The Guardian's Blog, page 14

A turn-up for the books – when lost manuscripts are rediscovered

This week the New York Review of Books’ blog revealed that a literary manuscript assumed to be among those lost for ever has reappeared, but what of the others?

Reviewing 2015’s remarkable run of rediscovered lost books – including works by Charlotte Brontë, F Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Dr Seuss and, above all, an entire previously unknown novel, Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee – Claire Fallon wondered in November if the streak of luck would continue in 2016 and, more cynically, “did any famous authors not have lost manuscripts?”.

The first question can be easily answered, since in January a long-lost Beatrix Potter book was readied for publication – The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots immediately entered Amazon’s bestseller chart, eight months before its publication in September – and this week the New York Review of Books’ blog revealed that a literary manuscript assumed to be among those lost for ever, like the first version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom that TE Lawrence left on a station platform, has reappeared.

Related: Unseen Beatrix Potter story featuring an older Peter Rabbit to be published

Related: Go Set A Watchman: read the first chapter - interactive

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Europe's best indie novels listed in support of UK remaining in EU

Dedalus Books’ Reading Europe initiative aims to make a cultural case for the UK remaining in Europe by listing the best novels from EU countries

Earlier this month, Axel Scheffler warned us that the Gruffalo couldn’t have existed without the EU. Last week, we heard from authors including Kerry Hudson and Geoff Dyer about what leaving Europe might mean for the arts. “You’ll have this enormous drain on creative talent,” said Hudson.

Related: Being European: what does it mean?

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Translation Tuesday: seven micro stories by Alex Epstein

An intelligent mouse, a broken umbrella and Franz Kafka feature in tiny stories of love and hope translated from Hebrew

By Alex Epstein and Yardenne Greenspan for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

In the religion column the robot wrote: human.

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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

Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including Tolstoy, Zadie Smith, Murakami – and not one single happy marriage.

coburg just finished Haruki Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage:

...and I loved it! I know his books have been very popular for some time but seem to have passed me by, but then I read Patti Smith’s M Train and she kept referring to Murakami so then I read his first books Wind/Pinball, which were great but weird, and then got my hands on this book and it absorbed me cover to cover. Quite profound at times, simple yet deep – it leaves a lot space for the reader to ponder upon and fill in the gaps. I’m just so pleased he’s written so many other books which I can now indulge in.

Over the weekend I re-visited two, fine, black and white films of the 1930s based on novels by Dashiell Hammett – The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. Watching The Thin Man again reminded me of a question I asked here a couple of years ago... Can anyone name me a novel that begins with a happily married couple and whatever travails they endure, ends with that same couple still happily married?

I don’t think the unequivocal absence of even one happy marriage in all of literature is an accident

Despite having a reputation as a crank who hates all things fun this is plainly a love letter by Alan Moore to the golden age and silver age of comments. With some gentle self mocking at the “dark age” of comics Moore was involved in ushering in. It’s also Moore just having fun in writing Superman mythos stories without having to work for DC who shamefully ripped him and Dave Gibbons off along with a bunch of writers and artists before them.

Like Tom Strong it’s not his best work or in the same league as Watchmen/V For Vendetta but a fun, humourous read for anyone who loves the medium and its great history. Alan Moore just having fun also tends to be better than most writers attempting a serious story.

The central displays provided two candidates: Tightrope by Simon Mawer and The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard. I ditched the Mawer after a little consideration. I remembered that Swimming to Ithaca was perfectly okay but not distinctive in any way. The Howard on the other hand did give me pause. It’s been donkey’s years since I read the first four Cazalet books and she seemed due for a revisit so I hurried off to the library (stressed and poor last week) and emerged with an armful.

I’m just not sure. I like all sorts of books written by women and consider “domestic” writing an important part of literary output. I’m not overly put off by all the upper-middle-class stuff and her books are certainly page-turning to a degree. And yet I’m still hesitating, unable to decide if the ease with which they can be read is due to exceptional and lightly-worn writing talent or because actually there’s nothing much there after all.

I found all three novels to be utterly wonderful – psychological studies focussed on one adolescent, following his (often confused, always self-conscious) experiences, feelings and opinions as he grows from a child in his family’s countryside home to a young man attending a Moscow university.

Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth are, all three, intellectual, rich, deeply perceptive, highly emotional, and often – something I feel is usually overlooked, or just not talked about much with Tolstoy – very funny. The protagonist, Nikolai, and thus Tolstoy himself as this is to whatever extent an autobiographical exercise, is so self-conscious, so self-(un)knowing, it can be completely embarrassing and brutal but it can also be really comical. (BBC documentary The Trouble with Tolstoy was particularly good when touching on this aspect of the writer: at one point Alan Yentob refers to his youthful diaries as being “Adrian Moleish”, and other contributors discuss how much of an absolute narcissist Tolstoy was, how completely self-obsessed – how he liked nothing better than writing about what he was most interested in: himself!)

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For me, traditional publishing means poverty. But self-publish? No way

Life as a professional writer is financially depressing, and I’ve often been advised to self-publish. Here’s why I won’t do it

A few days ago, I wrote a piece on my blog exploding the myth of the rich writer, and laying out (in terms the Royal Literary Fund described as “ruthlessly mathematical”) what authors actually receive when you buy their books. The simple answer for many of us is nothing at all, after that heady advance in the case of my most recent novel, which was £5,000 for two years’ work.

