The Guardian's Blog, page 163

Literary breakfasts: orders, please

Fiction sometimes seems to contain almost as many recipes as cookery, but which are the most appetising?

James Bond was always fussy about his food – remember that breakfast in Casino Royale with "half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon, and a double portion of coffee without sugar". Now William Boyd has taken 007's foodie fetishism to a new level with a footnoted recipe for salad dressing.

It opens up a whole new perspective on your bookshelves – what if you tried to live off the recipes buried between the covers of your favourite fiction? There's an old joke about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) – you might not enjoy the novel, but you can certainly learn how to make the French classic dish boeuf en daube. But this is completely untrue: the dish is made by Mildred (a cook who seems to spend most of her time looking after the children), and Woolf and Mrs Ramsay are both suspiciously vague about what is involved: both seem to think that the dish can burn, has knife-edge timings, and that the "bay leaf … must be done to a turn". This is complete rubbish, useless advice.

In Dorothy L Sayers' Strong Poison (1930), there is a full description of how to make a jam omelette, but this happens in court, during a murder trial, with the unusual purpose of explaining that the dish could not have been poisoned. The cook's technique is praised, and the appalling judge says "I advise you all to treat omelettes in the same way". You could certainly make one from the description, though it doesn't sound all that delicious.

Crime and spy novels and thrillers do seem to attract food writing. Contrary to popular belief, the unnamed hero of Len Deighton's 1962 The Ipcress File does not make himself anything more than sandwiches and coffee (in the film he becomes Harry Palmer and does cook), but he gives a couple of cocktail recipes, and you could certainly produce homard a la broche by following another character make it – spit-roast, and baste frequently with a mixture of champagne and butter. John Connolly's 1999 thriller Every Dead Thing is slowed down three-quarters of the way through by a detailed description of how to make chicken gumbo, a full-scale recipe. And in recent years there have been shedloads of American mystery stories featuring cooking sleuths who generously share their recipes with the reader – seriously, there are too many to mention.

Lobster again: in EF Benson's 1935 Mapp and Lucia, the two women almost die in a fight over the recipe for Lobster a la Riseholme – they are swept away by a flood while Mapp is trying to steal the vital piece of paper from Lucia's house. Fortunately they survive, though the only line of the recipe we see is "take two hen lobsters …"

One of the nicest quasi-recipes comes in Mary McCarthy's 1963 The Group, where there is a lovely description of Polly making paté from a family recipe while Libby, "having splurged on chicken livers at the market", stands watching and criticising. Polly sautés the livers ("Aren't you doing them too rare?" Libby asks) then laboriously pushes them through a sieve, which takes an hour. She then adds a huge amount of butter, plus brandy and sherry – "no wonder the Andrews family was insolvent". She should then make stock and boil it down to a glaze. It sounds deliciously tempting.

But it was during the foodie 80s that the "novel with recipes" really got going, adding a dash of real life some nuance and a pinch of backstory with the pretence that all fictional people need to eat too. In Nora Ephron's 1983 Heartburn – her roman a clef about affairs among the chattering classes in Washington DC – the heroine is a food writer, so before throwing it at her husband the narrator gives the recipe for key lime pie, not to mention a vinaigrette very different from James Bond's.

According to Kurt Vonnegut the recipes in Dead Eye Dick (1982) are "musical interludes for the salivary glands", though he does warn that "no one should use this novel as a cookbook". They don't really seem to add much, though one recipe for soup splendidly involves cooking large quantities of meat in liquid: you then remove the meat and what's left is the soup. Laura Esquivel's magic realist Like Water for Chocolate (1989) is structured around Mexican food: each section opens with a recipe, and centres on an incident involving the dish. And in Saturday (2005), Ian McEwan's annoying Henry Perowne makes bouillabaisse in such excruciating detail that we could surely follow his recipe.

