the far future. A virtual construct with an artificial body, he soon begins to question where his loyalties lie. On a moon in a far-flung solar system, Seba is an AI that has gained sentience and is fighting for its rights. What follows is part space opera thriller, part philosophical treatise on the nature of consciousness, free will and self-determination.
Continue reading...The Daughter of Odren will be published in new omnibus edition of the much-loved fantasy sequence to mark the 50th anniversary of The Wizard of Earthsea
A story from Ursula K Le Guin’s world of Earthsea that has never been published in print before is due to be released to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of her classic fantasy novel, The Wizard of Earthsea.
The Daughter of Odren is a story of betrayal and revenge set in the world of Earthsea, in which Weed, the daughter of Lord Garnet, waits for the day she will have her father back. Published as an ebook two years ago, it has never been released in print before, but will be collected in the first ever compilation volume of all the Earthsea novels and short stories in autumn 2018, illustrated by Charles Vess.
Related: David Mitchell on Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin
Related: Classic of the month: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
Continue reading...The chair of Penguin Random House and Labour peer admitted she was ‘speechless’ when told the work would hang in the central London gallery
A portrait of one of the most influential figures in British publishing, Gail Rebuck, chair and former chief executive of the Penguin Random House group and a co-founder of World Book Day, is being unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Rebuck, a Labour peer since 2014, said she was “unusually speechless” when asked about being added to the collection.
Continue reading...The author and artist’s 14-year-old blog, in the same vein as his transgressive novels, was taken down by Google – even erasing an unfinished book
Two weeks ago, writer and artist Dennis Cooper was checking his Gmail when something peculiar happened: the page was refreshed and he was notified that his account had been deactivated – along with the blog that he’d maintained for 14 years.
Cooper’s DC’s Blog had been a prime destination for fans of experimental literature and avant garde writing. The author of such acclaimed and transgressive novels as Frisk and Closer would showcase the work of other writers, while the blog also hosted his recent novels which use gifs instead of text.
Continue reading...The book, to be published close to Election Day, will include both his policy ideas for the future and reflections on a surprisingly strong run in the primaries
Just days after ending his campaign and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, Bernie Sanders is preparing to take his message to the printed page.
Thomas Dunne Books told The Associated Press on Thursday it will publish Sanders’ Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. The book is scheduled to come out 15 November, a week after election day. It will include both his policy ideas for the future and reflections on his surprisingly strong run in the primaries.
Related: What now? Sanders supporters shift allegiance to Clinton, Trump – and Stein
Continue reading...NearSt, a new platform to order titles from local bookshops – and get them to customers within an hour – begins in London
At Ink@84, an independent bookshop in Highbury, north London, an order pinged in on Thursday morning for Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. The Pulitzer prize-winning bestseller was then to be delivered to a nearby customer within 60 minutes – by NearSt, a new platform that is offering one-hour delivery for books across London, as well as the facility to browse your local shops with your phone.
Almost 40 bookshops are now on NearSt’s newly-launched platform, which allows customers in London to enter their postcode and the name of the book they’re looking for on the site or app. They can then order the book for instant collection from a local store, or have it speedily delivered. Entering Joe Hill’s post-apocalyptic thriller The Fireman for my home address in Kilburn, I’m told I can either walk nine minutes to a local shop, Queen’s Park Books, where it will be reserved for me, or have it delivered within the hour.
Related: 'People are hungry for real bookstores': Judy Blume on why US indie booksellers are thriving
Continue reading...Early version of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings can be seen in this take on a medieval Breton ballad, out of print for 70 years
A poem “from the darker side of JRR Tolkien’s imagination”, which hints at an early version of the elf queen Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings, is due to be published for the first time in more than 70 years this November.
Tolkien’s The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, which was published in 1945 in literary journal The Welsh Review and has been out of print ever since, is a lengthy poem in the tradition of the medieval lay, inspired by the Celtic legends of Brittany. It tells of a couple who are desperate for a child. Aotrou visits a witch “who span dark spells with spider-craft, / and as she span she softly laughed”. She gives him a potion and his wife bears twins. But riding through the forest, he meets the witch again. Now transformed from a “crone” into a beautiful woman, the Corrigan – a generic Breton term for a person of fairy race – says he must marry her or die.
