BritLitBlogs

Stationery love: notebooks notebooks notebooks! And yet more at blackcover.net. (Via Scott.)... read more

The Royal Court is celebrating playwright Caryl Churchill’s 70th birthday with a series of readings of her plays. Mark Ravenhill is directing a reading of her British Civil War play Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, which I have a special fondness for as this is a rare cultural recognition of this heady period. Somehow the Civil War fails to register in our culture as a major historical moment – compare it with other revolutions and civil wars the world over. (It was because of its scrubbing from popular discourse that I wanted Verso to publish an edition of the Putney Debates... read more

I’m a bit slow on this but The Impostume’s demolition of Mike Leigh is superb, particularly on the role of gender. I love a thoroughly vicious polemic, me!
Check out also the responses from K-punk and Infinite Thought.... read more

Vertigo on Sebald's "blurbing":
In the August 15, 2008 New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio wrote about the business of blurbing, that “tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith.”  Recently, Fourth Estate, a HarperCollins (UK) imprint, published a book by Philip Hoare called Leviathan - with an approving quote by W.G. Sebald. Since Sebald died in 2001, I was instantly curious (more...)... read more

Via Booksurfer: "This neat and informative Atlas comes courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries. Designed primarily as an interactive teaching aid, it is still useful to the general reader with an interest in the history of the books."... read more

My review of Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher (translated by Henry Howard) is up on the Independent's website today. The Indy sub's header ("a lost classic that is an uneven mix of Thomas Mann and Mills & Boon") is a more than fair summation of a book I really wanted to love, but thought was pretty dreadful:
In recent years, the work of Joseph Roth, Antal Szerb, Leonid Tsypkin and Stefan Zweig has been rediscovered, treating readers to some delightful "lost classics". Each of these minor Mitteleuropean writers has a unique voice to be treasured, despite the slightness of some... read more

Straight into a shortlist of one for best book of the year and worst cover design of the decade is Tobias Wolff’s volume of new and selected stories, Our Story Begins. (Seriously, what is it with that cover? To give an already under-read writer like Wolff such an offputting design reminds me a little of the Lee and Herring joke about a poorly-rated TV show, which was “so popular they had to keep moving it around in the schedules to give other programmes a chance.”) If you believe me about the book of the year thing - and I... read more

Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency is the longest and, for me, the last of the Man Booker Prize 2008 wronglist longlist. Reading eleven novels in a row which I wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to read has taught me that, whatever I think of the judges’ choices, I don’t envy them their task, which involved reading over one hundred such books. Hensher himself was a judge in 2001, and found the task no struggle at all, pointing out that he always reads five books a week: “It was just my six months’ normal reading.” The... read more

I left Michelle de Kretser’s novel The Lost Dog for near the end of my Booker Prize longlist reading, as I’d been warned by others that it was a pretty knotty read, particularly at the beginning. The other features which distinguish it - how nice it is to try to form an opinion on a book before reading it - are that it’s the fifth book of the thirteen-strong longlist which is set wholly or partly in the Indian subcontinent (”The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist” - M. Portillo), and that boasts the oddest... read more

The longlisting of Mohammed Hanif’s debut novel for the 2008 Man Booker Prize could not be better timed: as I write, it is 20 years to the day since the death of Pakistan’s General Zia al-Huq, the event which is the centrepoint of the novel. The book takes a satirical look at the days approaching General Zia’s death - in a plane crash - and attempts to weave this into the story of a fictional Pakistan Army member who has a story or two of his own to tell. Perhaps the greatest measure of my response to this... read more

Being the obsessive type that I am, I ordered all the Booker longlisted titles on the evening of the announcement (other than the two I’d read previously). When they arrived, I saw that ten of the eleven were still in their first printing, and industry sources tell us that most of the books had sold poorly until then, some (such as Michelle de Kretser’s The Lost Dog) having shifted just a few hundred copies. I noticed one exception: Linda Grant’s The Clothes on their Backs had been reprinted twice since its publication six months earlier. Clearly it... read more

Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress was a title I had never heard of before the Booker Prize 2008 longlist was announced. There’s no shame in that, as I suspect the only people who had heard of it were the author and publisher. The publisher in question is Tindal Street, a small Birmingham-based press who have bucked the odds by having three novels listed for the Booker since 2003: an astonishing achievement for a publisher which issues only a handful of books a year. Admittedly last year I wasn’t much enamoured of Catherine O’Flynn’s What... read more

Ed Champion reviews Iain M Banks: In an Iain M. Banks novel, you will find sour antiheroes sweet-talking corpulent cannibal kings, erratic robot drones so caught up in lending a helping hand that they overlook the telltale traces of emotional breakdown within those they serve, and a febrile zeal for blowing things up which suggests that Banks isn’t so much an author of bawdy and exciting adventures as he is a giddy eight-year-old with an elaborate train set scattered across a football field. When not committing his considerable energies to such intense Bildungsromans as The Wasp Factory or bleak-humored narratives like... read more