James Hamilton Paterson's Cooking with Fernet Branca (which is a 2004 novel rather than the cookbook the name suggests) contains some of the most disgusting recipes you could ever wish to come across, and – going out on a limb here – are not intended to be made. But has anyone tried the (many) recipes from John Lanchester's 1996 The Debt to Pleasure? – the book is completely built around cooking, but there's something about it that might make you reluctant to try to replicate the dishes ...

Ephron's salad dressing seems much more appealing – I've just tested it against Boyd's. Both taste surprisingly good but are very strong (007's seems to have far too much vinegar in it, but it does work) and need to be used sparingly. But then maybe the same could be said of recipes in fiction.

FictionFood and drinkVirginia WoolfIan FlemingNora EphronFood & drinkMoira Redmond
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Dylan Thomas prize: a judge's notes

The award is as international as they come, but this year's Nevadan winner has benefited from Dylan Thomas's Welsh legacy in more ways than one

The shortlist for this year's Dylan Thomas prize – for writers under 30 – was notable for being a clean sweep for independent publishers. Congratulations to Atlantic, who had two books on the list, OneWorld, Quercus, Salt, Granta and Parthian. And the sheer length of this roll call indicates the second notable aspect of the shortlist: it wasn't really very short. A total of seven writers – a testament to the quality of the longlist rather than judgely indecision – were in competition for the £30,000 prize, which in the end myself and my fellow judges, led by Hay festival supremo Peter Florence and including musician and BBC 6 Music presenter Cerys Matthews unanimously awarded to American writer Claire Vaye Watkins for her remarkably assured and arresting collection of stories, Battleborn, which draws on both her own family history – her father, who died when she was six, was a close associate of Charles Manson and testified against him– as well as life among the casinos, brothels and deserts of her native Nevada.

Vaye Watkins picked up the award at a ceremony in Thomas's own "ugly lovely town" of Swansea on Thursday night. (It is a melancholy quirk of a prize that celebrates youth that it is awarded on a date determined by the tragically early death of Thomas himself, aged only 39, in 1953.) Despite the name and location, the prize has never been exclusively for Welsh writers – although one, the poet Jemma L King, was shortlisted this year – but has always been an international competition that was way ahead of the Booker in allowing Americans to join in from the outset. This year's hopefuls came from Australia via Sudan, India via Missouri, South Africa, Nevada, England and Wales. All forms of fictional writing are accepted and so two volumes of poetry (King's The Shape of a Forest and James Brookes's Sins of the Leopard) were up against a brace of short-story collections (Vaye Watkins's Battleborn and Prajwal Parajuly's The Gurkha's Daughter), and three novels (The Last King of Lydia by Tim Leach, Call It Dog by Marli Roode and Beneath the Darkening Sky by Majok Tulba).

The award's focus on youth is an acknowledgment of Thomas's own precocious gifts, which saw many of his most famous poems written well before he was 30. It is a focus that takes practical form in all the shortlistees spending a week in Swansea in the run-up to the prize – they are billeted together in a shared house, an experience one of last year's writers described as a combination of Big Brother and The Hunger Games – where they give readings and talks at local schools and colleges.

Peter Stead, prize chair and guiding spirit, says that education has always been a key element: "We're more than just a monetary award. We genuinely want to make a difference to the future of aspiring young writers. It is exciting to think that, in this way, the prize may be stimulating new young writers in Wales – and maybe even fostering the development of one of its future winners!"

Ambitious talk, but if you want an example of the way that a combination of Dylan Thomas and education can pay off, look no further than Vaye Watkins herself. Speaking just after she had picked up the prize she recalled that "at school I had a teacher who made us memorise and recite two poems. One of them was Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night which I loved and I loved learning." And the other? "Stephen Crane's In the Desert, which I used as the epigraph for Battleborn."

