The Guardian's Blog, page 133
April 26, 2014
Eat, Pray, Love for sale as author puts home on market
Elizabeth Gilbert is selling her house in New Jersey, offering her fans an appetising opportunity to play a part in the inevitable follow-up memoir to Eat, Pray, Love, and so potentially become a character in the hit Julia Roberts movie's sequel. On a dedicated website called Eat, Pray, Crib, Gilbert deploys all her gifts for gush in depicting the nine-room "mini-estate" (confusingly described as "Italianate Victorian" in style) as so perfect that her need to move is puzzling.
Apparently it's so she and Jose the Brazilian importer who provides the book with its happy ending, played by Javier Bardem in the film can live closer to Two Buttons, their "pan-Asian emporium" in Frenchtown, NJ, which is so-called because the two "lifelong travellers" were told by "a priest in Laos that we had so much love for life that we needed nothing more than two buttons in our pockets to get by in this world".
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April 25, 2014
Tadeusz Róewicz: poet of a decimated generation
Tadeusz Róewicz, who has died at the age of 92, was one of the great European "witness" poets whose own lives were directly affected by the seismic events of the 20th century. "My decimated generation is now departed and dying, duped and disillusioned," he said soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw the forgetting of history as a disaster, "the falling of tears on the stock exchange" as he wrote in a poem of 1994.
That generation, born just after the first world war, amid the great chaotic redrawing of maps, saw the rise of fascism, the terrors of the second world war (both Róewicz and his brother Janusz also a poet served in the Polish Underground, Janusz being killed by the Gestapo in 1944), then watched the Iron Curtain descend across Europe and survived, if they did, Stalinism without being jailed or killed to see the clock tick towards 1989 and what they sometimes considered the false reinterpretation of their own pasts.
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Choose May's Reading group book: PG Wodehouse
Following on from April's reading group is cruel. What could rival The Tempest? Who wouldn't seem pale by comparison to Shakespeare?
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The science of writing SF
Please share your own useful lessons below
So you want to write sci-fi, eh? Some claim that creative writing cannot be taught, but it can certainly be learned. And a good guide, be it a teacher or a handbook, can help shave hundreds of hours from your learning process. Of course the best sci-fi is just great writing by any measure, so it behooves any young writer to look at the best guides for general fiction writers. But sci-fi writing brings its own special challenges, and has its own canon of teachings to help overcome them.
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April 24, 2014
The Tempest casts strange spells at the cinema
So far there have been more than 400 film adaptations of Shakespeare that's more than any other author. There have been plenty of successes and even a few triumphs, but anyone who's laughed at, felt enraged by and fallen asleep during Laurence Olivier, Derek Jaocbi and Mel Gibson's variously awful attempts at Hamlet, for instance, will know all varieties of actors and directorial approaches can fail to make Shakespeare work on the screen.
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Odd book sections in bookshops: can you beat 'cosy crime'?
'Tragic life stories' or 'Cosy crime' Bookselling niches are becoming ever stranger. What are the weirdest sections you have found in store?
A recent conversation in our Tips, links and suggestions column drew attention to a strange phenomenon: booksellers are taking an ever more creative approach to the labelling of their shelves. A visit to Waterstones' London Piccadilly branch revealed a 'cosy crime' section featuring a novel that was surely written with these very shelves in mind: James Anderson's The Affair of the Blood-stained Egg Cosy.
But the trend doesn't stop with retro-crime, as MsCarey pointed out:
I made a trip to my nearest big town today. In addition to Waterstones and Oxfam Books I decided to check out the book selection at W.H. Smith. Not bad as it turned out (in a book-related emergency I could find something there) but the most striking aspect of the book dept was a whole section named Tragic Life Stories. This was a strange and terrible thing. Starting off with memoirs (Call the Midwife) it then moved on to a solid phalanx of novels by a limited number of authors producing work ranging from East End deprivation to honour killings. Evidently a whole new type of genre fiction.
The most terrible thing I saw was in the travel literature section at Oxfam Books. It was called England, Our England and "compiled and illustrated" by Alan Titchmarsh. This was sitting next to Colin Thubron and Mark Tully.
@GuardianBooks at Dymocks, Melbourne, Australia on the first trip with my girl pic.twitter.com/CrC8j4bbpE
@GuardianBooks my local Barnes and Noble had a section "Books about Books" with the subsection "grammer."
@GuardianBooks We've got a section called "Cheap 'n' Dirty".
@GuardianBooks 'paranormal teen fiction'in LA Barnes & Noble caught my eye.Why not teen or supernatural?Maybe on the back of recent movies?
Goodreads lists "knitting mysteries" as a genre https://www.goodreads.com/genres/knitting-mysteries
For a short while the local Waterstones had a "Walthamstow Noir" section.
As seen in Shakespeare & Co. on Broadway:
"Books by Paul Auster now reside in the Drinking, Smoking & Screwing section."
Heffers in Cambridge has a second-hand section that is separated by subject, leading to the delights of 'second-hand philosophy'
The Inner Bookshop in Oxford has a section called "Secondhand Buddhism", which somehow seems to sum up the New Age movement as a whole.
I found '54' by Wu Ming in, I think, 'Chinese literature' in Waterstones in Leeds.
