The Guardian's Blog, page 15
March 16, 2016
Literary Mixtape: Miroslav Penkov cranks up Radiohead and Queen on the shores of the Black Sea
The Bulgarian writer discusses the music that inspired his first novel and remembers a childhood in which listening to Deep Purple could get you in serious trouble with the Communist Party
By Miroslav Penkov for Literary Mixtapes by Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
Your mixtape stories: share your memories and pictures hereI’ve always thought of the mixtape as one of the quintessential American art forms. Songs arranged with care and trepidation; the boy’s heart laid bare on an audio cassette; an object of intimacy and vulnerability, which the girl could embrace or crush on a whim. In Bulgaria, it was the Communist Party that did the crushing. How absurd it seems to me now, the idea that getting caught listening to Smoke on the Water could get you in serious trouble. The idea that you had to mix your tapes in secret, like bombs. Then in the 90s, when the Party had already fallen, the mixtape, like our people, grew savage, ruthless, unapologetic. You could go to the market and next to the crates of tomatoes, cucumbers and potatoes find others packed with bootleg cassettes – Serbian Turbofolk, or Scandinavian Death Metal? American rap, or British pop? A cornucopia of choices in a world where “copy right” signified, and still does, one’s immutable right to make copies completely unimpeded.
In my novel Stork Mountain, a young immigrant returns to Bulgaria and searches for his disappeared grandfather, ending up in a village on the border with Turkey, a stone’s throw away from Greece, up in the Strandja Mountains. This is a place of pagan mysteries and storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals and seek rebirth. There in the village, the boy reconnects with the old man, falls in love with the rebellious daughter of the local imam and gets drawn in a maze of insanity and half-truths.
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Katherine Anne Porter's short story changed the way I think of life, of familial bonds, of the tales we tell each other
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March 15, 2016
Recognition at last for Tessa Hadley, a domestic goddess
Few writers can create female characters like Tessa Hadley, whose Windham-Campbell prize is much deserved
When will there be good news? Well, here’s some: Tessa Hadley, the British writer, has won a Windham-Campbell prize (established three years ago, the awards support the work of nine writers each year with a grant worth $150,000).
I couldn’t be happier for her. She deserves all the prizes. Hadley is psychologically acute, drily witty and, whether describing a red-brick suburb or a sopping country afternoon, she is absolutely wonderful on place. Her relative obscurity, then, is an unfathomable mystery, even if I know deep down she is likely just another victim of a literary culture that tends to prize the male over the female, the grandly thematic over the so-called domestic. The female characters at the heart of her novels – clever, impulsive, not always wholly likable – are so finely drawn, I can never get them out of my head. Even now, whenever I see a train bound for Cardiff, I picture Kate, the heroine of her third novel, The Master Bedroom. What is she doing these days, I think to myself. Is she sleeping with yet another unsuitable man?
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March 14, 2016
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, including two great books about very different big cities, very very French novels, a reader who is going through all of Nabokov chronologically in 2016, and excellent reads for the rainy days of early spring.
paulburns finished EL Doctorow’s World’s Fair:
A wonderfully evocative book about a Jewish childhood in New York between the wars. Doctorow’s superb sense of place re New York reminded me a little of James T Farrell’s sense of place of Chicago in the Studs Lonigan books, though, in this book anyway, Doctorow is a much gentler writer. That’s three of his books I’ve read now and am determined to get some others. To date I have found Doctorow a very easy read.
... a book that is so French it it had me grinning ear from ear! And wanting to immediately watch a Louis Malle film. I thought a lot about why I liked this so much, and I came to the conclusion, in a hairs-raising-on-the-back-of-my-neck kind of way, that it was a rather macabre interest – a dawning sense of recognition of girls I used to lust after as an arty farty teen, and into my twenties, and, shame-facedly, beyond. Thank god I left those days behind. Anyway, a light read – great for a single sitting in a cafe/bar – about relatively unlikable self absorbed bourgeoisie playing games with each other.
This year I’ve set myself a project of reading most of Nabokov’s fiction chronologically from the beginning with Brian Boyd’s great biography as a companion. Over the years I’ve read Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin each at least twice as well as a couple of his other novels, but realized I hadn’t read any of his early works written originally in Russian or his short stories.
