The Guardian's Blog, page 124
June 12, 2014
Elena Ferrante: writer of the unsayable
At the beginning of The Story of a New Name, the second of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, published in English last September by Europa Editions, Luna throws a box into the river. Luna, the narrator, is a writer, but the notebooks in the box belong to her friend, Lila, who left school aged 12, marrying a mere four years later.
She's the recipient of many prizes in her native Italy, but Google Ferrante and you'll find nothing more than a few fuzzy photos, and the barest of biographical detail. "I've published six books in 20 years." she said in a rare interview. "Isn't that sufficient?"
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Book cover clichés: have you spotted recurrent designs?
Certain themes and stories seem to be packaged with a particular aesthetic. Have you spotted this trend? Share your examples
Why is it that books about Africa always look the same? A recent article on the blog Africa is a Country demonstrated that "the covers of most novels 'about Africa' seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King" - reducing it, no matter the subject, geographical area or writer, to an acacia tree and a sunset. This followed a Twitterstorm triggered by a tweet from SimonMStevens:
Like so many (wildly varying) writers on Africa, Adichie gets the acacia tree sunset treatment... (@AfricasaCountry) pic.twitter.com/zMQtirfrQ9
.@SimonMStevens @AfricasaCountry See also soulful-black-woman-with-colourful-smudges e.g. UK pb eds of Adichie's bks. pic.twitter.com/bt7kUcaP06
There is a peculiar phenomenon in English-language publishing in Southeast Asia: a ubiquitous genre perhaps best thought of as Asian sleaze. It spans fiction and non-fiction, but the cover generally features a partially clothed woman with long black hair, either in silhouette, or viewed from behind. The title is usually something along the lines of Bangkok Velvet. The author is always a white man.
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June 11, 2014
Edinburgh International Book Festival bags: send us your quotations
Suggest quotations for the tote bags that everyone will be carrying at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year and win a pair of tickets
It's barely two months away, and we can't wait for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, sponsored by the Guardian, to kick off with a joyous combination of unmissable literary events, food, drink, sun (hopefully) and all-round magic. While we wait for authors and artists from around the world to gather in the Scottish capital from the 9th of August, we want your help in getting everyone in full festival mood.
When the festival begins there'll be live blogs, articles, videos, podcasts and more and you will be able to take part in our coverage in many ways. But in the meantime, we want your help to get the enthusiasm flowing. In previous years, the Guardian supplied deckchairs to the festival attendees, decorated with quotations from great works of literature. This year, we are looking for your suggestions for the the most inspiring quotes to decorate our official festival tote bags.
A life without stories would be no life at all. (Alexander McCall, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies)
Empathise with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot. (Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas)
Take no heed of her... She reads a lot of books. (Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair)
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin)
There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon. (Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety)
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Edinburgh Books Festival bags: send us your quotations
Suggest quotations for the tote bags that everyone will be carrying at the Edinburgh International Books Festival this year and win a pair of tickets
It's barely two months away, and we can't wait for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, sponsored by the Guardian, to kick off with a joyous combination of unmissable literary events, food, drink, sun (hopefully) and all-round magic. While we wait for authors and artists from around the world to gather in the Scottish capital from the 9th of August, we want your help in getting everyone in full festival mood.
When the festival begins there'll be live blogs, articles, videos, podcasts and more and you will be able to take part in our coverage in many ways. But in the meantime, we want your help to get the enthusiasm flowing. In previous years, the Guardian supplied deckchairs to the festival attendees, decorated with quotations from great works of literature. This year, we are looking for your suggestions for the the most inspiring quotes to decorate the festival's tote bags.
A life without stories would be no life at all. (Alexander McCall, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies)
Empathise with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot. (Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas)
Take no heed of her... She reads a lot of books. (Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair)
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. (Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin)
There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon. (Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety)
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Ulysses app lets you 'literally wrestle' with Joyce
I'm intrigued and delighted by Cnet's spot of this new app, "He liked thick word soup", which allows the user to manipulate and "literally wrestle" with the text of Ulysses. Look: it's so pretty.