Related: JRR Tolkien's war experiences inspire novel by his grandson
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Continue reading...Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger offers a deeply personal insight into life-threatening battle with the illness
The acclaimed writer, critic and poet Fiona Wright has won the prestigious Kibble award for Australian women writers, taking $30,000 for Small Acts of Disappearance, a collection of essays about anorexia.
Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger is the second book from Wright, 33, who published her first collection of poetry, Knuckled, in 2011. Also shortlisted for this year’s Stella prize and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, it offers a deeply personal insight into life with anorexia, which began for Wright in high school and became life-threatening over the next 10 years.
Continue reading...Embattled Labour leader will appear in conversation with the Booker prize-winning novelist in London, despite the event falling in the middle of multiple leadership challenges
Jeremy Corbyn is due to take time out from the Labour party’s internal wranglings to discuss the state of the world and the potential for positive change with the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri.
As Corbyn faces challenges for the leadership of his party, organisers confirmed that his discussion with the Booker prize-winning author was still scheduled to go ahead at the Royal Festival Hall on Friday evening. Organised by 5x15, in association with the Southbank Centre, the event is pitched as “an unforgettable evening, an inspiring and invigorating meeting of minds”.
Related: Ben Okri: A New Dream of Politics – a poem
Continue reading...Alice Jolly’s Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, which recounts her struggles after her second child was stillborn, takes award previously won by Alan Bennett and Jenny Diski
Alice Jolly’s crowd-funded memoir about the stillbirth of her second child, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, has beaten books by AA Gill and Adam Mars-Jones to win the £3,000 PEN Ackerley prize.
Accepting the prize on Tuesday evening, Jolly thanked her publisher, Unbound, who she said “published this book when nobody else would … they stuck by this book all the way and believed in it when other people didn’t”. A literary crowd-funding platform that offers readers the chance to financially support books they would like to read, with the book published once an agreed level of support has been reached, Unbound is also home to Paul Kingsnorth’s award-winning novel The Wake, which was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Folio prize, and won the Gordon Burn prize.
Related: First person: Alice Jolly on the birth of a stillborn baby
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Continue reading...Surreal creatures in book by 14th-century Neapolitan monk added by two children a few centuries laters, says academic
The drawings of strange animals in the margin of a precious medieval manuscript have been revealed as doodles by children, presumably bored by the dense Latin text.
The book, now in the library of the University of Pennsylvania, was written by a 14th-century monk in a Franciscan community in Naples, and includes astronomy and astrology tables, sermons, columns of biblical dates and tables for working out any day of the week between 1204 and 1512 – all thoroughly dull to the children into whose hands the manuscript fell a few centuries later.
Continue reading...Gold-enamelled book once belonging to King François I of France is at risk of being taken out of UK unless buyer can match price
A prayer book as beautiful as a piece of jewellery and once owned by King François I of France in 1532 has been temporarily barred from export by the government to give a British institution the chance to raise the £8m price paid by an overseas collector.
The gold-enamelled cover, studded with rubies, turquoise and tourmaline, and the 20 beautiful illustrations painted on parchment, make the book one of the most expensive ever. It has been in UK collections since 1720, and was once owned by Horace Walpole, a collector of works of art with royal connections, as one of the greatest treasures of his eccentric Strawberry Hill folly castle home in south-west London.
Continue reading...Sharon Dodua Otoo takes €25,000 Ingeborg Bachmann prize with Herr Gröttrup Sits Down, about the rocket scientist who worked for the Nazis, then the USSR
When Sharon Dodua Otoo moved from Ilford to Hanover as an au pair in 1992, her family were concerned. Would a black girl from outer London cope with provincial Germany? “They were really panicked about it. ‘Don’t stay too long,’ they said.”
Twenty-four years later Dodua Otoo not only still lives in Germany, but has just won arguably the most prestigious award in the German language, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize – for the first and only short story she has ever written in the language of her adopted homeland.