Dylan Thomas prizeAwards and prizesDylan ThomasWalesShort storiesFictionPoetryNicholas Wroe
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Albert Camus centenary goes without much honour at home

Neither France nor Algeria pay much attention to 100th anniversary, leaving job to Google

Last month, the 300th anniversary of Denis Diderot's birth prompted François Hollande to talk of reburying his bones in the Panthéon, the shrine of national heroes. Thursday's centenary of Albert Camus' birth, in contrast, has not seen the kind of festivities you might expect, either in the French capital or his childhood home, Algiers.

The lead role in feting him in France was reportedly assigned to Marseille, one of the current European capitals of culture, and a reasonable choice as Camus bought a house in Provence (which faces Algeria across the Mediterranean) two years before his death in a car crash in 1960, and is buried there. But, whether due to cock-up or conspiracy, Marseille-Provence 2013 has been as grudging as Paris in what it has offered by way of celebration. Camus was hence robbed of a big national "hommage", noted Le Point magazine, but at least "took the most beautiful of revenges on Google", which honoured him with its Doodle on Thursday.

Although The Outsider and The Plague are both set in Algeria, a full-blown Camus anniversary tribute there was always less likely. He came from a pied-noir (European settler) family, put the killing of an Arab at the centre of his best-known novel, and was (rightly or wrongly) seen as siding with France in his writings on the postwar independence struggle; as a result, "not a single official commemoration" took place in his native country, following the authorities' ban in 2010 on plans to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.

The continent as a whole has disowned him, in fact: although he was the first African-born Nobel literature laureate – and the second African-born laureate across all categories – the African Union's website's list of "Africa and diaspora" Nobel winners omits him, while welcoming Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as members of the diaspora.

For Algerians, the fact that Nicolas Sarkozy championed him when president – in unsuccessfully urging the transfer of Camus' body to the Panthéon, he was in effect appropriating him as French, not Algerian or Mediterranean – can't have helped. So on his 100th birthday, Camus was again an outsider, without a proper cake and belonging fully to neither. Which may be exactly what he would have wanted.

Albert CamusFranceEuropeJohn Dugdale
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The sweven-ish joys of archaic words

A collection of Gothic tales has reminded me of the pleasures of stumbling on forgotten vocabulary

"Now that we be upon this subject of dreams and apparitions, I may nohow forbear to mention that full strange and terrible one of "Sir Guy Eveling", and the consequences tragical issuing therefrom, which do I the more willingly pen, forasmuch as the dismal tale was hushed and smothered up at the time by the great families with whom he was consanguined, people of worshipful regard and jeopardous power, whereby folks only whispered of the story in corners, and peradventure bruited about many things which were but fond imaginings …"

Now that's one hell of an opening paragraph. A single sentence of 89 words, some unfamiliar, the entire passage peculiar and evocative, exquisitely so. Even the length of it, vaulting and ambitious. It seems almost gratuitously verbose in this era of controlled prose and a "less is more" aesthetic.

The passage is from "Sir Guy Eveling's Dream" by Horace Smith, the second story [PDF] in an OUP collection of Gothic fiction, Tales of the Macabre headlined by John Polidori's seminal "The Vampyre". These works were first published in early 19th-century magazines, from London, Dublin and Edinburgh. Besides Polidori's genre-defining classic and Smith's prolix nightmare, the book includes fine writers such as Letitia Landon, William Carleton and the peerless Sheridan LeFanu.

I pulled out the anthology on Halloween, in search of some suitably spooky material (an appropriately Irish-tinged collection, too, to honour the Celtic festival of Samhain). Reading these stories, I felt as though I was sloughing off time and literary convention to step into a long-forgotten world of words.

If you're like me, you'll take as much pleasure from words as from themes, characters or plot – the sound of them, their appearance on the page, the musicality of a piece, how it chimes on your inner ear.

And you'll also love surprises in reading – something The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre delivers at a fundamental level. Not the predictable surprise of the twist ending or authorial double-bluff, but a deeper surprise at how these old stories make you reappraise your approach to reading.

