Ann Leckie and Terry Pratchett among the high-profile authors whose work has been published in Mandiner: ‘One can’t pay rent with exposure’
Hugo award winning science fiction author Ann Leckie has blasted a Hungarian sci-fi magazine for translating short stories and publishing them without paying the authors.
Related: Living to be 500 years old would be wonderful – but only for the rich | Ann Leckie
Continue reading...Ann Leckie and Terry Pratchett among the high-profile authors whose work has been published in Mandiner: ‘One can’t pay rent with exposure’
Hugo award winning science fiction author Ann Leckie has blasted a Hungarian sci-fi magazine for translating short stories and publishing them without paying the authors.
Related: Living to be 500 years old would be wonderful – but only for the rich | Ann Leckie
Continue reading...Authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Téa Obreht have drawn up a list of debut authors expected ‘to make a lasting impression on the literary landsape’
Five young writers whose future work is predicted to make an enduring mark on American literature have been named as ones to watch by the US National Book Foundation.
Dubbed the “five under 35 honorees”, the debut fiction authors were selected by award-winning writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jacqueline Woodson. With former names chosen for the honour including the Pulitzer finalist Karen Russell, Orange prize winner and author of The Tiger’s Wife Téa Obreht, and 2014 National Book Award winner Phil Klay, the work of this year’s lineup, said the foundation, “promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape”.
Related: Claudia Rankine wins $625,000 MacArthur 'genius grant'
Continue reading...Library of a Lifetime award asks readers to nominate the title that means most to them, with a new book every month offered as the prize
Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Paul Beatty might be competing for the Man Booker prize and a £50,000 cheque if they win next month, but readers around the world are being offered the opportunity to vie for their own literary award – where the winner will “never have to buy a book again”.
Launched on Friday by independent London bookshop Heywood Hill to mark its 80th anniversary, the Library of a Lifetime award will give its winner “one newly published and hand-picked hardback book per month, for life, delivered anywhere in the world”.
Continue reading...Bestsellers from the likes of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard have helped the market, but fundamental obstacles to reading genuinely widely remain
Today is International Translation Day. Look at any bookshop bestseller shelf in the UK and you’ll see translated names everywhere: Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami, Swedish names all over crime fiction. Recent sales figures seem to suggest that the British public has steadily become more open to European and international authors: according to Nielsen, which undertook research for the International Man Booker prize this year, the number of translated books bought in Britain increased by an astounding 96% between 2001 and 2015. Translated fiction sells better, overall, than English literary fiction and made up 7% of all UK fiction sales in 2015.
Related: Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds
Continue reading...Social media celebrates after writer Greg Rucka says the character had ‘obviously’ been in love and relationships with other women
Wonder Woman is queer, her writer has confirmed: “I don’t know how much clearer I can make it”.
Greg Rucka, who worked on Wonder Woman for DC Comics throughout the 2000s, returned to DC Comics this year for the new Rebirth series commemorating her 75th year in print.
dc: wonder woman is bissexual
me: http://pic.twitter.com/O9uenH7mJV
My timeline is divided between "no duh wonder woman is queer, she's from a feminist utopia"
And
"If it's not shown on panel it's not canon"
Related: A woman’s place? How Hollywood learned to love superheroines
Continue reading...The embattled actor and Oscar winner will star in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Daisy Ridley
Johnny Depp and Judi Dench are set to headline Kenneth Branagh’s upcoming remake of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Branagh has also enlisted Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley and Michael Peña to feature in the thriller.
Related: Johnny Depp's Tupac and Notorious BIG thriller has the wrong main source
Continue reading...Ex-PM considered leaving No 10 in 2004 over tension with Brown and sounded out EU politicians about European commission job, spin doctor reveals
Tony Blair was sounding out the possibility of becoming president of the European commission three years before he stood down as prime minister, his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has claimed.
In the latest instalment of his diaries, Campbell also says that Blair decided to walk away from No 10 in 2004 because of the tension with Gordon Brown. Blair eventually stood down in 2007.
Continue reading...The playwright is to return to big-screen directing duties for the first time in eight years as he takes over from Michael Polish
David Mamet is to take charge of a big-screen transfer of his 1988 Hollywood satire Speed-the-Plow. According to Deadline, Mamet – whose last movie as director was little-seen drama Redbelt (2008) – has taken over from Michael Polish as director of the project.
The play, whose original Broadway cast included Joe Mantegna and Madonna, focuses on the competition between a studio chief and his colleague to go to bed with a new secretary. Lindsay Lohan featured in a 2014 London revival, while Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum were in a 2008 Old Vic production.
Related: Need for Speed the Plow: David Mamet to adapt stage satire for big screen
Continue reading...A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition, available through Apple from Thursday, promises ‘a world of additional content’ including sigils, family trees and glossaries
George RR Martin has hailed “an amazing next step in the world of books” as he announced publication of a new digital edition of A Game of Thrones, featuring “a world of additional content” and an extract from the forthcoming sixth novel in his bestselling Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter.
A Game of Thrones: Enhanced Edition was released on Thursday on Apple’s iBooks to mark the 20th anniversary of the epic fantasy novel’s first publication. It offers “a world of additional content”, said its publisher HarperCollins, ranging from interactive character maps to detailed annotations, character journeys and timelines, family trees and and audio clips.
Related: Game of Thrones: an epic publishing story
Related: Game of Thrones: how will Winds of Winter regain the suspense stolen by the show?
Continue reading...A new ranking of the entertainment industry’s most influential authors adds some surprising names to its list of leading players
Alongside familiar entertainment royalty – JK Rowling, Stephen King and George RR Martin – a new report from the Hollywood Reporter calculates that EL James, Paula Hawkins and Patrick Ness have become three of the most powerful writers in Hollywood.
The magazine’s 25-strong list of authors is topped by Harry Potter author Rowling, who wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them, and has television series based on both her Cormoran Strike thrillers and her first adult novel The Casual Vacancy coming up, as well as the sellout play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Related: Girl on the Train carries Paula Hawkins into list of world's richest authors
Related: Good Omens: Neil Gaiman to adapt Terry Pratchett collaboration for TV
Continue reading...Translator says Chairlie and the Chocolate Works, published to mark the writer’s centenary, avoids some of ‘the honkin and hackit and mingin stuff’
After much deliberation from translator Matthew Fitt, the Oompa-Loompas have become the Heedrum-Hodrums in the latest in a series of Scots translations of Roald Dahl’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Related: Roald Dahl's BFG becomes Guid and Freendly in Scots translation
Continue reading...Eimear McBride is in contention for a second time, alongside five other novels including Deborah Levy’s Booker-nominated Hot Milk
Eimear McBride, who struggled for years to find a publisher for her debut novel before it went on to win a host of prizes, has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths award for her second, The Lesser Bohemians.
Related: The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride review – a brilliant evocation of sex and intimacy
Related: Why I chose an African publisher over a western one
Continue reading...Robert Langdon, the Harvard ‘symbologist’ who has solved four previous mysteries, will make his fifth outing in the hugely popular series in September 2017
Dan Brown’s Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon is due to brush the dust off his tweed jacket and charcoal turtleneck and throw himself into another “earth-shaking” mystery in the bestselling author’s forthcoming novel Origin, his publishers announced on Wednesday.
Out on 26 September 2017, Origin follows Brown’s other Langdon thrillers: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol and Inferno. It will be written, said his publishers, in keeping with Brown’s “trademark style” and sees the author interweaving “codes, science, religion, history, art and architecture”.
Continue reading...Tasmanian author, whose novel The Clinking explores themes of extinction, snaps up award for Australian writers who have not yet published a book
An “ecological love story” is not a common genre, but this is how Susie Greenhill, winner of this year’s Richell prize, sees her novel The Clinking.
Greenhill, who was also longlisted for last year’s Richell prize, stood out among 428 entries in the second year of the award, which is offered to Australian writers who have not yet published a book.