So far I’ve gotten to about 1929 and it has been a real pleasure. I just finished The Defense (which was marvelous and a clear leap forward in his stylistic development) after previously reading Mary and King, Queen, Knave, all for the first time. I’ve also read the first 350 pages or so of the biography and the stories written along the way (which have been uneven, to say the least), which have included a few gems such as An Affair of Honor and A Guide to Berlin.
I, City by Pavel Brycz is a wonderful little book from Prague based Twisted Spoon Press. It is an engaging series of vignettes narrated by the city of Most, an industrial centre north of Prague. Through tales about its people, that city comes alive, in the author’s attempt to render poetic his hometown which is no Paris or Vienna (but wishes it was). Most has medieval roots, but situated on lignite deposits, it has been mined for its low quality coal. Under the Communists in the 1960s, it was decided to destroy the old town to access the resources, so the people were relocated to housing constructed of pre-fabricated concrete panels. All that remains of its heritage is a castle and a Gothic church. To save the church it was moved 183 m away from the new mining site – on 52 trucks and a system of rails!
My other recent read was Olivia Laing’s new book, The Lonely City. This essay/memoir is an account of a couple of years she spent in New York City following the break-up of a relationship. She explores the loneliness of the big city through a number of artists including painter Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol among others. I loved her earlier The Trip to Echo Spring which examined the relationship between alcohol and writers in the form of a road trip through the hometowns and lives of five major American authors. I deeply related to this new book, it really spoke to me.
Idly dipping into James Salter’s Light Years, a book I frequently revisit for the almost heartless brilliance of the writing, I came upon this wonderfully tender passage which will surely resonate with book-loving parents everywhere:
And he reads to them as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet ... What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice that protects, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognise it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. Instead, in his even, sensuous, voice he laves them in the petty myths of Europe, of snowy Russia, the East.
Such yearning in that voice – I’m quite choked up.
“The world is a hellish place,” Tom Waits said, “and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
Thanks Jenny Bhatt for the rec.
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Interview with a Bookstore: San Francisco's historic City Lights
Lost ducks, beatniks, and sex in the storeroom: we kick off a new series exploring iconic bookstores with one of America’s most famous, City Lights – in partnership with Literary Hub
Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books Network
Scroll down for the staff recommendations shelfThe best independent bookshops in the world – readers recommend
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet laureate of Coney Island, cofounder of perhaps America’s most famous bookstore, wrote of his adopted city:
The changing light / at San Francisco / is none of your East Coast light
none of your / pearly light of Paris
A young woman surreptitiously placed her father’s ashes in various nooks and crannies throughout our poetry room
Some German tourists said “Excuse me, did you know there is a duck in here?” No, no I did not know.
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Happiness to mindfulness, via wellbeing: how publishing trends grow
From cod to colouring, fashions come and go in books. What do they tell us about our culture, and can we predict what’s next?
After the long, wet winter, the season is finally on the turn. I know this partly because the instinct to hunker down in a nest of books is giving way to an urge to purge. As the weak spring sunshine straggles through the dust motes, it inevitably lands on heaps of unsorted books – among them eight volumes of the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.
I’ve written before about my problems with literary decluttering. But who in their right mind would want to keep eight copies of a directory that barely changes from year to year except for the entries that are out of date? Well – sigh! – me. And here’s why. Many volumes ago, I was asked to write an essay on a literary editor’s life for this sturdy compendium of information for people aspiring to a writing career. While extolling the value of making lists, I wrote that it helped to spot the signs of new publishing trends.
Related: Book festivals are worth far more than fees | Claire Armitstead
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Poem of the Week: The Sun’s Shame by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Rossetti’s contemporaries accused him of promoting a ‘fleshly school’ of poetry, but these sonnets about death, renewal and desire are pure bliss
I
Beholding youth and hope in mockery caught
From life; and mocking pulses that remain
When the soul’s death of bodily death is fain;
Honour unknown, and honour known unsought;
And penury’s sedulous self-torturing thought
On gold, whose master therewith buys his bane;
And longed-for woman longing all in vain
For lonely man with love’s desire distraught;
And wealth, and strength, and power, and pleasantness,
Given unto bodies of whose souls men say,
None poor and weak, slavish and foul, as they:—
Beholding these things, I behold no less
The blushing morn and blushing eve confess
The shame that loads the intolerable day.