There's a challenge to unfamiliar words, or even vaguely recognised ones; you can't "skim-read" as normal, but must make your way in a stately fashion through each sentence. Each is a surprise in itself; your mind is constantly forced to check itself, think back over what it's processed, and ask, "Do I know what that means? Do I think I know? Can I guess at the meaning from its context?" (And sometimes, you don't really want to know anyway.)

I love old words anyway, and those moments when you stumble upon one that's strange to you. It's especially nice if the word itself is, well, especially nice. For instance, "slumbrously", which I came across recently in a review – what a gorgeous assemblage of letters and sounds. "Slumbrously" … you can almost physically feel the sensation of drifting into sleep, sinking drowsily onto a soft pillow in a cradle of dreaming.

This anthology is bursting with them: tristful, howbeit, swinge-bucklers, horripilation, sooth, beseem, maugre, haute, orgulous, agnize, beadsmen, racqueters, scatterlings, ribalds, wasselers, giglots, ronyons, bonarobas, ostent, amort, nathless …

Ods Pitikins! There is a rare and fierce pleasure to antiquated vocabulary: as fantastical, haunting and shivery-beautiful as Sir Guy Eveling's dream-turned-to-nightmare.

Reference and languagesShort storiesFictionDarragh McManus
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Why we need an LGBT book award

The Green Carnation prize honours a vital contribution to contemporary literature that deserves to be celebrated and seen

In 2010 I co-founded the Green Carnation prize with Paul Magrs after he tweeted his dismay at the paucity of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) writers winning high-profile prizes. Within five weeks we had three more judges and over 30 submissions, and they kept coming in. And so the first prize in the UK designed to celebrate LGBT literature was born.

Four years down the line and still, two of the biggest publishers have yet to put an author forward for the prize. One emailed saying "why would I want my author to win a prize just for being a lesbian?" This year we have had two debut novelists decline to be submitted, along with two well-known authors, who are both "out". Apparently some authors and publishers still don't think the reading population are ready for LGBT authors openly discussing LGBT themes – or, even more shockingly, not discussing them. I think they are wrong.

It seems many people agree. For while sponsors can be put off by the "niche LGBT tag", in the last four years many people have given up their time, for free, to judge the award. Kerry Hudson, who is judging this year and was shortlisted in 2012 for Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, jumped at the chance: she wanted to help others see "the importance of LGBT writers starting out seeing excellence within their community … thus feeling able to be open in publishing about being queer as with any sector."

I don't think winning the Green Carnation prize has hindered Patrick Gale, a Richard and Judy favourite, or his sales. Winning the prize has been important to Catherine Hall, Andre Carl van der Merwe and Chris Fowler in terms of sales and exposure. In Fowler's case he told the judges that it helped get the green light for a followup to Paperboy, the inaugural winner. Yet while the authors and the books are incredibly important there is more to it than that.

We encourage the LGBT community to speak up and be seen, and it's natural that this should happen in the literary and publishing worlds. This year's chair of judges Uli Lenart, events manager at Gay's the Word bookshop, says the prize is a "celebration of the extraordinarily vital and pervasive contribution of LGBT writers to contemporary literature and ideas".

Why should the visibility of LGBT authors matter? Damian Barr put it brilliantly when he tweeted that prizes like ours "celebrate LGBT writers and raise awareness of our stories on and off page". That doesn't mean that we search for "the gayest book". We want incredibly strong and diverse long and shortlists, culminating in a book that wins because it's bloody marvellous and will inevitably have an LGBT sensibility. I have yet to meet someone who didn't like Catherine Hall's The Proof of Love, be they 22, 45, 71, gay or straight. It does have some racy LGBT content and that is, I think, what puts people off LGBT fiction. As soon as the word "gay" comes up, people think about "the sex bit" and don't want to read or talk about it. What message is that sending for generations to come? That it's fine for Julian Barnes to use a straight man masturbating into a basin as a motif in his Man Booker-winning novel, but when it comes to non-heterosexual sex, please leave the bedroom door closed? It's notable that when Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty won the Booker, there was a titillating focus on its sexual content.