Related: Top 10 books about the Australian bush
Continue reading...As writers learn that tech giant has processed their work without permission, the Society of Authors condemns ‘blatantly commercial use of expressive authorship’
When the writer Rebecca Forster first heard how Google was using her work, it felt like she was trapped in a science fiction novel.
“Is this any different than someone using one of my books to start a fire? I have no idea,” she says. “I have no idea what their objective is. Certainly it is not to bring me readers.”
Continue reading...Greetings from Freehold, New Jersey, where Bruce Springsteen greeted the faithful as he promoted his new autobiography at a Barnes and Noble
Bruce Springsteen opened the book tour for his new autobiography, Born to Run, with a meet-and-greet in Freehold, New Jersey, the singer’s hometown, on Tuesday.
A Barnes and Noble parking lot in the central Jersey town off Highway 9 (yes, the one from the songs) was temporarily transformed into something closer to a concert queue. Metal barriers corralled admirers, wristbands were handed out, fans ranging from children to the elderly waited in line, and a family atmosphere prevailed.
Related: Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen – review
Related: Bruce Springsteen calls Donald Trump a 'moron'
Continue reading...The Story of Sex, a witty account that embraces everything from the earliest humans to the age of cybersex, has already been a hit in France
Ranging from Cleopatra’s invention of the vibrator to a Dutch shopkeeper’s accidental discovery of the existence of sperm, a comic book detailing the history of sex, which became a surprise hit in France earlier this year, is due out in English in October.
The Story of Sex takes in medieval impotence trials and the contraptions used to stop 19th-century schoolboys from touching themselves – as well as Cleopatra’s bee-filled calabash and the Dutch shopkeeper who discovered sperm after masturbating on his microscope. It was published in France in April and sold more than 20,000 copies in its first month on sale. Written by Philippe Brenot, a psychiatrist and director of sexology at Paris Descartes University, and illustrated by Laetitia Coryn, the comic-strip history has now been translated into English by Will McMorran, and will be published in the UK on 27 October by Penguin Press.
Related: Five of the sexiest scenes in literature
Continue reading...JK Rowling’s series remains cinemagoers’ favourite ahead of multiple works by Stephen King and JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter has again topped a poll to find the best-loved book-to-film adaptations, with 32% of 2,000 cinemagoers placing the series in their top 10. The result echoes a similar survey in March 2015.
However, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was a surprise entry at No 2 (it didn’t feature last year), with 30% of respondents citing it in their top 10. The Shawshank Redemption, meanwhile, took third place, with 28%.
Continue reading...The Shining author says Republican candidate’s campaign ‘scares me more than anything else’, adding that decline in reading has blunted voters’s ‘nose for bullshit’
Stephen King has said that listening to Donald Trump’s speeches “is like listening to a piano fall down stairs”, as he admitted that the Republican presidential candidate has a “real shot” of winning this November’s presidential election.
The horror novelist was speaking at the National book festival in Washington DC on Saturday, where he was being honoured by the Library of Congress for his lifelong work promoting literacy. King has long been an outspoken critic of Trump, putting his name to a statement opposing “unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J Trump for the presidency of the United States” earlier this year, and needling him regularly on Twitter. Earlier this month, he joked that “Donald Trump is actually Cthulhu. The absurd hairdo isn’t absurd at all. It hides the tentacles.” On Sunday, he added that “Texas may go for Trump, but they have a saying for guys like him: ‘He’s so low, he could put on a top hat and crawl under a rattlesnake.’”
The most basic fact about Donald Trump: If brains were black powder, the guy couldn't blow his nose.
Related: Stephen King joins hundreds of authors petitioning against Donald Trump
Related: Paul LePage: is this one outburst too many for Maine's Trump-like governor?
Continue reading...Auctioneer says that Breakfast at Tiffany’s author, always conscious of his public profile, would have loved to see his remains passed on in this way
The ashes of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s author Truman Capote have been sold at auction in Los Angeles for $43,750 (£33,800).
Kept in a carved Japanese wooden box, the ashes belonged to the late Joanne Carson, wife of the former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. According to vendor Julien’s Auctions, Carson, who died last year, said that owning the ashes “brought her great comfort”. She and Capote were good friends, and the celebrated writer died of liver disease at her mansion in Bel-Air in 1984, at the age of 59.
Related: Truman Capote's ashes go up for auction in LA: 'I think he would love it'
Continue reading...Joining the annual celebration of the right to read, US author Jessica Herthel urges people to seek out ‘more information, more voices’ to protect diversity
The author of a children’s picture book chronicling the transgender journey of Jazz Jennings has urged readers to celebrate Banned Books Week this year “by picking up a book that some closed-minded person out there wanted desperately to keep out of your hands”.
America’s annual celebration of the right to read, which has been joined by authors and readers in the UK, kicked off on Sunday with a series of displays, events and readings across the US, focusing for 2016 on diverse books. According to the American Library Association, more than half of all banned books are by authors of colour, or focus on diverse communities.
Related: Why Melvin Burgess's 'dangerous' books aren't dangerous at all
Related: Banned Books Week 2016: the 10 most challenged titles – in pictures
Continue reading...For a long time, Dame Jacqueline Wilson had no idea how sad she was as a child. “If you’d asked me as I was growing up was I happy, I’d have said yes, and been absolutely certain I was. If I was sometimes nervous or anxious, which I was, I would have thought it was my fault.”
Divorce, child abuse and parental neglect all feature regularly in her bestselling children’s books – but until now little has been known about how the writer’s own unhappy childhood has influenced her work. After the death of her mother last year, Wilson, 70, is marking the publication next month of her 105th novel, Clover Moon, by finally allowing her own family skeletons to come out of the closet.
Continue reading...Thriller writer had been due to publish a book about an attempt on the horror master’s life, but decided against after learning of real-life threats
Bestselling thriller writer James Patterson has cancelled publication of his novel The Murder of Stephen King, belatedly deciding that he did not want to cause King and his family “any discomfort”.
King has dreamed up his fair share of deranged fans, from Misery’s axe-wielding Annie Wilkes who keeps her favourite author writing by chopping off his foot, to Morris Bellamy, the villain in his recent thriller Finders Keepers, who shoots his idol in the head. Patterson’s novel, which was only announced last week for publication in November, promised to feature “all of Stephen King’s greatest villains, rolled into one”.
Continue reading...Popularity of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s murder story sets small Scottish publisher scrambling to meet demand
A little-known novelist with a tiny independent publisher in Scotland is enjoying an extraordinary sales rush after being shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s historical tale of murder in a remote Highland crofting community, is leading sales of shortlisted books by a significant margin, according to the most recently available figures. Its closest and far better-recognised rival is selling more than a third less.
Related: His Bloody Project review by Graeme Macrae Burnet – murder in the Highlands
Continue reading...Monkey Master will weave Chinese and Indian warrior myths into modern-day martial arts story, and follows pioneering mashup Chakra: The Invincible
Marvel Comics great Stan Lee is to enter the Chinese film market by co-creating a new superhero movie character, Monkey Master.
According to Variety, Lee will work on the project with Liquid Comics’ Sharad Devarajan, with whom he created Indian superhero Chakra: The Invincible. While Chakra emerged as a 65-minute animated film on Cartoon Network India, Monkey Master is aiming higher: with backing from China’s Shinework Pictures and Graphic India, Lee and Devarajan are planning an international English-language blockbuster.
Continue reading...More than 300 writers, including Malorie Blackman, Jackie Kay and Michael Holroyd, have written to Karen Bradley calling for action on crisis in library service
Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman and Michael Holroyd are among the writers calling on the new secretary of state for culture, Karen Bradley, to recognise the “crisis” the public library service is going through and to “set a new course after years of decline”.
Libraries campaigner and award-winning children’s author Alan Gibbons has collected more than 300 signatories for an open letter to Bradley, including some of the UK’s top writers, from Michael Rosen to Jackie Kay, and from Frank Cottrell Boyce to Darren Shan. Bradley was appointed secretary of state for culture, media and sport in July, when she said that the sectors were “all areas which help to make life richer, drive the economy and promote the UK around the world”, and that she was “committed to making sure these sectors continue to thrive”.