Thematically, the novel has nothing to do with China. And the 'author' was actually a collective of five Italian writers - no Chinese connection there either. Presumably, an authorship with an Asian-sounding name is enough for a work to be classified as unmistakably Chinese, regardless of topic.
Back in the 80s I volnteered in a radical bookshop that put 'Protect and Survive' in Comedy. A book by David Owen about the SDP was filed as 'DIY'.
London's Forbidden Planet used to have a good section (when it was a bookshop) called 'Slipstream', with Baudrillard, Pynchon, Bruno Schultz, Mischa and Ferret, the first two Nicholson Baker books and Angela Carter. Now it has 'Macho Dudes With Guns' for the (mainly Baen books) military-fetish SF.
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April 23, 2014
Shakespeare's dictionary is a possibility that makes me look up
If ever there was a claim which I would love to see be proved true, it is this one. In time for Shakespeare's 450th birthday marked on Wednesday with a wealth of quizzes and "10 things you didn't know about"s and idiotic "Shakespeare would have liked Twitter" press releases rare booksellers in New York have announced that they believe they have purchased the playwright's own dictionary.
Before we go into the whys and wherefores of it all: just imagine if it turns out to be true. Shakespeare's dictionary! It doesn't seem possible; it makes him seem all too human.
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Long shadow over Palestine killing
In the ever-controversial history of Palestine, a special place is reserved for Avraham Stern. The leader of the eponymous "gang" its Hebrew name meant "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel" was shot and killed in February 1942 after masterminding a wave of terrorist attacks on British targets with the goal of securing Jewish independence in the holy land. Now a new account of Stern's life, focusing on his violent death, raises fascinating questions and serves as a vivid reminder of a fateful stage in the development of the world's most intractable conflict.
Patrick Bishop, author of several acclaimed military histories, has skillfully re-created a drama that pitted the charismatic, Polish-born Stern against the British detective Geoffrey Morton, who tracked down his quarry to what was supposed to be a safe house in Tel Aviv - thus the "reckoning" of the book's title.
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What book would you give to someone you love?
Are you involved in World Book Night? Or are you in one of the countries that celebrate World Book Day today? We want to see and read how you're experiencing it and what book you would share with your loved ones
Not only is April 23 Shakespeare's birthday his 450th this year but it's a day when books are the centre of festivals and events around the world.
In the UK and Ireland, today marks the celebration of World Book Night. This year, for the first time, individual readers are are being encouraged to register as community book givers and give a book away be it to a friend or loved one, a member of their community or a complete stranger to spread the love for literature.
She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste. [ Julio Cortázar - Hopscotch ]
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23 April 2014, 9:53
My boyfriend and I are currently in a long distance situation. To keep close we've decided to read a book together. It was a tough one deciding which book and also limited to availability on different continents but we decided on a Haruki Murakami. :)
As my motherland tradition dictates, every year I give my (British) boyfriend a book on Sant Jordis Day. I usually try and choose a work of Catalan or Hispanic Literature. This year it was clear it had to be a book by the late Gabo - so I gave him The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago). Although this is one of Garcia Marquez's least known works, its a very interesting book, that I really wanted him to read.
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By AgnesBeans
23 April 2014, 14:39
Following the Catalan tradition, I have just bought my English boyfriend the book "Stone in a Landslide" by Maria Barbal, great Catalan literature! I just hope he will think about the rose :)
My Nigerian husband and I have recently shared, very much enjoyed and discussed together over meals Adichie's AMERICANAH. What better way to enhance our love?
The Big Sleep for its dark humor as my husband is Swiss and methinks he doesn't understand. How mistaken I was. A few years back Stendhals, 'The Red and the Black' and 'The Way of all flesh'.
Not easy to think of something suitably Sonnet-y for her. So let's Frankenstein some generic loved one out of the air, out of the thin air and then oh, I don't know.
Wise Children, by Angela Carter
Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon
The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies
One of our librarians is giving away free books on campus at Newcastle University before heading back over to the library to join in our Rainy Day Reads book club
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23 April 2014, 10:15
The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis: This is a beautiful, heart-searching book on the nature love. By reading it yourself and giving it to someone you love, not only would you would both find out precisely where you stood (!) but you could enjoy the greater depth of love in all its nuances opened up before you!
Lights Out In Wonderland: Zara, mother of my gorgeous girlfriend, gave me Lights Out In Wonderland by DCC Pierre. Amazing woman, amazing novel, amazingly eye-opening, disturbing, hilarious portrait of the time we live in.
I was a WBN Giver last year. A lovely experience. As for a book to give a loved one, I gave my hub the complete Shakespeare's plays when we started dating. He was an actor, and loved it. Last Christmas I gave my best friend CS Lewis' Til We Have Faces. She'd never heard of it and loves it as well.
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April 22, 2014
'Literally' figuratively destroyed by program to remove the word's misuse
My favourite misuse of "literally" came from an august editor at an august publishing house. A debut novel, she declared to a group of journalists, had "literally broken her heart". We all, of course, then made sure to steer well clear.
Not being a football follower, I didn't know that Jamie Redknapp had form in this area, however, and I'm rather impressed. I think "he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he literally hasn't got a right foot" is brilliantly surreal.
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