This is the second reason we need to raise the visibility of LGBT authors – as role models, not only for the next generation of authors but also for the next generation of readers. As a gay man, I don't define myself by my sexuality, but it is part of me and I want to know the history and heritage of that. When I was younger, in the days before YA fiction, it took me until I was 15 to get my hands on Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I remember thinking "wow, there are more people like me", and Maupin and his characters became incredibly important to me.

With this year's shortlist – Chris Adrian's Gob's Grief, Niven Govinden's Black Bread White Beer, AM Homes's May We Be Forgiven, Richard House's The Kills, Neil McKenna's Fanny & Stella and Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree – the prize once more demonstrates the diversity of LGBT writing, covering subjects from reversing death in Civil War America to dysfunctional families in modern times; from marital breakdowns to crime and international conspiracy; from transvestites in London to tolerance today. What the Green Carnation prize stands for is diversity - and that is why we need awards like it.

• For more information visit the Green Carnation prize website.

FictionBiographyAwards and prizesSimon Savidge
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November's Reading group: The Outsider by Albert Camus

This month, to mark his centenary, we'll be looking at the most famous novel by the reluctant poster boy for existentialism

There are famous book openings, and then, there are famous book openings:

"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile : <> Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier."

(Or, if like me, you find the Penguin translation a little easier: "My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I received a telegram from the old people's home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomrrow. Very sincerely yours.' That doesn't mean anything. It might have been yesterday.")

This narrator's confusion about his mother's death (or, arguably, his lack of concern) set in train a new force in European literature, and a new way of examining the human conscience. It could even be argued that these few words changed the face of literary and popular culture. At the very least, they alerted the world to a new talent, Albert Camus: fag in mouth, slick of hair, surprisingly good in goal, and still such an important part of the modern age that it's unsettling to realise that on 7 November it will be 100 years since he was born.

We'll be focusing on the great Frenchman for the rest of this month in the Reading group and most particularly his classic first novel, L'Etranger, usually but not always translated into English as The Outsider. I almost wrote "classic existentialist" novel then – but, of course, that was a tag the author himself never accepted. We'll be able to discuss such questions, not to mention whether to see Camus as primarily a novelist or philosopher, or if that even matters, later in the month.

But for now, the thing is to get going through those wonderful words. I'll be reading through the new Penguin translation and I'm pleased to say that the translator Sandra Smith has agreed to answer a few questions from us later on in the month. I'm also pleased to say that we have 10 copies to give away to the first 10 UK people to post "I want a copy please", alongside a nice comment relevant to the book. And if you're lucky enough to get in early, don't forget to email Ginny.Hooker@guardian.co.uk as we can't track you down ourselves. Be nice to her too.

Albert CamusFictionSam Jordison
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Is MacKenzie Bezos's one-star Amazon review part of a trend?

Her bad review of a book on her husband, Amazon boss Jeff, is the latest example of literary support between spouses. In the age of the 'slagosphere', such interventions could become de rigueur

MacKenzie Bezos's scathing one-star Amazon review of a book about her husband, the site's billionaire boss Jeff Bezos, suggests that online spousal supportiveness may soon become a loving duty, not just the crazy spasm of rage or embarrassing outpouring of affection that – as reactions on social media testify – it's currently seen as. Mrs Bezos, who as a novelist has won a National Book Award (in 2006, for The Testing of Luther Albright), took Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon to task for, in effect, trespassing on her territory, using techniques that "stretch the boundaries of non-fiction" and result in "way too many inaccuracies" – as in its claim that her husband's reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day played a role in his setting up Amazon (he only read it afterwards, she wrote).