Related: Libraries: the inside story – books podcast
Continue reading...Author of Citizen: An American Lyric book of poetry about racism and American Born Chinese writer awarded ‘genius’ grants along with 23 others
Gene Luen Yang, a prize-winning author and the national ambassador for young people’s literature, and Claudia Rankine, one of poetry’s brightest and most innovative stars, are among this year’s 23 MacArthur fellows and recipients of the so-called “genius” grants.
Related: Claudia Rankine: ‘Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people’
Related: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins: 'theatre is about controversial ideas'
Continue reading...Love is Love, an anthology containing work from 200 writers and artists, mourns victims of the nightclub attack and celebrates the LGBT community
After hearing about the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, last June, comic book writer Marc Andreyko’s reaction was physical. “My body just clenched and I was ill. I knew I had to do something, anything,” Andreyko wrote in an email to the Guardian. A gunman had killed 49 patrons at the LGBT nightclub before he was killed by police.
The day after the tragedy, Andreyko posted on Facebook that the comic book community should do something. “As a child who grew up with Live-Aid and We Are the World, my first instinct was, ‘Let’s make a comic’,” he said.
This MATTERS. I cannot express to you with enough force how much this matters.
Continue reading...According to the University of Glasgow, the Scottish poet’s songs were ‘tailored for the parlours of the middle classes’, and would have been performed in that setting on Baroque harpsichords, cellos and violas, rather than in a pub, accompanied by a violin or guitar. Here, musicians perform Burns’s 1795 song ‘Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?’
Continue reading...Academics say arrangements for harpsichords, cellos and violas will not appeal to everyone, but that this is how they were meant to be heard
Cautiously warning that they may not be to everyone’s taste, the University of Glasgow has recorded a collection of songs by Robert Burns as they would originally have been performed.
According to the university, the Scottish poet’s songs, written in the late 18th and early 19th century, were “tailored for the parlours of the middle classes”, and would have been performed in that setting on Baroque harpsichords, cellos and violas, rather than their more usual airing today; in a pub, accompanied by a violin or guitar.
Related: Would Rabbie Burns thrive in Nationalist Scotland? | Kevin McKenna
Continue reading...The Girl on a Train star has spoken of her dislike of domestic competitiveness and distaste for the phrase: ‘Can she keep a man?’
Emily Blunt, the actor who stars in the film adaptation of The Girl on the Train, has called for greater compassion when it comes to a woman’s choice – or lack thereof – to have a family.
Speaking in London on Wednesday, Blunt, 33, said: “I think we all need to be much kinder to each other, whether you’re a man or a woman.” Expanding on comments given at the world premiere on Tuesday about a potential competitiveness between women, Blunt added:
Continue reading...Correspondence by future US president recounts news of breeding travails to the owner of a visiting ‘she ass’, and is priced at $35,000
A slice of “racy” agricultural correspondence from George Washington written a few years before he became the first president of the US and dealing with a “she ass” has gone up for sale.
The 1786 letter was written by Washington from his family estate, Mount Vernon, to the Maryland politician and lawyer Richard Sprigg. Sprigg had sent his female donkey, or “she ass”, to Mount Vernon for breeding purposes, and Washington writes to say that “I feel myself obliged by your polite offer of the first fruit of your jenny [female donkey].”
Related: Eleventh-century Chinese letter – just 124 characters long – sells for $32m
Continue reading...His Dark Materials author has appealed for EU directive to be introduced in Britain, to block ‘unfair practices that currently prevent authors making a living’
His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman has welcomed a “badly need[ed]” new proposal from the European Commission that would protect authors who achieve unexpected success from missing out on royalties.
Pullman was speaking as president of the Society of Authors, which is pressing the UK government to adopt clauses from the new EU draft directive on the digital single market in order to “avoid unfair practices that currently prevent authors making a living from writing”. The Society highlighted the case of Horrid Henry author Francesca Simon, who has not received any royalties from the television and film adaptations of her Horrid Henry books, despite the series being broadcast in 44 countries with more than 1.5m DVDs sold.
Continue reading...On his 150th birthday, we’re celebrating the man behind The Invisible Man, The War of the World and many other classic stories. Do you know what the HG stands for, and which hip-hop group is named after one of his books?
What does the HG in HG Wells stand for?
Henry Gordon
Herbert George
Hector Glynn
Hamish Gregory
In The Sleeper Awakes, Graham falls asleep in 1897 and wakes up in what year?
1997
2016
2100
2897
In which English county is The Invisible Man set?
Sussex
Oxfordshire
Herefordshire
Devon
Which part of London did Wells take particular joy in destroying in The War of the Worlds?
Chelsea
Westminster
South Kensington
Maida Vale
In The Time Machine, what does the Traveller bring back with him as proof of his travels?
Some red rocks
An alien
Two flowers
Nothing
In the 1920s, Wells stood as a candidate for which political party?
Conservative party
Labour party
Liberal party
Communist party
Hip-hop group House of Pain is named after which HG Wells novel?
The Island of Dr Moreau
The Time Machine
The History of Mr Polly
The Red Room
Which of the following is named after HG Wells?
A dwarf planet
A crater on the moon
A volcano on Mars
All of the above
As president of PEN International, Wells excluded the branch of German PEN in 1934, to their anger. Why did he do this?
Because his books were being burnt in Germany.
Because they began refusing to admit non-Aryan members.
Which of Wells's books is credited as being one of the earliest and most accurate depictions of radioactive decay, and contained the first use of the term "atomic bomb"?
The War of the Worlds
The World Set Free
Tono-Bungay
The War in the Air
Which of the following developments is HG Wells NOT credited with having inspired or predicted?
Lasers
Genetic engineering
Nuclear weapons
Automatic doors
Wireless communication
Wikipedia
Cosmetic surgery
Sky writing
In the preface of the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells stated that his epitaph should be:
“Unconquered.”
“Steel True Blade Straight”
"Man must endure his going hence."
"I told you so. You damned fools."
Related: HG Wells’s prescient visions of the future remain unsurpassed
Continue reading...Writer warns that policy of constantly testing children is resulting in millions feeling excluded and alienated
Michael Morpurgo has said the policy of constantly testing children in schools has created an “apartheid system” that is destroying their self-confidence and resulting in feelings of shame and anxiety.
The children’s laureate, whose book War Horse is taught in primary and secondary schools, said exams had ensured “millions of our children still feel excluded and alienated” and that the world of books and education “was shut off from them for ever”.
Continue reading...The £30,000 Baillie Gifford prize sets Belarusian author among diverse contenders, ranging from a memoir of living as an animal to a history of genetics
Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich has been longlisted for the UK’s most prestigious award for nonfiction writing for her collage of voices from the collapsing USSR, Second-Hand Time.
Related: Svetlana Alexievich: ‘Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills’
Related: Lives shaped by history with Hisham Matar and Margo Jefferson – books podcast
Related: How the Nuremberg trials found names for the Nazis' crimes
Continue reading...The actress, who plays Rachel in the adaptation of the international bestseller The Girl On The Train, says film captures the social pressure on women
Emily Blunt has been describing the “mummy cult” that she believes leads to cruelty between women. In The Girl on the Train, Blunt stars as a recent divorcee and alcoholic, Rachel Watson, who is infatuated by the seemingly perfect couple she sees daily through her train window.
Related: Girl on the Train carries Paula Hawkins into list of world's richest authors
Continue reading...University of Glasgow professor takes £15,000 prize for Measures of Expatriation – the third Caribbean poet in a row to win the award
Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo has won the 2016 Forward prize for best poetry collection, making it three years in a row that a Caribbean poet has won one of the most prestigious poetry awards in the UK and Ireland.