The blog was widely shared on social media, and viewed by nearly 10,000 people in its first week. The shock, agreement and commiserations were followed swiftly by people telling me what I really need to do is self-publish.

Related: The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber – review

#Bestseller: ARRANGED MARRIAGE https://t.co/GYO5Sxgwa2 #IAN1 #amreading #ASMSG #romance #IARTG #BYNR #PDf1 #readers

Related: Devotion by Ros Barber review – the conflict between religion and science

I do not earn much as a traditionally published author but I earn more than I did as a self-publisher. I published 7 books in 4 years and in that time only one of them went into profit – and that less than £100. And before anyone says it’s because I didn’t work hard enough, my friends and family who barely saw me for 4 years will tell you that I worked my butt off. So hard in fact that I attracted the attention of two separate traditional publishers who took me on (one for my adult books, one for my children’s books).

I could no longer take the feeling of inadequacy every time I read an article by a self-publishing success story telling me if only I worked harder and smarter, did all the right social media promotions, spent 90% of my time marketing and only 10% writing – oh and subscribed to their blog or downloaded their latest how-to manual – I too could earn at least 5 figures a month. But the reality is, of dozens of self-publishers I knew, I was probably the most successful.”

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Interview with a Bookstore: The Strand in New York City

Started by a 25-year-old with 600 dollars in the 1920s, the Strand is the only bookshop left of New York’s once-thriving ‘Book Row’. With 18 miles of books, its staff talk about its past and present – and give reading recommendations

Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books Network

Scroll down for the staff recommendations shelf

The Strand was born in 1927 on Fourth Avenue on what was then called “Book Row.” Book Row covered six city blocks and housed 48 bookstores. Ben Bass, an entrepreneur at heart and a reader by nature, was all of 25 years old when he began his modest used bookstore with 300 dollars of his own and 300 dollars that he borrowed from a friend.

Ben sought to create a place where books would be loved, and book lovers could congregate. He named his bookstore after the London street where writers like Thackeray, Dickens, and Mill once gathered and interesting book publishers thrived. The Strand quickly became a Greenwich Village institution where writers went to converse, sell their books and find a hidden treasure to buy. Today, the Strand is the sole survivor of Book Row’s colorful past, boasting more than 18 miles of new, used, and rare books.

It’s a lot different now, but when I first started working here it was like the wild west

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Will Elena Ferrante outlast Louisa May Alcott's secret alter ego?

As an Italian historian denies claims that she is Elena Ferrante, we look into the history of pseudonymity for clues as to how long the secret will hold

It looks as if the quest to identify the real Elena Ferrante will have to continue, following this week’s firm denial by the historian Marcella Marmo – “Really, I’m not Elena Ferrante” – who had been fingered as the pseudonymous Neapolitan novelist in an Italian newspaper. (It should be noted, though, that there is a precedent for a false denial: Joe Klein initially insisted he was not Anonymous, the author of Primary Colors). So far, Ferrante has eluded the identity detectives for 24 years, already a good score compared with other female authors who have used pseudonyms of either gender.

Related: Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows

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Penderyn prize 2016 announces shortlist of best books about pop music

Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Tracey Thorn are among the musicians in this year’s music writers’ prize

Whoever it was that said writing about music is like dancing about architecture is not among the authors – half of whom are better known as musicians – shortlisted for this year’s Penderyn prize honouring the best books about popular music.

Elvis Costello invoked the line in a bad-tempered music press interview in 1983 (“Framing all the great music out there only drags down its immediacy”, he told the unfortunate reporter.) But he has clearly had a change of heart, having spent seven years preparing a massive autobiography. His Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink is the first title on the list and is considered a strong contender.

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When AI rules the world: what SF novels tell us about our future overlords

Science fiction has offered many visions of a computer-controlled future, and the future doesn’t look good for humanity

It’s only March and already we’ve seen a computer beat a Go grandmaster and a self-driving car crash into a bus. The world is waking up to the ways in which a combination of “deep learning” artificial intelligence and robotics will take over most jobs. But if we don’t want our robot servants to rise up and kill us in our beds, maybe we should delete the video of us beating their grandparents with hockey sticks.

Thanks to science fiction, we know that the first thing AI will do is take over the defence grid and nuke us all. In Harlan Ellison’s 1967 story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream – one of the most brutal depictions of an AI-dominated world – an AI called AM, constructed to fight a nuclear war, kills off most of the human race, keeping five people as playthings.

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish, and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

Related: Is the Robopocalypse nigh?

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Food in books: spaghetti and meatballs from The Godfather

Kate Young reminisces about meeting her stepfather and what he brought into her life – including Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and, of course, its food

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

Clemenza had finally come back from his day’s work and was bustling around the kitchen cooking up a huge pot of tomato sauce. Michael nodded to him and went to the corner office where he found Hagen and Sonny waiting for him impatiently. “Is Clemenza out there?” Sonny asked.

Michael grinned. “He’s cooking up spaghetti for the troops, just like the army.”

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