Ahead of Steven Brower’s Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, due 2009, the Paris Review editors share some of Satchmo’s collages: When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius. The story goes that he did a series of collages on paper and tacked them up on the wall of his den, but Lucille, who had supervised the purchase and interior decoration of their house in Corona, Queens, objected.... read more

Paradise Row, in association with the How to Live blog, are launching The Speakers’ Society, a forum for the exploration of ideas in the realms of contemporary art, culture and politics. At their first event philosopher Simon Critchley will “take the opportunity to refute the old Ciceronian wisdom that to philosophise is to learn how to die, and instead exalt a philosophy that is committed to learning how to live. Such a philosophy takes on the task of thinking of the future through the present.” Simon Critchley will tell you how to live /
Saturday 13 September, 5PM /
Paradise Row... read more

In September’s Dazed & Confused, Andrew Gallix on the French Offbeats: In one of his early stories, the French advertising executive turned writer Frédéric Beigbeder imagined Saint-Germain-des-Prés — the ultra-posh heartland of Parisian publishing — overrun by hordes of vandals from the deprived banlieues. It ends with the pope of French letters, Philippe Sollers, dangling upside down à la Mussolini from the local church steeple. This carnivalesque tableau foreshadows the literary revolution that is gaining ground across the Channel. “We’re witnessing the democratisation of writing,” explains 26-year-old Antoine Dole who instigated the movement two years ago. “What used to belong to an... read more

By Tao Lin and Ellen Kennedy. 1. In 1956 the Japanese government create an organization to study ‘Japanese children with digital cameras in a field.’ Five Japanese men are recruited from the top universities in Japan for the organization. The organization is code-named ‘Italia.’ The five men are code-named ‘Gigantor,’ ‘Mimi,’ ‘Lulu,’ ‘Energy Man,’ and ‘Taiwan.’ They meet in a secret underground studio apartment. The studio apartment has a refrigerator with two hundred energy drinks in it, a playpen with sixteen Japanese babies in it, and five supercomputers with five rolling chairs in front of them. ‘Gigantor,’ ‘Mimi,’ ‘Lulu,’ ‘Energy... read more

The Cult interview Hard Case author Christa Faust (whose Money Shot is seriously good): Drawing a line from Chandler and Hammett to the crime writers of today, what’s changed about the genre? And how do you remain faithful to the trappings while updating it for a modern audience? Well, on the surface it seems like the big change is the explicitness of violence and sex, but I don’t think that’s exactly true. Back in their day, the Black Mask-era writers were considered extremely base and vulgar, both shockingly violent and outrageously sexy. Their stories featured realistic scenes involving criminals and underworld denizens... read more

Barbaric Document offers many more images of this writer's grave.... read more

The second chapter of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is called Easter Island, after the island in the Pacific now known as Rapanui. Like Jennifer Vanderbes' 2003 feminist romance Easter Island, it uses the island's devastating history as part of a larger story. For both it is a microcosm of the Earth in the time of the humans. The story is well known: Easter Island had sustained a population of many thousands at least until the late 18th Century when Captain Cook's Resolution arrived to find a barren, inhospitable land with a ragged population "few in number". What had happened?... read more

I hope Rosalind Belben's long-overdue success in the James Tait Memorial Prize for Our Horses in Egypt encourages an enterprising publisher to reissue her remarkable earlier novels Dreaming of Dead People (1979) and Is Beauty Good (1989). In her review of both, Maggie Gee wrote that Belben: has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. She has a photographic eye for natural beauty, and is also tough-minded and funny. So why, she then asks, is Belben so little known? The unfortunate answer is provided: "Because... read more

Last night as I lay sleepless and let everything continually veer back and forth between my aching temples, what I had almost forgotten during the last relatively quiet time became clear to me; namely, on what frail ground or rather altogether nonexistent ground I live, over a darkness from which the dark power emerges when it wills and, heedless of my stammering, destroys my life. Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? Kafka, in a letter to Max Brod, July 1922. By this I don't mean, of course, that... read more

Norman Mailer once wrote of Samuel Beckett that, as "he never enters a situation where any of his people might try to break out of whatever trap they are in", his work is "obsessive rather than haunting". This is how Stephen Abell begins his review of Paul Auster's Man in the Dark. Mailer is right of course; not one of Beckett's characters kills themselves. I mean, in what other traps are his characters other than the eternity of stories? "His people" go on; they have to. Beckett's fiction explores the "obsessive" state we might call life (whatever trap that is)... read more

What more can be said about the revelation that Kafka owned some erotica except: please, no more? Anyone familiar with his work and with the secondary literature won't be in the least bit surprised. Even if you've read only Metamorphosis, the magazine image that Gregor Samsa had framed for display showing "a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished" is enough to suggest a unusually stimulated imagination. But there's much more. So why has the British... read more