Related: Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo review – ‘language is my home’
Continue reading...Three short stories by the queen of Regency romance have been discovered by her biographer and are being reprinted in a new volume
A trio of forgotten stories by the queen of Regency romance Georgette Heyer have been uncovered by her biographer and are due to be published, for the first time in almost 80 years, next month.
Heyer, known for her tales of romance and intrigue set during the early 19th century, died in 1974, the author of more than 50 books. She said of her work that “I ought to be shot for writing such nonsense, but it’s unquestionably good escapist literature”, and left behind several bestsellers, including Devil’s Cub (1932), Friday’s Child (1944) and The Grand Sophy (1950).
Related: Georgette Heyer, queen of Regency romance, honoured with blue plaque
Continue reading...Former prime minister will base autobiography on weekly chats with friend and Times journalist Daniel Finkelstein
David Cameron is to base his upcoming memoirs on a frank and contemporaneous audio diary of his time as prime minister, according to a report.
He recorded 53 hours of conversations with Daniel Finkelstein, the Times columnist and former Conservative adviser who is a close friend of Cameron, and who was made a peer in 2013, Finkelstein’s newspaper said.
Related: The Clinton Tapes by Taylor Branch | Book review
Continue reading...Between the tote bags and discussions of cat puns in Margaret Atwood’s new book, worry about the future dominated the literature festival
“I don’t want to be the first person to mention the name,” said the writer Moustafa Bayoumi as he brought up Donald Trump during the Terror, Threats and Fear panel at the Brooklyn book festival on Sunday, attributing the resurgence of anti-Muslim fringe groups to the rise of the Republican candidate. In this context, he said, he preferred the term “Trumpism, rather than Trump”.
Bayoumi, author of This Muslim American Life, shared the panel with Amitava Kumar, author of A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and Masha Gessen, whose book The Brothers, about the Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, provided the subject matter for much of the talk.
Continue reading...Next month, just ahead of ITV’s new drama about the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the British Library will publish Lost in a Pyramid, a brilliant new collection of classic mummy stories.
Of the 12 included, only one was familiar to me: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No 249, in which an Oxford student reanimates a mummy and sends it to attack those against whom he has a grudge. Most of the others – Eva M Henry’s The Curse of Vasartas (the removal of a sarcophagus brings tragedy on all involved); WG Peasgood’s The Necklace of Dreams (those who wear it will suffer first visions, and then death); Hester White’s The Dead Hand (until restored to its rightful owner, it brings only misfortune to the story’s narrator) – have not been in print since their publication. Either way, it’s a major treat, its editor Andrew Smith, an academic with a special interest in the gothic, having made his selection primarily on grounds of their (to me, extreme) readability.
Continue reading...Andrea Wulf wins £25,000 award for The Invention of Nature, a biography of the 19th-century explorer who has more things named after him than any other human
A biography of the 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who has “faded from collective memory” despite being dubbed “the Shakespeare of the sciences” by his peers, has won the £25,000 prize for the best science book of the year.
Related: Andrea Wulf on a scientific adventurer 'chased by 10,000 pigs'
Continue reading...V for Vendetta author, an avowed anarchist, urges voters in the Labour leadership contest to ‘put all of their muscle’ behind the embattled leader
Comic book writer Alan Moore has endorsed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and has urged voters to “put all of your mind and all of your muscle” into supporting the embattled Labour leader – although he himself is an avowed anarchist who doesn’t vote.
In a piece written for the Northampton branch of Momentum, the grassroots movement set up in support of Corbyn’s leadership, Moore sets out his family’s history of voting Labour because a Labour government introduced the NHS and provided free education for children: “I was raised with the probably simplistic but heartfelt belief that it was the duty of our family and people like us to vote Labour since Labour, unambiguously, was the party of the working people.”
Related: Jeremy Corbyn plans Sanders-style campaign for next general election
Continue reading...Ninety years after AA Milne’s first book about Christopher Robin’s bear, the much loved children’s character is returning with a new companion
The Hundred Acre Wood is already home to a diverse animal population, from a kangaroo to the world’s most famous bear. Now a penguin is due to join the cast dreamed up by AA Milne in 1926, to mark the 90th anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Author Brian Sibley was inspired to create the character of Penguin by a little-known photograph of Milne with his son Christopher Robin Milne, in which Christopher is playing with a penguin toy alongside a teddy bear. The latter, which was renamed Winnie-the-Pooh after London Zoo’s Canadian black bear Winnie, was bought by Christopher’s mother Daphne Milne from the Harrods toy department, and was the inspiration for Milne’s best-loved stories set in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Related: The real Winnie-the-Pooh and friends back on show after makeover
Continue reading...KJ Orr and Claire-Louise Bennett compete with Hilary Mantel, Lavinia Greenlaw and Tahmima Aman for £15,000 prize
Debut writers KJ Orr and Claire-Louise Bennett are competing with the two-time Man Booker prize winner Hilary Mantel for this year’s BBC national short story award.
The five writers shortlisted for the £15,000 prize were chosen from 478 entries, with the first round in the selection process judged anonymously. Mantel, who was shortlisted for the award last year with her controversial story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, was chosen this year for her story In a Right State. Inspired by Alan Bennett’s account of a visit to A&E in the London Review of Books, it portrays one of the people Bennett described as “habitués” during one night in hospital.
Continue reading...On the old hillside road linking Grasmere and Ambleside, above Windermere, stands a gate that “time out of mind”, as William Wordsworth put it, has been called the Wishing Gate.
This month, while cheering crowds below lined the route of the Tour of Britain cycle race, there were few tourists who made the trip up to see this unimposing wooden gate.
Continue reading...WP Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe was turned into the huge hit film Field Of Dreams in 1989
Canadian novelist WP Kinsella, who blended magical realism and baseball in the book that became the smash hit film Field of Dreams, has died. He was 81.
Related: Assisted dying to become legal in Canada but without clear guidelines
Continue reading...‘Sensitive revisions’ of Enid Blyton books for modern children have not been the hit that publishers hoped for
Six years after Hachette updated the language in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in an attempt to make them appeal more to modern children, the publisher has decided to abandon the idea because the new versions “didn’t work”.
In 2010, Hachette announced that it would be making “sensitive text revisions” to Blyton’s 21 Famous Five books. This followed market research that suggested children were no longer engaging with the tales about child detectives, due to their dated language.
Related: Leave Enid Blyton's potboilers alone
Continue reading...Morris minors, spitfire pilots and ‘endless surprises’ to descend on Welsh capital in remembrance of city’s beloved storyteller
Firemen, spitfire pilots, a parade of bald men and one hundred morris minor drivers are among those who will descend on Cardiff this weekend, as the entire city is given over to a theatrical spectacle to mark Roald Dahl’s centenary.
Over two days, the Welsh capital is to be transformed into a City of the Unexpected to mark the birth of their most beloved storyteller, who was born in Cardiff in 1916.
Related: My grandfather Roald Dahl, the magician
Related: How family tragedy turned Roald Dahl into a medical pioneer
Continue reading...In an essay covering censorship and her childhood muteness, the often controversial author says if writers want to avoid consequences from their words, they should not write at all
Hilary Mantel has revealed how her childhood was marked by a reluctance to speak, in a provocative essay in which she urges writers that “if you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all”.
Writing in the new issue of Index on Censorship’s magazine, Mantel, who has won the Man Booker prize twice for her historical novels set around the life of Thomas Cromwell, says her muteness was “prolonged … to the point of enquiry: ‘Doesn’t she talk, what’s wrong with her?’”, and that “throughout childhood I felt the attraction of sliding back into muteness”.
Continue reading...A century after Christie penned her first mystery, the Royal Mail has announced a fresh range of stamps – with clues embedded
Quiz: How well do you know Agatha Christie?
Little grey cells are set to be exercised up and down the country after the Royal Mail announced it would be releasing a series of Agatha Christie stamps packed with “hidden secrets” to mark what would have been the queen of crime’s 126th birthday on Thursday.