"Some apps claim to increase your reading speed. We propose precisely the opposite: How about reading Ulysses with your fingers?" writes Tel Aviv-based designer and programmer Ariel Malka on his website, Chronotext, which documents "a growing collection of software experiments exploring the relation between text, space and time". (I am not sure quite what that means but I want to know more.)
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June 10, 2014
What's the best British short story?
Is the short story the literary form of the moment? Prize juries seem to think so. When judged against the novel the short story has won out in the International Man Booker, the Nobel, the inaugural Folio prize and just recently, the Independent Foreign Fiction prize.
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June's Reading group: The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
The votes are in -and there's a runaway winner: The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet. David Mitchell's most recent novel, published in 2010, won nearly as many nominations as all his others combined.
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June 9, 2014
Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week's blog. Here's a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.
david hornby has his hands full with a classic:
Moby Dick: The Whale. Having only recently realised the connection between Melville and the brief but successful whaling phase of the port of Liverpool, I decided it was time to read the "modern classic". I should say that the film with Gregory Peck gave me nightmares from the age of 6 to 12, so time to be brave!
Obviously the first line is as instantly recognisable as "The clock struck thirteen...". But I am really taken by the contemporary feel of some of the prose set against more period style.
Bowed to temptation after hearing readings from R4's book of the week after putting Linda Cracknell's Doubling Back on the holiday pile. Interview with Mark Stephen on Radio Scotland made it a certainty I could wait no longer.
And a fine read it is too, with the rhythms of walking giving the flow of words; journeys in others' footsteps; journeys of return. Richly deserves the plaudits on the cover and who am I to disagree with Gavin Francis, Raja Shehadeh, Robert Macfarlane and others.
I'm back to reading one book at a time, thank heaven; I can't cope with too much consciousness all at the same time. Iain Banks's A Song of Stone is the first of his that I've read outside the 'Culture' series, and I'm really enjoying it. It's a hard-edged story but his prose is poetry and he sometimes uses its gentle rythms, I suspect, to wrong-foot the reader. More when I've finished it.
The Colombian Mule Mediterranean-Noir and Massimo Carlotto at its best.
Max Cámara returns A Death in Valencia.
Sent via GuardianWitness
By robert1950
4 June 2014, 17:16
I'm reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck at the moment. It's a wonderful novel, both a page turning "thriller" and a serious piece of literature. Some critics have accused it of being too heavy handed in the Cain and Abel parallel, which I find ridiculous. I think it uses that parallel very well, giving the novel great psychological depth, and introducing great tension - I keep on wondering when the murder is going to happen! (It it does, the parallel isn't exact...) I think the novel suffered from being published in the middle of the modernist boom - it's not stream of consciousness, and as easy to read as the Guardian. So not for those who like a Joycean puzzler, but certainly for those who like Dickens or Tolstoy.
Since many of Somerset Maugham's Short Stories Vol 4 are set there, I thought it quite fitting that I picked this old edition up at a book swap in Malaysia. I felt like the cat that got the cream.
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By LizCleere
5 June 2014, 15:27
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Can you identify the book from its map? - quiz
What became of literary blogging?
I started blogging more than 10 years ago, and even then I felt I was late to the game. I'd recently stopped working for Amazon.co.uk and a book review website seemed the best way to keep my contact book live, and keep the review copies coming in. Back then, I felt I was joining a real community of dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles. And, moreover, one I believed had radical possibilities: if the book review pages hadn't quite shrunk to the pinched state we find them in today, they were hardly in rude and rigorous health. Not only that, but when serious books were reviewed they all seemed to me to be of a type I call Establishment Literary Fiction, the kind of literary fiction that wins prizes, and which mostly leaves me cold. I wanted to review books I felt weren't being given the credit or publicity they deserved. Writers like Gabriel Josipovici, Gert Hofmann, Enrique Vila-Matas, Peter Handke and Rosalind Belben.
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