Continue reading...Described by publisher as ‘a mix between Game of Thrones and the UK House of Cards-style fiction’, the book is due out in December
A novella written by Saddam Hussein, and finished in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war, is set to be translated into English for the first time by a UK publisher.
Hesperus, an independent publisher that releases books that have gone out of print or have yet to find an English translator, will issue the former Iraqi president’s novella in December 2016, to mark the 10th anniversary of his execution.
Related: Dictator-lit: Saddam Hussein tortured metaphors, too
Continue reading...Wordplay games and interactive exhibits that recreate the worlds inside the playful mind of Dr Seuss, one of the most popular of all children’s writers, are to be unveiled later this month in east London.
A year-long exhibition celebrating the work of the American creator of The Cat in the Hat and The Lorax will form the entire basement floor of the revamped venue, Discover in Stratford, from 23 July.
Continue reading...‘Meeting Noma was like meeting my older self,’ says the actor after seeing JK Rowling’s stage play in London’s West End
Emma Watson has said she felt as if she was “meeting her older self” as she embraced the actor who plays Hermione in JK Rowling’s new stage play. Watson portrayed Hermione Granger in eight Harry Potter films and now Noma Dumezweni is starring as an older version of the character in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in London’s West End.
Related: Noma Dumezweni on playing Hermione in Harry Potter: 'we all aspire to be her'
Related: Casting a spell: meet the characters of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Continue reading...We announce the eight wonderful authors and books that have been longlisted for our prize, this year judged by David Almond, SF Said and Kate Saunders
Continue reading...Hachette Australia says memoirs will be ‘testament to a mother’s love’ after disastrous snatch attempt in Lebanon organised with help of Channel Nine
Brisbane woman Sally Faulkner, who has been charged with kidnapping her own children in Beirut, has signed an international book deal for a tell-all memoir.
All for My Children, “the heartbreaking true story of how one Australian mother’s life fractured in the instant she kissed her kids goodbye”, will be published in November 2016 by Hachette Australia.
Related: Australian woman 'should face kidnap charges' over bid to seize own children
Related: Sally Faulkner's former husband claims he took children to Lebanon due to her 'relationships'
Related: Australian mother and TV crew released in Lebanon kidnap case
Continue reading...Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot wins the award for first-time children’s authors and their editors
Horatio Clare and his editor Penny Thomas at Firefly have won the much coveted Branford Boase award 2016 for their book Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot.
Related: The Branford Boase children's book awards shortlist 2016 – in pictures
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Continue reading...The newest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary finds space for 1,000 new words, including l8r, deffo and glamping
Pull on your budgie smugglers if you can be bovvered, but deffo make sure you don’t end up sleeping with the fishes.
These are some of the 1,000 new words, phrases and senses to make it into the latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Also included are nearly 2,000 fully revised or partially expanded entries.
Continue reading...Perumal Murugan, who had stopped writing following death threats and calls for his prosecution, told he should return ‘to what he is best at’ and write
An Indian judge has ruled in favour of a Tamil-language writer, who had withdrawn from the literary scene after facing protests and death threats from members of a far-right Hindu nationalist group over his novel Madhorubhagan, which features a woman trying to get pregnant at a controversial Hindu public fertility ritual.
Announcing his return from self-imposed literary exile on Wednesday, Perumal Murugan said: “I will get up.” The writer had dramatically announced his death as a creative artist last year, and withdrawn all his Tamil writings from bookshops after copies of his books were burned and the town of Tiruchengode, where the novel is set, held a one-day strike to protest the novel’s publication.
Continue reading...The sister of Virginia Woolf and lover of Duncan Grant is long overdue recognition as pioneer of modern art, say curators
The first major solo exhibition presenting Vanessa Bell as a pioneering 20th-century artist rather than a player in the tangled affairs of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists will be shown at the Dulwich picture gallery next year.
She might have been better off, even better known, if she hadn't been part of the group
Continue reading...Evans was one of literary scene’s leading figures for decades, working with writers including Ted Hughes and Hanif Kureishi
Matthew Evans, one of the most important figures in British publishing who led Faber and Faber for several decades, has died aged 74.