Continue reading...Brilliance and bafflement collide in this almost visionary tale of recovered memories, art and madness
Somewhere in this sprawling behemoth, this teeming leviathan, this pythonic mammoth of a novel there is a very good – even visionary – book struggling to get out. Notoriously, it runs to more than 600,000 words and is longer than the Bible. None of this will deter Alan Moore’s legions of fans, though I suspect that many of them may indulge in what Sir Walter Scott once referred to as the “laudable practice of skipping”.
The plot is simple enough. We open with Alma Warren, an artist and eccentric, whose brother Michael once nearly choked on a cough sweet and miraculously came back to life. Many years later a bonk on the noggin has allowed him to access the memories of what happened when he was between life and death. He is worried that he is going mad, which seems to be something of a family tradition, going back at least as far as his great-great-grandfather Ernest Vernall. Alma uses Michael’s memories or hallucinations or epiphanies as the inspiration for a series of paintings, and on the night of the private viewing, various lives converge en route to the gallery in Northampton district the Boroughs. There is a heroin-addicted prostitute looking for a client, a middle-aged poetaster still living with his mother, a predatory monster, a bewildered boy, a compromised council official, someone who works with refugees, a car crash. Some chapters fill in the Vernall family history; others deal with the countercultural history of Northampton: Lucia Joyce, daughter of James, confined in an asylum; John Clare and Sir Malcolm Arnold; Samuel Beckett and Thomas a Becket and a surprising amount of hymnology. There are also ghosts, often intersecting across centuries; a monk who brought a relic to Northampton as the “heart of England”, a “rough sleeper” ghost who laments the problematic logistics of ghost sex and is charged with a mission of deadly import. Finally, there are the chapters set in Moore’s most visionary mode. These are mostly associated with what happened to Michael Warren in his betwixt time: in which “Builders” play “trilliards” with human souls in a metaphysical pool hall; two Vernall spirits embark on an epic pilgrimage to the end of time; and there’s a night flight with demon king Asmodeus. The final chapter gives us Alma’s exhibition, where the titles of the painting correspond with the titles of the individual chapters in another one of the crisscrossings found throughout the novel.
Continue reading...The creator of the stoned frog and his three unambitious roommates says Pepe is ‘all about diversity’ despite the cartoon having been used in a Trump meme
Perhaps no cartoon frog has been as thoroughly maligned during the 2016 election as Matt Furie’s hapless Pepe. The meme-friendly, often crudely drawn amphibian has lately been seen smiling, sporting Trump-like hair and standing menacingly behind the Republican presidential nominee in a photoshopped lineup of “The Deplorables”, a play on Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of many of the candidate’s supporters as “a basket full of deplorables”.
The Clinton campaign posted an underinformed explainer about Pepe, describing him as a “symbol associated with white supremacy”, though they admit that he has been “enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike” in the past.
I am so proud to be one of the Deplorables #Trump2016 http://pic.twitter.com/IFD1hfC60w
Continue reading...Studio acquires life rights of comic writer who will be depicted in vein of ‘Roger Moore’s 007’ in Kingsman-like action-adventure
Marvel mainstay Stan Lee is to have a movie made about his life, after it emerged that 20th Century Fox, the studio behind Marvel-related hits such as the X-Men and Fantastic Four series, has acquired Lee’s “life rights”.
Related: Stan Lee: the greatest storyteller in history?
Continue reading...A composer’s tour of a Dream Archipelago explores themes of time, memory and the petty frustrations of travel
Critics sometimes talk of an artist’s “late style”. Shakespeare’s last plays have a distinct flavour all their own, as do Beethoven’s late quartets, or Henry James’s densely fluid later novels. To pick a more contemporary example, we can ponder both the continuities and the differences between early David Bowie and his last album Blackstar. Edward Said has written well on this topic: how certain artists use a lifetime’s wisdom and technical maturity to do something both recognisably their own and also new, even contradictory, “a form of exile from their own milieu”.
Such thoughts are provoked by reading Christopher Priest’s new novel, since Priest, now in his 70s, has moved into a potent late phase of his art. He has always deployed unostentatious prose to tell elegantly complex stories about alienation and loss; about twins, conjuration, displacement and strangeness. His most recent fiction still does all this, but it feels somehow different: cooler, more austere, balancing his perennial fascination with mortality against a new sense of the possibilities of restitution.
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
Given the way evolution happened, starting with the very simplest form of plant life, why is there a rigid split between animals and plant life, with no sort of halfway house as in, say, John Wyndham’s (fictional) The Day of the Triffids?
Peter Hanson, Exeter
Continue reading...Penguin Random House says book, Zayn, will be released on 1 November and feature Bradford-born singer’s thoughts and photos
Zayn Malik is publishing an autobiography at the age of 23. Penguin Random House confirmed the British singer’s “first autobiography”, entitled Zayn, will be published worldwide on 1 November. Rather than pages of written narrative, however, the book will feature his thoughts, drawings and personal photographs.
Related: Zayn Malik - saviour of Muslim teenagers | Urmee Khan
Continue reading...Writer and former spy is giving up on fiction because he has ‘run out of things to say’ and his wife thinks he is too old
After a dozen novels and 70m book sales, British writer Frederick Forsyth has said he is giving up on thrillers because his wife told him he can no longer travel to adventurous places.
“I’m tired of it and I can’t just sit at home and do a nice little romance from my study,” said the 78-year-old, who revealed in a memoir last year that he had worked extensively for the MI6 spy service.
Related: Frederick Forsyth: I was an MI6 agent
Continue reading...War Horse author failed 11-plus as a boy and believes return of selection in education would add to the divisions in society
The children’s author Michael Morpurgo, whose best-selling stories have inspired a generation of young readers, has condemned government plans to extend grammar schools as divisive and “quite deeply stupid”.
Morpurgo, who has previously described the way in which his own failure to pass the 11-plus exam “shattered” his confidence as a child, warned that increased selection in education would only add to the divisions in society. “I know from being on that side of it, it is not the way to go,” he said.
Related: Grammar schools are yet another gamble with the futures of young people | Lewis Iwu
Continue reading...Whenever the author of But What If We’re Wrong? writes a book, he is asked how long it took to write. The answer proves surprisingly difficult
I’ve published nine books and all nine experiences have been unique. Yet there are two questions you get asked every single time, over and over again (by journalists, but also by normal people).
The first question is always: “How did you come up with this idea?” My most honest answer would be to admit that I don’t know, or that I can’t remember, or that I do remember but I don’t want to say. But because this (totally reasonable) question is asked so persistently, I inevitably manufacture a semi-cogent response that feels halfway plausible, and I repeat that response until it feels like the true answer. I suppose it’s possible that this rote reply is the true answer, and that I simply needed to work through the inquiry 25 times before realising this was the case. For example: whenever people ask me how I came up with the idea behind But What If We’re Wrong? I almost always mention watching a specific TV series (Cosmos) while simultaneously reading about the life of a specific author (Herman Melville).
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Melville publishes Moby-Dick in 1851, basing his narrative on the real-life 1839 account of a murderous sperm whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick”. The initial British edition is around 900 pages. Melville, a moderately successful author at the time of the novel’s release, assumes this book will immediately be seen as his masterwork. But the reviews are mixed, and some are contemptuous (“It repels the reader” is the key takeaway from one of the very first reviews in the London Spectator). It sells poorly – at the time of Melville’s death, total sales hover below 5,000 copies. The failure ruins Melville’s life: he becomes an alcoholic and a poet and eventually a customs inspector. When he dies destitute in 1891, one has to assume his perspective on Moby-Dick is something along the lines of: ‘Well I guess that didn’t work. Maybe I should have spent fewer pages explaining how to tie complicated knots.’ For the next 30 years, nothing about the reception of this book changes. But then [the first world war] happens and – somehow and for reasons that can’t be totally explained – modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival. The concept of what a novel is suppose to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation, eventually prompting people (like the 2005 director of Columbia University’s American studies programme) to classify Moby-Dick as ‘the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer’. Pundits and cranks can disagree with that assertion, but no one cares if they do.