The Enchantress of Florence concludes with a six page non-fiction bibliography, a roll call of books and websites about 15th century Florence and Mughal India consulted during its writing.  What, I ask myself, is such a bibliography trying or hoping to achieve?  How are we supposed to 'read' it?  Do we take Salman Rushdie at his word and believe that he is simply covering his back against objections of plagiarism? Or is there more to it than that? Is it, for example, an act of braggery? - Look at everything I have read and how clever I have been... read more

I started reading the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography yesterday, quite by accident.  In other words, I picked it up at work and then couldn't put it down.  Readers of this blog will remember that Lessing and I have proved somewhat less than compatible in the past and that, as a result, I have felt a certain disappointment.  But just 47 pages into this book and I feel that she and I are finally on the same wave-length: Under My Skin is just delicious.  It covers the early years of Lessing's life, from her birth in Kermanshah (in... read more

This week I have been mostly reading Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practise by Elizabeth Shephard and Geoffrey Yeo.  Which I wouldn't recommend unless:a) you're a trainee archivist with a loaded assignment deadline held to your head.orb) you get your kicks from performing records surveys using systems analysis.I don't imagine many readers of this blog fall into either of the above categories.  I would much rather have been reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a novel so weighted with cover-quote praise that it's a wonder I can lift it.  But, alas, it has been entirely relegated to the margins... read more

The Art was common to all the kinden, yet unique to each. It grew the spines on Mantis arms and gave them their prodigious speed and skill. It was the silent voice with which Ant-kinden spoke to each other, mind to mind, to co-ordinate their battles. It made some strong, others resilient. It could cloud enemy minds, or climb enemy walls. It could make the earth-bound fly... Oh, she would so like to fly.A shorter post than usual, tonight, because the following is a review I had published in last month's SFX. (Tsk, magazines and their wordcounts...!) Since that issue... read more

She will never again help me; she will never again react to the real or imagined circumstances of her life with the disgust, the shudders, that made me want to weave its rhythms and images together in a joint collaboration, active and shared, the convulsive game of two shipwrecked women who do not want to abandon the hope of being saved on a barrel. She has merged once more into the distant light of three centuries ago, a light which shines full into my face.Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651) was, by any standard, a remarkable woman. An artist by profession in an... read more

The Booker Prize longlist has just been announced and, despite counselling myself repeatedly to leave well alone, I find myself drawn in.  Because it is actually a very exciting list.  No, really.  I mean it.  It feels very fresh.  Look, there is even a thriller on there.  My only concern is that male authors outnumber female by 8-3, but I can get over that since eight of the books are on my TBR list already and only one doesn't interest me at all (the Linda Grant sadly, which I abandoned when it was on the Orange longlist).   My library... read more

Catching up with the prize draw for a copy of From A to X by John Berger because in the meantime I've had to go to casualty after trying on some sunglasses last Sunday (buy one get one free, too good to miss) and poking myself in the eye with that daft label.
Yes I know, we all laughed too.
One corneal abrasion later I'm supposed to be "resting" my eye and putting ointment in four times a day.I didn't get to buy the sunglasses either and I could use them right now because I look a sight.
But I've... read more

Actually that's a daft headline, Sebastian Barry wouldn't gatecrash anything. I imagine he has a soft Irish lilt to his voice and would just whisper his way in past the bouncers on the door, perhaps add in a little Michael Flatley jump and a squiggle.
I have anguished so extensively over The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry I think I need a holiday, so it's a good thing I've got one coming up. I thought I couldn't forgive the ending now that the book was in Booker territory but I've decided I just have to. I mean I wrote this about it after... read more

To read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga straight after Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies was unplanning that couldn't have been better planned if I'd tried.
From 1850's India to present day India and shaping an understanding of a country, which if I'm truthful, I don't know that much about beyond the usual colonial history.
I wasn't too sure how I was going to fare here. Michael Portillo's comment that he was delighted with the even spread of nations amongst the writing on this year's longlist (which made me feel it had somehow been contrived) and my poor form with... read more

It's a mad rush this evening, late leaving work after obsessively striving to leave my desk clear for a week's annual leave (why do I feel obliged to have done the very last bit of filing and shredding?) and then getting the emergency call advising me not to set foot in the door without cat food, so late home, and now have to dash out for a Girl's Night In, which is all my excuse for not printing off the names and numbers.
I've numbered the entries 'on my screen' and the winner of a copy of The Lost Dog... read more

It's been nothing short of a revelation to read all the other Booker longlist reviews in the light of my own findings as I consider the books for my shortlist, and none more so than From A to X by John Berger.
I have no history whatsoever to fall back on here, I knew next to zilch about John Berger and have never read him before so I brought nothing with me to this book, not a single pre-conceived idea, no assumptions, no comparisons waiting in the wings, no knowledge of previous Booker ceremony behaviour.
Blank canvas me, I just... read more

Stand by your wardrobes Frocky has dashed over to Mrs Glosser's place and the winner of the prize-draw copy of The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant and published by Virago is






Congratulations to Peta.




... read more