Evans, or Baron Evans of Temple Guiting as he became in 2000, died peacefully on Wednesday morning after a long illness, said his wife, the literary agent Caroline Michel.
Continue reading...Children’s author receives BookTrust award in the place where she was inspired to write The Tiger Who Came to Tea
The author and illustrator Judith Kerr, who escaped from Hitler’s Germany as a child and has gone on to write more than 30 children’s books, has received a lifetime achievement award at London zoo within a whisker of the big cats that inspired her picture book classic, The Tiger Who Came to Tea.
To the faint roars of real tigers, possibly descendants of the very beasts that inspired her first book, Kerr accepted the award on Wednesday with her trademark modesty and humour: “When a prize is given for a lifetime’s achievement, age is going to play a part and I may have an unfair advantage. Inevitably the judges must say: ‘She’s 93, she might not be around to give it to next year’, which is acutely unfair to young illustrators and authors in their 80s.”
Continue reading...Comic writer Brian Michael Bendis reveals Tony Stark is set to be succeeded by 15-year-old genius Riri Williams when current comic-book series draws to close
We’ve seen a female Thor, a black Spider-Man and a Muslim Ms Marvel. Now move over Tony Stark: Marvel has announced that the next Iron Man will be a black woman.
In its latest move towards increasing diversity in its print output, the comic book giant has released details about new character Riri Williams. A science genius who enrols in MIT at the age of 15, Williams was glimpsed in Invincible Iron Man #7, seen reverse-engineering one of Stark’s older Iron Man suits. Now revealed as the new Iron Man – or Iron Woman – in a forthcoming comic titled Invincible Iron Man #1, Williams draws Stark’s attention after she makes her own Iron Man suit in her college dorm room.
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Continue reading...Drawings offering ‘a glimpse into the world of Beatrix beyond the children’s stories’ found folded into books at Melford Hall in Suffolk
Four previously unseen illustrations by Beatrix Potter have been discovered tucked away in some books in a National Trust property in Suffolk.
Continue reading...I’ve never read anything quite like M Suddain’s second novel. On the one hand, it’s a galaxy-spanning space opera with intrigue, adventure and fascinating tech extrapolations. On the other, it’s a hilarious, almost Nabokovian account of a food critic’s gastronomic misadventures as he conducts a tour of restaurants on dozens of far-flung planets. Suddain manages the almost impossible task of balancing cosmic scope with slapstick, intricate wordplay and dialogue at times worthy of PG Wodehouse.
He spares readers the annoying exposition sometimes found at the beginning of far-future novels. Instead, we get parody, rhapsody and endless invention from the off: “Remember when you were young? … Remember when you weren’t just a ghost who changes faces to suit the weather, or a strange device used by others to manufacture their happiness?” And on that note we are introduced to J Salvador Tamerlain, food critic – a snobby, finicky, opinionated and yet ultimately likable narrator who always carries a “compact portable cocktail kit” and who has no interest in the kind of spaceship he’s on or anything, really, apart from restaurants.
Continue reading...The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts
Which sci-fi author has come closest to predicting the future? Perhaps Isaac Asimov? Aldous Huxley? George Orwell? JG Ballard? Philip K Dick? Arthur C Clarke?
erol quantum
Continue reading...Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog author is celebrated for her outstanding contributions to children’s literature
The author and illustrator Judith Kerr, who escaped from Hitler’s Germany as a child and went on to write over 30 children’s books, including The Tiger Who Came to Tea, has been named BookTrust Lifetime Achievement award winner for 2016.
Related: Judith Kerr: I wasn’t scared enough. That’s how I nearly gave us away
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Continue reading...A Child’s First Book of Trump is aimed at adults, says author, but could be read to children ‘if they don’t scare easily’
If you’re at a loss to explain the phenomenon that is Donald Trump to your children, help may be at hand – from A Child’s First Book of Trump, published this week.
US comedian and writer Michael Ian Black has written the book, published by Simon and Schuster, and although the 32-page picture book is released under the publisher’s Books for Young Readers imprint, it’s more likely to appeal to adults, says the author.