Now, there’s certainly a difference between collective, objective wrongness (eg: misunderstanding gravity for centuries) and collective, subjective wrongness (eg: not caring about Moby-Dick for 75 years). The machinations of the transitions are completely different. Yet both scenarios hint at a practical reality and a modern problem. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true – both objectively and subjectively – is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that re-evaluating what we consider ‘true’ is becoming increasingly difficult.
Continue reading...Instapoet’s originally self-published collection now into 16th printing after themes of violence, abuse and femininity gained her fans online
The “Instapoet” Rupi Kaur’s originally self-published collection Milk and Honey has sold more than half a million copies in the US and is into its 16th printing, according to its publisher.
Related: Rupi Kaur: 'There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse and healing’
Related: Instagram poets society: selfie age breeds life into verse and has a new following
Continue reading...Big names including JM Coetzee, AL Kennedy and Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout are out, as writers from US, Canada and UK remain
Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet’s story of murder in a 19th-century crofting community has beaten novels by some of literature’s biggest names on to a shortlist for the Man Booker prize that judges said “take[s] risks with language and form”.
Burnet’s His Bloody Project, published by tiny independent Scottish press Saraband, is one of six titles to be shortlisted for this year’s £50,000 prize. The judges, chaired by Amanda Foreman, overlooked major writers on the longlist including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, Costa winner AL Kennedy and Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, to choose titles including Burnet’s His Bloody Project and a debut novel from the American writer Ottessa Moshfegh, the psychological thriller Eileen.
Continue reading...Second helping of EL James erotic bestseller promoted by ultra-short trailer ahead of full trailer release on Tuesday
It wasn’t entirely a surprise, but the solid business for the EL James adaptation Fifty Shades of Grey ensured that follow-ups to the best-selling erotic novel were put swiftly into production.
Fifty Shades Darker is the first result, and while Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are back as the blushing Anastasia Steele and frowning Christian Grey, one person who isn’t is director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who has been replaced by James Foley.
Continue reading...Speaking in Paris, the Jamaica-born Man Booker prize winner compared US police to Argentina’s state-sanctioned death squads
The US is afflicted with “third world police”, which has led to “almost state-sanctioned” killings of people from minority groups, one of the country’s leading black writers has said.
Marlon James, who won the Man Booker prize last year for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, told a literary festival in Paris that some officers thought themselves above the law, comparing them to death squads during the “dirty war” run by Argentina’s military rulers in the 1970s.
Related: Man Booker winner Marlon James: 'Writers of colour pander to the white woman'
Continue reading...Scrumdiddlyumptious and other Roald Dahl language also included in dictionary to celebrate centenary of his birth
Moobs, gender-fluid and yolo are among more than 1,000 words and terms added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Moobs, a term for unusually prominent breasts on a man; gender-fluid, describing a person who does not identify with a single fixed gender; and yolo, the acronym for the phrase “you only live once”, made the cut in the OED’s quarterly update.
Continue reading...Black Widow, a novel of ‘twists within twists’, takes £1,000 award now rebranded as the William McIlvanney prize
Chris Brookmyre has beaten Val McDermid to the Scottish crime book of the year award with his novel Black Widow, a story of cyber-abuse in which, judges said, “even the twists have twists”.
Telling of a surgeon, Diana Jager, whose personal details are released online after she is exposed as the author of an anonymous blog about sexism in surgery, Black Widow was named winner of the inaugural McIlvanney prize at the Bloody Scotland festival this weekend. Formerly the Scottish crime book of the year award, the prize was renamed in honour of the late author William McIlvanney, who was known as “the godfather of tartan noir”.
@cbrookmyre so it is! Finished in early hours of this morning - brilliant!
Continue reading...Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech has started a row that promises to be the literary spat of the season
The arcane study of language has a new literary entrant: the famed New Journalism author Tom Wolfe. Never one to back away from a fight, Wolfe, 85, has picked two disputes in his new book, The Kingdom of Speech – one with Charles Darwin and a second with linguist Noam Chomsky, 87, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Skirmishes broke out over the summer and look set to continue. Wolfe takes on Darwin’s theory of evolution – “a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place”. He also assails Chomsky’s central theory that babies are born with a language organ that produces, in effect, a “universal grammar” which could explain why children are able to speak so early.
Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 7 – The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)
Continue reading...The comic writer and actor Charlie Higson couldn’t help but see the funny side when his alma mater, the University of East Anglia, asked him to consider transferring his archive of manuscripts to its care. It happened shortly after he had tossed two boxes of papers into a skip, assuming they were of no value.
UEA will announce this week that his papers will go into its British Archive for Contemporary Writing, whose literary holdings include Malcolm Bradbury and JD Salinger. The university has an international reputation for creative writing through its MA, with Ian McEwan among its alumni.
Related: Brilliant! The Fast Show archive - in pictures
Continue reading...Forget domestic noir and put down all those books with “Girl” in the title. Crime fiction is turning back the clock to its golden age with a host of books that pay homage to the genre’s grande dame, Agatha Christie, either intentionally or in spirit.
Last week saw the publication of Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah’s second Hercule Poirot book, which “continues” the great sleuth’s life of solving crimes. The book has been published to coincide with what would have been the author’s birthday and to commemorate 100 years since she wrote her first published novel.
Continue reading...Helen Fielding’s comic creation won women over by oversharing and messing up and despite her advancing years, Hollywood can’t let Bridget Jones grow up
If you’ve ever wondered how to make half a billion dollars out of a woman, then this is how it works.
First, take a book that gives life and shape to something millions of young women felt but couldn’t quite put into words. Second, turn it into a film whose lead actress will be asked over and over again about her weight for a decade, thus neatly illustrating why your lead character counts calories obsessively. Third, dull the genuinely acerbic edge of the novels, and defy all attempts to make this female Peter Pan grow up.
Related: Bridget Jones doesn’t need to be a perfect feminist | Laura Snapes
Related: Renée Zellweger: there is so much more to her than Bridget Jones | Observer profile
Continue reading...The American poet, who has also won the TS Eliot prize and the Pulitzer, is credited for her ‘outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry’
American poet Sharon Olds has won the $100,000 (£75,000) Wallace Stevens award for her “proven mastery in the art of poetry”. Judges praised her work for its “candour and clarity” and for having given younger female poets “permission to speak”.
Related: Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds – review
Related: Sharon Olds wins TS Eliot poetry prize for Stag's Leap collection on divorce
Continue reading...The reclusive author’s New Hampshire former home is being offered as a workspace for young artists after it was bought by illustrator Harry Bliss
Fans of the reclusive author JD Salinger, who also happen to have a penchant for art – and and four-wheel drives – are in for a treat as the former home of the late Catcher in the Rye author is to be opened up for a cartoonist residency.
Salinger moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1953, two years after The Catcher in the Rye was published and the same year he released Nine Stories. After the publication of Hapworth 16, 1924 in 1965, he would publish no more novels, withdrawing from public life and dying in 2010. The novelist’s first home in Cornish was bought this summer by the cartoonist Harry Bliss, who has worked with the Centre for Cartoon Studies to set up the residency.
Related: The 100 best novels: No 72 – The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Continue reading...Jacqueline Wilson, David Walliams and Julia Donaldson among authors writing new stories to mark the 20th anniversary of annual children’s reading celebration
Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson and David Walliams are among the authors writing new stories to mark the 20th World Book Day in the UK in 2017, with Wilson promising that “no matter how much a child might say they hate reading, there’ll be a book somewhere that they’ll love”.
The annual celebration of reading was launched in the UK in 1998 in response to declining reading and writing standards among children. A similar tradition has run for more than 90 years in Catalonia, and in 1995, it was designated an international event by Unesco.
Continue reading...Jacqueline Wilson, David Walliams and Julia Donaldson among authors writing new stories to mark the 20th anniversary of annual children’s reading celebration
Jacqueline Wilson, Julia Donaldson and David Walliams are among the authors writing new stories to mark the 20th World Book Day in the UK in 2017, with Wilson promising that “no matter how much a child might say they hate reading, there’ll be a book somewhere that they’ll love”.