MacKenzie Bezos's intervention, however, was scholarly and measured (key sign: no swear words) by the usual standards of pro-spouse commentary, as recently exemplified by the rock star Amanda Palmer's "review" on her blog of her husband Neil Gaiman's latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. She began by hailing it as "absolutely fucking amazing", advanced a theory that both of them throw personal ingredients into the "art blender" but with different dial settings (helpfully illustrated), and chattily detailed aspects of their marriage ("it's impossible to write a blog about his new book without talking about us").

Similarly candid, though in Bezos-style attack mode rather than adoration mode, was the defence of Michael Chabon by his wife Ayelet Waldman, a fellow novelist but also known for confessional writing and outspoken views on motherhood. Amazon reviews in 2011 of Chabon's first children's book, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man (including one asking if it was the best a Pulitzer winner could do), led to tweets from Waldman denouncing "jackasses" and "fucking Amazon reviewers giving Awesome Man 1 star... IT WAS WRITTEN FOR LITTLE KIDS". Twitter was also her chosen vehicle when she slated Katie Roiphe for criticism of her husband's style.

Chabon, for his part, had earlier taken up the cudgels on her behalf in an interview during the controversy about her essay Motherlove, but, instead of assailing individuals, portrayed her as a victim of the culture of the "slagosphere", where anyone with their head above the parapet is seen as fair game.

Spousal solidarity has yet to become as overt in the UK as it is for some US power couples, with George Osborne discreetly puffing a book by his wife, Frances, in a Spectator Books of the Year round-up the closest equivalent to Palmer's effusions. As far as we know, scandalous online behaviour here is limited to writers – the historian Orlando Figes, at least two crime novelists – praising themselves and/or attacking rivals using sock-puppet pseudonyms, not wives or partners.

The most obvious exception came when the novelist Julie Myerson wrote about her son's drug addiction in her 2009 non-fiction book The Lost Child, and was attacked for betraying family secrets. With "most of the British press queuing up to criticise Julie for writing about the devastation that skunk has worked on our family", her husband Jonathan, also a writer, defended her in the Guardian. But although he complained the attacks were either "ill-informed or plain vitriolic", the piece was very British in its sorrowful tone and the absence of ad hominem retaliation. References to jackasses were entirely absent.

BiographyLiterary criticismAmazon.comInternetJulie MyersonJohn Dugdale
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What's the best way to kill a novelist's passion for writing? Success

If you can't seem to get your novel published, or if it's a commercial failure, never fear: some of the best writers improved as their reputations and sales declined

To an answering chorus of jealous tweets, Lionel Shriver has been writing about the perils of becoming a successful novelist. As well as rehearsing the familiar plaint that you can't make any money from it these days, she lines up some fresh troubles that await the author whose books win acclaim and sales.

Once you've finished your festival appearances, she says, then you need to settle down to writing any number of unpaid features to keep your name in the limelight, as well as doing interviews with anybody who's mildly interested. Then there are the panels, the blurbs for other writers, those important questions about your "lifestyle" for feature fillers on the model of Private Eye's Me and My Spoon. And don't forget to keep scattering crumbs of inspiration into your Twitter feed and reminding your Facebook fans that you love them.

All of which gets in the way of doing what you've dreamed of for so long: writing another novel. Shriver says she's "grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure – when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them".

And as that last quote hints, media and marketing distractions are not the only things to fear about becoming successful. First of all comes the enormous pressure that weighs upon your next book once the first one is bathed in golden limelight, and critics are describing you as bursting with "promise". No wonder Ralph Ellison, having written Invisible Man, which was almost immediately recognised as one of the great books of the 20th century, was effectively paralysed for the rest of his career.

To his many curious and admiring readers, he explained that he was working on a second book that would improve on the first. For the remaining 40 years of his life he scratched away at a second novel following the career of a light-skinned child raised by a black preacher, who later "passes" as white and becomes a racist senator. Ellison wrote thousands of pages towards what was published, after his death and uncompleted, as Juneteenth.

