The Guardian's Blog, page 112
August 7, 2014
Will Self live Q&A submit your questions now
Fiction, journalism, broadcasting and walking are just a few of his more celebrated activities, so theres lots to discuss when Will Self joins us for a live Q&A from 1pm BST on Monday 11 August. What would you like to ask him?
12.05pm BST
After 30 years of writing and 10 novels, Will Self still defies categories, both in his writing and beyond. From street sweeper, to becoming Professor Self; Oxford degree and addiction to heroin; prolific walker and even typewriter repairer: Self has probably done it and on Monday you can find out more, direct from him.
Selfs books are just as varied as his experiences. His first, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was hailed by Salman Rushdie and Doris Lessing; his second was mauled by critics. In Dorian, Self sent Wildes nefarious Adonis into 1981; in The Book of Dave, he transported the mangled writings of a cab driver into the future, where they became gospel. In an interview with the Observers Elizabeth Day, Self said, I dont really write for readers if people like it, great, and if they dont like it, well, thats that what can you do? You cant go round and hold a gun to their head.
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A book for the beach: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
More books for the beach
I like a bit of dystopian fiction with my sunshine and sangria. As such I couldn't have asked for a more perfect companion on a recent trip to a welcoming, sunkissed Barcelona than Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. The opening scenes introducing the central character Snowman, a lonely figure isolated on the sandy and possibly toxic shores of human civilisation, gave a very different edge to the packed Barceloneta beach under my feet.
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Lost in Westeros? Use the Game of Thrones rail network map
We've seen the Game of Thrones paper atlas, as well as a number of interactive versions that allow you to plot the routes of the characters through George RR Martin's hugely popular fantasy saga. Now there's some fresh Thrones cartography: a map of its hitherto unmentioned rail system.
The map, by graphic designer Michael Tyznik, suggests that dragons are not the only rapid transportation option in Westeros. It wittily reimagines the chaotic political upheaval of the kingdom as having settled down to the point where a transit system, complete with complex interchanges, has been hashed out the river of red running down its spine is the only hint at the rampant violence. There are little in-jokes like the boxed-out apology by Harrentown station: "Please pardon our dust as Harrenhal is restored". But you can forget about ever getting even a bus past the Wall, where the services definitely terminate.
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August 6, 2014
A book for the beach: Modern Ranch Living by Mark Poirier
My holiday reading usually begins in one of three places. There's the shelf at home where I keep all the books I've bought over the years but never got round to reading. There's the folder in which I stuff cuttings of book reviews that whet my appetite, often from way back whenever, prompting an online search or visit to a secondhand shop. And then there's the cupboard at the Guardian/Observer offices where spare copies of all the books submitted for review are kept.
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Not the Booker prize 2014: the shortlist revealed
The votes are in. And since I'm guessing you're eager to see the shortlist, I'm going to cut straight to the chase. This year's shortlist consists of
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Reading American Cities: Boston in books
New York in books: readers' picks
Blog: New York in literature
Boston, the city that ignited the American war of independence, is inextricable from the work of New England writers. As Linda Barnes joked in a recent detective novel, Lie Down With the Devil, these Massachusetts writers are interwoven into the fabric of the city:
"In the summer of 1960, Boston's West End was bulldozed to rubble When the dust cleared, there was Charles River Park The tall, pale buildings had no ties to New England, so to grab some local flavor, they named the towers after Hawthorne, Whittier, Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow. I like to imagine those old dead white guys rolling in their graves. Not to mention stogie-smoking Amy Lowell."
"I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood and laughed aloud For my life I could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at the sight of the interminable rows of stores Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores!"
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August 5, 2014
New York in books: readers' picks
From the glamour of 1950s Manhattan to the decadence of Wall Street today, New York is a literary capital. Last week we offered you a guide to New York books and you had a lot more to suggest. Heres a selection of recommendations. Add your own below the line
We have just started a series about reading lists to prepare for or accompany visits to American cities. Charlotte Jones kicked it off with New York by recommending The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passoss Manhattan Transfer (a ridiculously brilliant novel, full of sensory overload, filmic cuts in place and character, as dislocated and dark as it is full of the city and its lives agreed reader michaelsylvain), Kathy Ackers short story New York City in 1979, David Wojnarowiczs Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, Paul Austers New York Trilogy, Herman Melvilles short story Bartleby the Scrivener and, for a panorama of 20th-century New York, Don DeLillos Underworld.