The beasty is called an American Trump
Its skin is bright orange, its figure is plump;
Its fur so complex, you might get enveloped.
Its hands are, sadly, underdeveloped.
And where does it live? On flat-screen TVs!
It rushes toward every camera it sees.
It thrives in the most contentious conditions
And excretes the most appalling emissions.
Artist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez has designed a comic book character who combines superpowers and activism on the troubled island
Tides are rising and a hurricane is due. Crime is growing, families are fleeing and hundreds of thousands are out of work. At best, they are forced to follow men and women who cannot even agree to fight a virus that harms infants. At worst, their leaders are corrupt.
Related: Caribbean neighbors Cuba and Puerto Rico wonder who really won cold war
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Continue reading...Long-gestating adaptation of stage play Vita and Virginia by Eileen Atkins will be directed by Chanya Button
Vita and Virginia, Eileen Atkins’s fictionalisation of the friendship and affair of writers Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, is finally heading to the big screen.
No casting has yet been announced, but the director is Chanya Button, whose female buddy comedy Burn Burn Burn was a hit at last autumn’s London film festival.
It’s not that the portrait of her is wrong, but it’s only her depression. It came as a real thrill to me that I made people go back and read it and see how witty she was. When I first got the script, I threw it from one end of my apartment to the other. I thought, right, OK, you’ve had your temper. It’s going to be done anyway, so grit your teeth, take the day’s filming, have a day with Meryl Streep and fuck everybody. And that’s what I did. It’s over and it was a success and that’s fine. But I just wish somebody would do my script.
Continue reading...The peace prize winner, best known for his book Night, which drew on his concentration camp experiences, spoke out against repression
The Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel has died aged 87 at his home in Manhattan.
His friend Menachem Rosensaft and Israeli Yad Veshem research center confirmed the death on Saturday.
Related: Night: Elie Wiesel's memoir and how it preserved the Jewish identity
Continue reading...The author took back comments he made that his new book’s credibility was ‘down the toilet’ after revelations of factual errors, saying he was surprised
Author Gay Talese backtracked on Friday over comments he made stating that his new book’s credibility was “down the toilet” following revelations of factual errors, claiming that his remarks had been made in the heat of the moment and he still stood by the book.
The excerpts have been printed, the movie rights sold, but just days before publication the acclaimed journalist Gay Talese disowned his new book, saying that its credibility is “down the toilet” – before quickly backtracking and claiming he still supported it.
Continue reading...Famously difficult author acclaimed by former poet laureate Andrew Motion as a writer ‘of immense gifts and originality and authenticity’
Geoffrey Hill, a poet regularly hailed as the greatest in the English language, died suddenly on Thursday evening at the age of 84.
Hill’s wife, the librettist Alice Goodman, announced his death on Twitter. “Please pray for the repose of the soul of my husband, Geoffrey Hill, who died yesterday evening, suddenly, and without pain or dread,” she wrote. Emmanuel College in Cambridge, where Hill was an honorary fellow, confirmed the news.
Continue reading...Gaps spotted in The Voyeur’s Motel, a non-fiction account of a motel owner who spied on his guests, cast doubt on its veracity
The excerpts have been printed, the movie rights sold, but just days before publication the acclaimed journalist Gay Talese has disowned his new book, saying that its credibility is “down the toilet”.
The Voyeur’s Motel, due out on 12 July, is Talese’s account of how Colorado motel owner Gerald Foos spent four decades spying on unsuspecting guests from an attic “observation platform” that he built in the 1960s. But an investigation by the Washington Post has revealed that Foos was not the owner of the hotel for eight years in the 80s – a period during which Talese had claimed that Foos was sometimes joined by his wife in the attic.
Continue reading...Bonhams sketches flesh out 16 potentially offensive characters that didn’t make the cut for the final seven in classic Disney animation
A display of concept drawings by the seminal movie artist Albert Hurter have shed new light on some of the rejected characters who didn’t make the cut in Walt Disney’s 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The final lineup – Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey – was selected from a pool of around 50 brainstormed by his team; in the Grimms’ original 1812 story, the dwarves are anonymous.
Continue reading...