The Guardian's Blog, page 12

Getting away with murder: literature's most annoyingly unpunished characters

Nobody wants to see the baddie win, however much sense it makes to the story. Which of the villains in books do you wish retribution on?

From cunning spies who evade discovery to baddies who literally get away with murder (and worse), novels that leave villains unpunished can be nail-bitingly frustrating. Even if you don’t believe in karma, something still feels wrong about seeing the bad guys triumph. Here are some great fictional evildoers that I really wanted to face justice:

1. Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

‘What worries me, Billy,’ she said. ‘Is how your poor mother is going to take this.’ Billy flinched and put his hand to his cheek like he’d been burned with acid. ‘Nuh! Nuh!’ His mouth was working. He shook his head, begging her … ‘No!’ he cried. We watched Billy folding into the floor, head going back, knees coming forward. He was shaking his head in panic like a kid that’s been promised a whipping just as soon as a willow is cut.

He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.

Related: Bret Easton Ellis still stuck with American Psycho after 25 years

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Writers' refuge network celebrates 10 years of finding safe havens

ICORN, the network that offers residences to writers at risk, has celebrated its 10th birthday in Paris

Bangladeshi publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, known to everyone as Tutul, told the New York Times that in the days before the brutal attack on his life last year, his suspicions had been aroused by a visit from two smartly dressed men who claimed to have a manuscript they hoped to sell.

Related: Secular activist who criticised Islamism killed in Dhaka

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How playwright Patrick Hamilton hit bullseye with The Archers

Hamilton’s name is back in the headlines as The Archers draws on Gaslight for its latest sensational storyline

For 20 years, attempts have been made to promote Patrick Hamilton as more than a literary also-ran. There have been fanfares around the Penguin Modern Classics reissues of his novels, the TV adaptation of his 1929-34 trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the noughties London revivals of his hit plays Gaslight and Rope (respectively better known, tellingly, in screen form as “the Ingrid Bergman film” and “Hitchcock’s one-shot masterpiece”) and Nigel Jones’s 2008 biography. But it has taken a posthumous stint as secret scriptwriter for The Archers to put him back in the headlines.

It is one of his plots rather than Hamilton himself that has made news, however. The Times’s Libby Purves, Mumsnet posters and newspaper letter writers have all pointed in recent weeks to the debt owed to Gaslight by the radio soap’s protracted domestic abuse storyline. This week it sensationally saw Helen Titchener stabbing her obnoxious husband, Rob, providing front-page fodder for the Mail, Times and Telegraph.

Related: How The Archers became a Shakespearean saga of fate, betrayal and family ambition

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'I've spent the past 24 hours in tears': bookshop robbery prompts flood of donations

After the store was robbed, the co-owner of the Big Green Bookshop in London was feeling less than impressed with humanity – until donations came pouring in

Eight years ago, me and Tim West opened the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, north London. Until 2007, we worked in a large chain store in the area. Then, one sunny August morning, the area manager turned up unannounced to break the news that the shop would be closing in nine days time.

While many of the staff relocated to other branches, Tim and I decided that Wood Green still really needed a bookshop. It has an amazing community and we love the place. So we decided to open one ourselves.

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Why we’ll continue our fight to save Lambeth’s Carnegie Library

Since it’s closure last month, the Carnegie Library in Lambeth has been under peaceful occupation – but the council’s response to the message of defiance has been patchy

It’s quite a strange feeling, chatting to a child about whether they are warm enough and have enough food – through the metal barrier across the front of a library. The Carnegie Library in Lambeth has been under peaceful occupation since 31 March, the day it was due to close after 110 years. What began as a sad party for a few locals grew into an occupation, when those involved, including several very articulate, slightly cold but generally well-nourished children, decided to stay on for the night, and the next night. They shall not be moved, as one of them said, “until the council change their mind”. When the building reopens next year, it is supposed to be as a “healthy living centre”. Books will be part of the package; librarians will not.

Related: Authors support occupation of south London library in protest against closure

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Saying goodbye to the Guardian first book award

After 17 years of hunting the best new writing, of terrific winners and terrific rows, we’re saying goodbye to the prize. It will leave lots of great memories – please share yours

All the winners of the Guardian first book award, year by year

It was conceived in the ashes of the old millennium as a prize that would celebrate new voices, challenge old genre boundaries and capitalise on the wisdom of crowds.

The scale of the challenge we had set ourselves back in 1999 became immediately clear when the wisdom of the reading groups based at bookshops around the country, whose votes helped shape the shortlist, clashed with that of the celebrity judging panel over who should be the first winner. The groups united behind David Mitchell’s novel Ghostwritten, while the individual judges ruled in favour of Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families.

Related: Guardian first book award: all the winners

“Are you a musician?”

“I play a bit in the garage with my brother.”

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Readers, go wild! Choose a literary adventure to try in real life

The hero’s Scotland journey in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is being recreated in real life this summer. Which story’s safari would you go for?

It is cold and wet here this morning, and I was feeling particularly sedentary until this tale of adventure inspired me to greater feats. Athletes Alan Rankin and Willie Gibson are due to recreate the complete journey of David Balfour, hero of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, to raise money for charity.

“In the summer of 2016 we will set sail from South Queensferry [west of Edinburgh], around Orkney down the Minch to the island of Erraid, off Mull. From Erraid, the team will go by foot the 270 miles back to South Queensferry,” they write on their website. “The overland leg will cross some of the wildest and most stunning landscapes in Scotland, following the route as described in the book, and mapped on the long-distance route the Stevenson Way.”

Related: How the moors changed my mind about the Brontës | Lucy Mangan

Related: The 100 best novels: No 24 – Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

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The writers Russians don't read – and you should

A new survey has found that living writers are not much favoured in Putin’s Russia, and there are many reasons why, but readers are missing out

Asked to name their country’s greatest writers in a new survey, Russians stick with the classics. The Levada Center’s survey of 1,600 Russians is topped, predictably enough, by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pushkin. So far, so normal. UK polls can be similarly old-fashioned. Work your eyes down the list of names and, unsurprisingly, they are almost exclusively male. And there is not a single living author in the top 10 choices.

Related: Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin

Contemporary writers in Russia are often bleak and challenging... unlikely to win huge global audiences

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10 inspiring female writers you need to read

As a response to Gay Talese’s failure to name any inspirational female writers, we asked our readers to explain why and how these authors changed their lives

‘Maybe he needs to read more widely’: authors respond to Gay Talese

It is hard to believe that this piece is still necessary. We long for the day when we don’t have to single out authors – or anyone of any walk of life, for that matter – for their gender, but here we are again. Last weekend, author and New Journalism father Gay Talese was asked to name women writers who had inspired him at a Boston University event, to which he answered: “None.” He reportedly went on to say that “educated women don’t want to hang out with anti-social people,” according to what journalist Amy Littlefield, who was in the audience,

Jane Eyre is April's Reading group book

Charlotte Brontë’s much-loved, much-hated masterpiece should generate some fascinating debate

Following our Reading Group vote, I have to admit some relief in announcing that Jane Eyre has trounced Don Quixote. I am keen to try a tilt at Cervantes one day – but, for now, a familiar Victorian classic feels like an easier bet than a strange 17th-century doorstopper.

Although, “easy” is probably not the best word to use in relation to Charlotte Brontë’s awkward, fiery novel. It’s a book that has always been divisive. While a large majority spoke up for Jane Eyre, others dismissed it with adjectives including “sleep inducing” and even “vintage chick lit”.

Related: My hero: Charlotte Brontë by Tracy Chevalier

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise was now out of the question.

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