Her blog is a great place to start your reading and here is what you had to add to it: your recommendations for fiction and non-fiction, in list form, and with added quotes. Is your favourite New York book not on the list? Add it in the comment thread below.
People in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate theyre invited to step into.
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington.
2. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (1951)
I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.
I hate living in New York and all. Taxicabs, and Madison avenue buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear door, and being introduced to phony guys that call the Lunts angels, and going up and down in elevators when you just want to go outside, and guys fitting your pants all the time at Brooks, and people always
I started walking over toward Broadway, just for the hell of it, because I hadnt been over there in years. Besides, I wanted to find a record store that was open on Sunday. There was this record I wanted to get for Phoebe, called Little Shirley Beans.
Its a sad irony of New York life that over time, the fabled buildings and institutions that first attract us to the city fade into invisibility.
To the north, the cubbyhole offices and upright pianos of Tin Pan Alley churned out popular tunes for the masses, while only a few blocks beyond that to the northwest, the brothels and gambling dens of the Tenderloin satisfied the desires of many New York Men.
How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here. You started out on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tads mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you arent is more fun than where you are.
Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event.
Bullshit reigns.
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not decorate it; she infused it.
He recalled his and Tracys parting at Penn Station on the morning of Pearl Harbor, in the first-class compartment of the Broadway Limited, their show of ordinary mute male farewell, the handshake, the pat on the shoulder, carefully tailoring and modulating their behavior through there was no one at all watching, so finely attuned to the danger of what they might lose that they could not permit themselves to notice what they had.
Shes always thought that one of the beauties of New York is that you can be from anywhere and within moments of landing its yours.
You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire.
Gould is a night wanderer, and he has put down descriptions of dreadful things he has seen on dark New York streets descriptions, for example, of the herds of big gray rats that come out in the hours before dawn in some neighborhoods of the lower East Side and Harlem and unconcernedly walk the sidewalks. I sometimes believe that these rats are not rats at all, he says, but the damned and aching souls of tenement landlords.
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Reading the readers' choices for the Guardian first book award 2014
News: Readers choose May-Lan Tan for the longlist
Well that was fun. The search for a book to fill the 10th slot on this year's first book award longlist has as ever thrown up a host of marvellous nominations, spanning the world of books from psychogeography to poetry and from self-published blockbuster to experimental non-novel . Once again, the quality of this year's titles means we're expanding the longlist to 11 titles. And once again among the blue-chip publishing powerhouses and the sparky independents are a bunch of imprints I'm discovering for the first time a big hullo to everyone at Orpen, Fledgling and Dead Ink. Thanks for all these inspiring recommendations. It's enough to make you think that perhaps the end of the writing worldisn't so nigh after all.
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A book for the beach: The Collector by John Fowles
Frederick Clegg is a loner. Isolated from society, he spends his time trapping butterflies in jars and watching them die. He's obsessed with the rare breeds, the special ones. The more magnificent the butterfly, the greater his desire to possess it.
When he catches sight of the beautiful art student Miranda Grey, the stage is set for his terrible transition from collector of butterflies to girls. Miranda is the perfect specimen. Delicate, captivating, gifted and in love with life, she's the prize catch. Fred is overcome by a sudden desire to pin her, to own her, to hold her up against the light and study her in ravenous detail.
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Historical fiction can speak very clearly to the present and the past
August's Reading group: The Alexander Trilogy by Mary Renault
A few days after choosing Mary Renault as the subject of this month's Reading group, I was listening to a few podcast interviews of Penelope Lively talking about her novel Moon Tiger. In one, Lively briefly got on to the subject of historical fiction, and noted: "I used to think that it was a debased genre."
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