March 11, 2016
Bret Easton Ellis: today's American Psycho would be an online troll
The author’s novel is now a musical due to make its Broadway debut – prompting Ellis to muse about what the murderous banker would be up to in 2016
A quarter century after the events of American Psycho, what would murderous Patrick Bateman be doing in 2016? The answer, according to the controversial novel’s author Bret Easton Ellis, seems to involve flashing his bling on Instagram and trolling people on Twitter.
The original Wolf of Wall Street, Bateman was a product of the “greed is good” 80s, where self-obsession was an art form and you lived or died by the label sewn into your underwear. Ellis’s antihero was a pre-crash Master of the Universe, and while, deep down, the world might not seem so very different a place today, we do in fact inhabit a whole other dimension of life online. Most of us have also woken up to the realisation that bankers are not gods to be revered.
Related: Bret Easton Ellis and Alex Israel: California Uber alles
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Only wilful disregard can hide the need to publish more women
As a publisher used to the more enlightened scene in Korea, I’m shocked at the gender bias in the UK books world – and I’m doing something about it
When I founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015, I made a few broad commitments: to focus on translations from Asian languages, to operate without unpaid interns, to get a tattoo of our logo. These were choices that made some people wince or shake their heads at my naive idealism, but they made sense to me.
One decision was a little different – that at least 50% of our list be by women. While my day job translating Korean literature has been woman-centric so far, this was always more by luck than judgment. In South Korea, possibly uniquely, women almost always outnumber men on the top prize shortlists, and the idea of a Korean Baileys prize would be seen as outmoded. I’d never been aware of the gender biases in publishing.
Related: Lionel Shriver rubbishes plans for dedicated Year of Publishing Women
Related: Translated fiction by women must stop being a minority in a minority
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Only wilful blindness can hide the need to publish more women
As a publisher used to the more enlightened scene in Korea, I’m shocked at the gender bias in the UK books world – and I’m doing something about it
When I founded Tilted Axis Press in 2015, I made a few broad commitments: to focus on translations from Asian languages, to operate without unpaid interns, to get a tattoo of our logo. These were choices that made some people wince or shake their heads at my naive idealism, but they made sense to me.
One decision was a little different – that at least 50% of our list be by women. While my day job translating Korean literature has been woman-centric so far, this was always more by luck than judgment. In South Korea, possibly uniquely, women almost always outnumber men on the top prize shortlists, and the idea of a Korean Baileys prize would be seen as outmoded. I’d never been aware of the gender biases in publishing.
Related: Lionel Shriver rubbishes plans for dedicated Year of Publishing Women
Related: Translated fiction by women must stop being a minority in a minority
Continue reading...
Evicted and poverty reporting: where has the muckraking gone?
Matthew Desmond’s new book is the latest in a long and illustrious tradition of writing about America’s poor – but where’s the anger, and why does nothing ever seem to get done?
The new hit in American nonfiction is Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book follows eight families as they navigate perilous housing situations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it arrived with a strong pedigree: Desmond is a professor of sociology at Harvard, a winner of the MacArthur Genius grant in 2015 for “revealing the impact of eviction on the lives of the urban poor and its role in perpetuating racial and economic inequality”.
Published last week, Evicted debuted at No 6 on the New York Times bestseller list. The reviews were all raves. Ours liked it. The New York Times deemed it a “regal hybrid of ethnography and policy reporting”. The Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada began his review in an attitude of prostration: “Thank you for writing about destitution in America with astonishing specificity yet without voyeurism or judgment.”
Related: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond – review
Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives”. That was true then. It did not know because it did not care. The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath, so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat. There came a time when the discomfort and crowding below were so great, and the consequent upheavals so violent, that it was no longer an easy thing to do, and then the upper half fell to inquiring what was the matter. Information on the subject has been accumulating rapidly since, and the whole world has had its hands full answering for its old ignorance.
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