Another model of gilded failure is F Scott Fitzgerald. He had something of a thirst on him already, but the combination of enormous fame and pots of cash sprung by the success of This Side of Paradise when he was just 24 must have helped tip him into the alcoholism that eventually killed him.

Some writers get drunk on praise. It's always tempting to have a go at Martin Amis, but the chorus of acclaim that attended his early books, rising to a crescendo with the publication of Money, seems to have led him to take himself a bit too seriously. He took on the fate of the planet, then the Holocaust – perhaps a bit much for a gifted comic novelist with a good turn of phrase. Similar folie de grandeur expanded Norman Mailer's books and inflated his ego, but didn't do much for his achievements in the wake of The Naked and the Dead.

A few writers are unlucky enough to be ruined by success even before they've published: Harold Brodkey, for instance, was widely touted as the next great American novelist well before he'd published a book. Not only did this mire him in anxiety and give him writers' block, but the long-gestated work was a disappointment that eclipsed the early excitement.

By way of sad but happy contrast, there are those writers whose work quietly marinated and matured in neglect. Could Kafka have developed such original vision in public sight? Could Bruno Schulz? Furthermore, a good number of the greats – Henry James, Herman Melville – got steadily better as their reputations and sales declined.

All of which provides some consolation for the many writers who haven't yet been published. Think of Samuel Beckett, who declared that his whole subject was failure, but he managed to reinvent both modernism and theatre while tucked away in obscurity. Not for nothing did his wife greet news of his Nobel prize as "a catastrophe".

"Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better" is one of his great phrases, but could also be seen as an inspiring motto for the writing life. If you can fail from success, you can also be a very successful failure.

Samuel BeckettMartin AmisLionel ShriverF Scott FitzgeraldLindesay Irvine
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

Open thread: who would be the best audiobook narrators?

David Morrissey is a surprise choice to read the audiobook of Morrissey's memoir. A good one? And which voices match which books best?

Finding the appropriate person to read an audiobook is clearly a tricky art. Given the excitement surrounding its paper publication, it was never going to be long before the audiobook version of Morrissey's Autobiography arrived. Fans will of course have been hoping for the unmistakeable astringent camp of the singer's own Mancunian tones – familiar from decades of indie hits and acid public comments on his rivals – to deliver his memoir himself. Instead, the Liverpudlian actor David Morrissey, known for playing stern and leathery politicians and tough guys, will be reading an unabridged version. Is he the right man for the job?

He does share a surname with Morrissey, but not very obviously much else. (I presume this won't be prompting a search for other namesake narrators? David "Peep Show" Mitchell reading David "Cloud Atlas" Mitchell? Dawn French tackling the grisly thrillers of Nicci French?… I'm not convinced.)

Some pairings in the audiobook world have become modern classics – think of Stephen Fry melliflously voicing forth Harry Potter, so definitively one feels the books could not possibly have been read by anybody else. Timothy Dalton's melodic reading of the crime series by John Banville's alter ego Benjamin Black makes for a similarly fitting combination of voice and style. However, letting plummy-voiced Kate Winslet loose on Andy Stanton's raucous stories for children about that absolute grimster Mr Gum seems like a less fortuitous idea.

There are so many wonderful pairings. I always thought Jarvis Cocker would be a great narrator of contemporary fiction, and lo, he is: here he is reading from neuroscientist David Eagleman's micro-fictions about the afterlife, Sum. Colin Firth has recorded a fine, atmospheric reading of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, while Samuel L Jackson has great fun with Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem (as well as with the pastiche children's bedtime story Go the Fuck to Sleep).

Moving into the realm of the possible, I'd rather like to hear Patsy Kensit reading Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and what about Danny Dyer to read Revenge, the latest by Martina Cole?

Who would you choose to read which book and why?

AudiobooksMorrissey
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