The annual celebration of reading was launched in the UK in 1998 in response to declining reading and writing standards among children. A similar tradition has run for more than 90 years in Catalonia, and in 1995, it was designated an international event by Unesco.
Continue reading...The author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and The Killing Joke plans to focus on film and music work
After writing some of most famous and critically acclaimed comic books of all time, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Alan Moore has confirmed he is retiring from the medium.
At a press conference in London for his latest work Jerusalem, a weighty novel named after William Blake’s poem that explores the history of Moore’s native Northampton through several lives, Moore said he had “about 250 pages of comics left in me”.
Related: Alan Moore finishes million-word novel Jerusalem
Continue reading...Laugh-out-loud moments in a book of anecdotes about life in old Fleet Street and the assorted celebrities who featured in his newspaper columns
John McEntee is a charmer who has exploited his Irish gift for comedic story-telling to such effect that he has been able to lead a charmed journalistic life.
He has long been renowned as the guy you would most like to spend time with in a pub ... or elsewhere for that matter. He tells his anecdotes so well and, in a true measure of a wonderful raconteur, it is always fun to hear him retell them. Often.
“You fucking Irish. You left the lights on in Dublin so the Germans could bomb Belfast. Your refuelled U-boats off the coast of Galway and you signed a book of condolence for Hitler at the end of the war. You treacherous, treacherous Irish.”
Continue reading...Gavin Chait’s first novel, Lament for the Fallen (Doubleday, £14.99), is a refreshingly different take on the old “alien-falls-to-Earth-bearing-gifts” chestnut. Joshua Ossai lives in the West African village of Ewuru, blessed by a water turbine, up-to-the-minute technology, and an AI known as sphere. This farming existence, however, is frequently threatened by refugees from the war-torn north, and the vicious attacks of ravaging warlords. When Joshua and his fellow villagers see something fall from the sky, they investigate and discover a crashed starship and its pilot, a bizarre metal-skinned alien who can speak their language. Samara is from the world of Achenia, a near-immortal soldier on the run from a space prison known as Tartarus. What follows is an exhilarating story of mutual co‑operation as Joshua nurses Samara back to health so that he can return and destroy Tartarus, and Samara assists the villagers against the brutal warlords. It’s a compulsively readable, life-affirming tale told in direct, lambent prose, and Chait does a masterful job of juxtaposing a traditional African setting with a convincing depiction of a far-future alien society.
Continue reading...The actor has signed up for the film version of Neil Strauss’s memoir about infiltrating a secret society of seducers with questionable methods
Fresh from his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s trade union epic In Dubious Battle, which premiered at the Venice film festival last week to mixed reviews, James Franco has signed up for another movie version of a bestelling book.
The actor is set to play Mystery, arch pickup artist and mentor to the protagonist in The Game, which is being adapted from Neil Strauss’s infamous memoir of the same name.
Continue reading...Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of Auster’s innovative detective novel will have its world premiere in Manchester
City of Glass, Paul Auster’s meta-detective novel about a thriller writer who finds himself playing sleuth, will be staged in Manchester and London next year in a new hi-tech adaptation. It is the first theatre show created by 59 Productions, whose projects have included the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, the V&A exhibition David Bowie Is and the sound-and-light spectacular Deep Time at this year’s Edinburgh international festival.
The book has been adapted by Duncan Macmillan, who says he first read it as a teenager and was “dazzled by its formal innovation and sheer weight of ideas. For such a short novella, it buzzes with thoughts about literature and authorship, about identity and time and death and faith, all within a mystery story that deconstructs itself as if it’s been corrupted by a virus.” City of Glass, published in 1985, became part of Auster’s New York Trilogy, hailed as a sophisticated take on the genres of both crime and city fiction. Auster himself appears as a character – believed by the narrator to have “behaved badly” throughout the novel – and it is stuffed with references to Cervantes and Edgar Allan Poe.
Continue reading...Immersive technologies are expanding creative experiences, and have a broader reach than simply Pokémon Go
Brands are experimenting with immersive technology to create electronic empathy – blending digital and experiential marketing to bring shared experiences to a wider audience.
This year, virtual reality (VR) headsets including Oculus Rift and HTC Vive hit the consumer gaming market, while Google Cardboard offers a limited VR experience via the smartphone. Augmented reality (AR) adds a virtual digital layer to our smartphone screens and mixed reality blends physical and digital elements.
Related: Virtual reality: are you ready for surreal estate?
Related: Facial recognition – a powerful ad tool or privacy nightmare?
Immersive technology needs to focus on connecting humans to humans in a profound way
Continue reading...In a Facebook post, Gilbert describes the revelation that followed her best friend Rayya Elias’s cancer diagnosis
The bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert has announced that her marriage with her husband, Jose Nunes – who features in two of her books – ended this year after she entered into a romantic same-sex relationship with her best friend, the Syrian-born author Rayya Elias.
In a lengthy Facebook post on Wednesday, Gilbert said her feelings for Elias became apparent after learning of her friend’s diagnosis with pancreatic and liver cancers. “Death — or the prospect of death — has a way of clearing away everything that is not real,” she said. “In that space of stark and utter realness, I was faced with this truth: I do not merely love Rayya; I am in love with Rayya. And I have no more time for denying that truth.”
Related: The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert – review
Continue reading...‘Provocative, morally complex and brilliantly realised’ outback thriller to hit the small screen in 2017, 46 years after the release of Ted Kotcheff’s cult classic
A two-part adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s classic Australian novel, Wake in Fright, will be coming to television in 2017, Network Ten announced on Thursday.
Produced by Lingo Pictures in association with Endemol Shine Australia, the series is the second screen adaptation of the outback thriller, following the 1971 film directed by Ted Kotcheff which has since become a cult classic.
Related: Wake in Fright: rewatching classic Australian films
Continue reading...Ian McEwan and Andrew Motion among those opposed to University of East Anglia’s rugby and parking development on wild flower meadows
A university with an international reputation for environmental science has been criticised by alumni, including Ian McEwan and Andrew Motion, for seeking to build a car park and rugby pitch on wild flower meadows.
The University of East Anglia’s (UEA) plans have been branded “crude” and “thuggish” by McEwan, while Motion, the former poet laureate, said they were “scandalous” and “deeply destructive”.
Continue reading...More than 6,000 poems, including ones about Brexit and marriage proposals, left in boxes over the last three years, will be considered for publication
Following in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge and encompassing everything from dirty limericks to love sonnets, thousands of visitors to Exmoor have added their poetic contributions to tin boxes, left out for the last three years to entice passersby.
Conceived by the poet Chris Jelley and supported by the Lynmouth Pavilion Project, the venture has been running for the last three summers. It has amassed more than 6,000 poems written by people lured by the boxes’ message: “Draw, read or write inside,/ And leave for the next to scribe and confide.”
Continue reading...The collection I’d Die for You contains works The Great Gatsby author was unable to sell in the 1930s because of its unexpected subject matter and style
Eighty years after they were written, the last complete unpublished stories by The Great Gatsby author F Scott Fitzgerald will be released next spring.
The collection, due to be published in April 2017 by Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner, is mainly drawn from stories written in the mid and late 1930s. It ranges from work that Fitzgerald was unable to sell because its “subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of [the author] in the 1930s”, Scribner said, to writing that he submitted to magazines, and which was accepted for publication but never printed.
Related: The roaring (drunk) 20s: literature's biggest party animals
Related: Should we care if yet another F Scott Fitzgerald story is ‘discovered’?
Continue reading...Former children’s laureate becomes latest high-profile figure to protest the move by Argyll and Bute council to remove 10 posts, with open letter to first minister
The former children’s laureate Julia Donaldson has added her voice to the chorus protesting against the decision by Argyll and Bute council to remove school librarians from secondary schools.
The decision, which saw 10 secondary-school librarian posts removed over the summer, was made by the council following what it called “drastically reducing funding”, which meant it had a savings target of over £10m in 2016-17. It has already been attacked by a wave of literary names: in April, Literature Alliance Scotland called on the council to restore the 10 roles, citing “the vital role of school librarians in encouraging young people to read, introducing them to learning, improving literacy, and assisting pupils’ academic attainment and chances in life”.
Related: School libraries face a bleak future as leaders try to balance the books
Related: Inspirational school libraries from around the world – gallery
Continue reading...From autumn, channel will focus on arts including poetry and dance, with intention of making BBC2 a ‘cultural destination’
BBC2 is entering the Saturday night ratings battle, taking on the X Factor, Strictly and Casualty with poetry, dance and Alan Bennett.
The channel said from autumn it would replace the jumble of repeats normally shown at that time with programmes dedicated to arts and culture.
Continue reading...Australian academic David McInnis claims literary bias by first editors of OED has credited Shakespeare with inventing phrases in common Elizabethan use
Shakespeare did not coin phrases such as “it’s Greek to me” and “a wild goose chase”, according to an Australian academic.
In an article for the University of Melbourne, Dr David McInnis, a Shakespeare lecturer at the institution, accuses the Oxford English Dictionary of “bias” over its citation of Shakespeare as the originator of hundreds of words in English. The OED, which saw its original volumes published between 1884 and 1928, includes more than 33,000 Shakespeare quotations, according to McInnis, with around 1,500 of those “the first evidence of a word’s existence in English”, and around 7,500 “the first evidence of a particular usage of meaning”.
His audiences had to understand at least the gist of what he meant, so his words were mostly in circulation already
Shakespeare's talent lies in his insights into human nature and ability to tell great tales – not just coning new words
Continue reading...He’s the creative force behind The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and even the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Help us choose a book to tackle together by the ‘man who invented tomorrow’
This September marks the 150th anniversary of HG Wells’s birth. It’s just over 70 years since his death. Which means that the man they called the “man who invented tomorrow” is fading ever further into yesterday.
Continue reading...Fifty words and phrases have been identified as being ‘on the cusp of extinction’ by the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has enlisted podcasters to use them
It’s not quite as vital as the battles to save the likes of the Amur leopard and giant panda from extinction, but a campaign to preserve a host of endangered regional American words and phrases has been launched, looking to save the likes of “wamus” to “sonsy”, and “spouty” to “bonnyclabber”.
The list of 50 words and phrases was compiled by the Dictionary of American Regional English, a project that has been running since 1965, when almost 3,000 face-to-face interviews were conducted with people across the US to map the thousands of differences in dialect across the states. DARE has chosen the words it believes to be “on the cusp of extinction” and teamed up with podcasting platform Acast, asking its producers and presenters to “adopt” an endangered word or phrase and use it on their shows.
'Sewing needle' is a dragonfly, because 'folklore says it would sew up one’s eyes and mouth if one fell asleep outside'
Related: The 50 podcasts you need to hear
Continue reading...A blitz of rival accounts is set to liven up the party conference season
A series of rival accounts of the 20-day political whirlwind that swept the UK out of the European Union, destroyed David Cameron’s premiership and catapulted Theresa May into Downing Street are to be released during the party conference season.
The autumn “battle of the books” will see politicians and journalists compete for the best and most lurid revelations about a period in which dramatic news came so fast that participants and onlookers were unable to keep up. Iain Dale, whose company Biteback is publishing several Brexit books, said: “Events between referendum day and Theresa May standing outside No 10 moved so fast it was impossible to take it all in. The blitz of books should help fill in some of what we missed, including all the details of the political bitterness and bloodletting during the most tumultuous political summer since world war two.”
Related: Nick Clegg: ‘I did not cater for the Tories' brazen ruthlessness’
Continue reading...Pippi Longstocking, from Sweden; the Moomins from Finland; that diminutive Norwegian, Mrs Pepperpot; or Heidi, fresh from her Swiss mountainside – these foreign stars of children’s literature were popular fixtures on British bookshelves at the end of the last century. So where are the new international children’s stories for tonight’s bedtime reading?
In a push against the complacent view that work first written in English is enough for Britain’s children, the country’s foremost early reading charity is to launch a campaign to bring over translations of more books from around the globe.
Continue reading...A lost world of Disney is to be made public for the first time, including images that, when added together, show Donald Duck dancing with giant cigars, and sketches for a film about the American folk hero Davy Crockett.
Film historian Daniel Kothenschulte has collated celluloid images from hundreds of Disney projects that, for various reasons, never saw the light of day. Having been given unrestricted access to the Disney Archives and Animation Research Library, his discoveries are to appear in a major book entitled The Walt Disney Film Archives: The Animated Movies 1921–1968.
Related: Unseen Disney - in pictures
Related: Unseen Disney - in pictures
Continue reading...To celebrate the publication of John le Carré’s first memoir The Pigeon Tunnel this month, actor Simon Russell Beale reads from the author’s 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Beale played George Smiley in Radio 4’s adaptation of all le Carré’s spy novels in 2009
To celebrate the publication of John le Carré’s first memoir The Pigeon Tunnel this month, actor David Harewood reads from the author’s 1968 novel A Small Town in Germany. Harewood starred in this year’s BBC adaptation of le Carré’s The Night Manager
Athens-Limestone public library in Alabama bring in strict new policy in effort to recover $200,000 worth of missing books
A library in Alabama has reportedly warned its customers that it plans to enforce strict new borrowing rules that include the possibility of jail time for anyone who fails to return a book on time.
In an effort to recoup about $200,000 worth of overdue books, the Athens-Limestone public library will be enforcing a new policy that includes fines of $100, a city jail term of 30 days or possibly both, according to the News Courier.
Related: Borrower returns library book 67 years late – but escapes $24,000 fine
Continue reading...Exclusive: Autobiography gives definitive account of life as writer and sometime spy, with most personal passages covering father Ronnie
John le Carré was beaten up by his father and grew up mostly starved of affection after his mother abandoned him at the age of five, he reveals in his hugely awaited autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel, serialised in the Guardian.
Le Carré – one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era – gives a definitive account of his life as a writer and sometime MI6 agent. He insists he is an author who “once happened to be a spy” rather than a “spy who turned to writing”.
Related: After The Night Manager: five of the best Le Carré novels
Continue reading...The fashion director turned auteur explained the thinking behind the most attention-grabbing sequences in his new film, at its gala screening in Venice
Fashion designer turned film-maker Tom Ford asserted his credentials as an auteur at the Venice film festival, as his second feature film (after 2009’s A Single Man) received its world premiere. Speaking at a press conference before the gala screening, Ford said: “Style always has to serve substance. Believe it or not, I am not just about style, especially in film-making. It has to be part of the storytelling ... Stylistically, I never made a decision that didn’t relate to the story.”
“When you start any project,” he continued, “you have to think: what am I trying to communicate? For me, this story is about finding the people in your life that mean something to you, and holding on to them.”
Related: Nocturnal Animals review – Tom Ford returns with wildly gripping revenge tale
Related: Tom Ford: a single man and his address book
Continue reading...To celebrate the publication of John le Carré’s first memoir The Pigeon Tunnel this month, actor Rachel Weisz reads from the author’s 2001 novel The Constant Gardener. Weisz won an Oscar for her role in the 2006 film adaptation
Scottish crime writing titans Val McDermid and Chris Brookmyre are up for the £1,000 McIlvanney prize, named after the late author of the DI Laidlaw novels
Two titans of Scottish crime writing, Val McDermid and Chris Brookmyre, are among the four novelists competing for the Scottish crime book of the year award.
The £1,000 McIlvanney prize, which recognises excellence in Scottish crime writing, is named in honour of the late William McIlvanney, author of the Inspector Jack Laidlaw novels. Known as “the godfather of tartan noir”, McIlvanney died in December.
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