The Guardian's Blog, page 165

Visiting writers' houses: who's at home?

There's no doubting our fascination with places in which authors have lived – it's less certain what we hope to find there

The news that a three-bedroom "colonial" property in Cleveland, Ohio, has been put up for sale would not usually make a newspaper headline, but when it is the teenage home of poet and writer Langston Hughes, it suddenly becomes interesting.

The estate agent handling the sale told the Plain Dealer: "People want to know how long Langston Hughes lived there and where he wrote" – they want to know that his room was the third-floor attic, and that's where he first started writing some of his early plays, poems and short stories before moving to New York in the 1920s.

An aspiring writer has reportedly bid for the house, bringing to mind other, similar stories: Vikram Seth was so taken with a rectory that was once the home of metaphysical poet George Herbert that he bought it, and has lived there ever since.

"I saw the house, felt its atmosphere, and – though I could not really afford to – made a bid for it. It struck me that had the house belonged to Donne or Milton or some more overtly forceful personality, I would not have been able to live there. But Herbert, for all his depth and richness, is a clear writer and a tactful spirit. He might influence me but would not wish to wrest me from myself," he has written.

More recently, a picturesque cottage in the village of Felpham, west Sussex, where William Blake lived with his wife while working on Milton: A Poem was put up for sale in July.

And it's not only in the property market that writerly associations are of value. Last month Dickens's family unveiled a project to restore the writer's home at Gad's Hill Place, now a museum, while Jane Austen aficionados can take a virtual tour of Chawton, where the author of Pride and Prejudice and Emma spent the last eight years of her life.

Why are we so fascinated by the places where writers worked? After spending many hours visiting the former homes of lauded writers, such as the Emily Dickinson museum in Amherst, Anne Trubek, who began research for her A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses in a suitably doubtful state of mind, concluded that "you see the profound emotional experience that visitors have in being in the room where, for instance, Emily Dickinson wrote. You develop a connection to the author that is physical".

I agree with Trubek that we crave a link to the writers whose work inspires us, but not that the connection we want is physical.

When I look at the photograph,"William Faulkner's kitchen phone with phone numbers scribbled on the wall", taken at Rowan Oak, Faulkner's former home in Oxford, Mississippi, I don't connect with the telephone as a thing (even though it is a lovely old classic). I'm inspired by the space which the image creates in which to imagine how Faulkner lived, and made his calls.

The blog Writers Houses is dedicated to "the art of literary pilgrimage", and to documenting all writers' houses open to the public around the world — no small task, there are said to be 290 in France alone. It is testament to the fascination that we have with the stuff of writers' lives; but I reckon it's as a focus for our imaginings about the author that these spaces and objects come alive.

Langston HughesPoetryWilliam FaulknerEmily DickinsonWilliam BlakeJane AustenLiz Bury
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Multi-storied: fictional female flatshares

From Muriel Spark to Hilary Mantel, there's a distinct tradition of novels built around young women living together

Two young women move into a student hall of residence in London, and have this conversation:

"It would be nice if we went around and talked like an Edna O'Brien novel. It would suit us."

"Yes it would become us" I said. "We haven't the class for Girls of Slender Means."

Hilary Mantel knows exactly the tradition her 1995 novel An Experiment in Love is tapping into. Set in 1970, it is the perfect template of the women-living-together book: here are the shared clothes – a hideous-sounding but very fashionable fox-fur coat – the rivalries and jealousies, the secrets, the alliances. (And an appearance by an unnamed character who is clearly Margaret Thatcher).

Because after all, what do women do when they grow up? They move to the big city, where they share flats, rooming-houses, hostels or halls together, in twos and threes and fours. One of them is anxiously pursuing a career, but another just wants to get married. One will have an affair with someone who is married, and one will have an unwanted pregnancy. There's a whole genre out there of books (and films and TV) about women sharing flats or student digs - yet it's hard to think of any corresponding literature about men.

Perhaps the knife-edge dynamic of shared accommodation suits the female narrative: is it where you feel safe, so you can go out and conquer the world, but at home are free to wander round in your knickers and borrow each other's clothes? Or is it more a place of stolen stockings, stolen boyfriends, the last egg (labelled) gone missing from the fridge, and notes about the cleaning rota? The women might be loyal sisters in solidarity (lying for each other to parents and boyfriends on the phone, providing a shoulder to cry on) or they might be rivals for careers and men.

In real life, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby shared a flat in a rather go-ahead, avant-garde way after the first world war: there's now a blue plaque outside their building in Doughty Street in London. Brittain said in Testament of Youth (1933) that it wasn't just independence they gained – she makes the telling point that it was the first taste of privacy either of these privileged women from well-off families had had. Both pacifists, they taught, wrote, and pursued wide-ranging political interests.

In Dodie Smith's 1920s-set novel The Town in Bloom, the young women alternate between a "Club" (read: respectable hostel) for young women, and sharing a mews flat – it's called The Heathen because it hasn't been wholly converted from being a stable/garage. The aspiring actresses and their stories are quite strange, but comparison with Valerie Grove's 2011 biography of the author, Dear Dodie, shows that the book (published in 1965) was hugely autobiographical – one of Smith's most surprising remarks is that she and her friends were "just clinging on to their amateur status" regarding their sex life in the period.

Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means (published 1963, but set in 1945) is the ur-novel of women living together: "love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories" of the May of Teck Club. There's the taffeta Schiaparelli evening dress, which can be borrowed from its owner on payment of soap or clothes coupons: "you can't wear it to the Milroy. It's been twice to the Milroy." And there are the arguments, the fascination with food and calories, going up on the roof to chat, the still-shocking ending (thin women win, in a way you couldn't expect).

Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published the same year and again was looking back – this time to "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs", ie 1953. Esther is an intern in New York and living with the other girls in a hotel: there is a similar collection of clothes crises, bitching and sudden friendships. Rona Jaffes's The Best of Everything – a massive 1958 bestseller, a successful Hollywood film and widely accepted as one of the inspirations for Mad Men – is another classic of the genre: three young women are friends, with two flats between them, and going in wildly different directions in their lives. Unrequited love, nervous breakdown, career vs marriage prospects, illegal abortion – it's all there.

Cait and Baba, Edna O'Brien's Country Girls (1960), move to a room in Dublin, go out into the "neon fairyland" of the city and know that "we're living at last". Next thing they're buying black underwear and stockings – no wonder the book was considered shocking when it first came out. They know their room is shabby, but any kind of city life is preferable to the country, and a married lover from the past turns up again. It's a far cry from Brittain and Holtby working for feminism and the League of Nations from their flat.

Of course murder story writers caught on to the possibilities of the shared flat: it's a group of people living in proximity, strangers, with endless motives, possibilities, and perhaps hidden identities. Ruth Rendell has flatshares in, for example, Some Lie and Some Die and Murder Being Once Done, both early 1970s, and Agatha Christie's Third Girl in 1966 describes the logistics in detail: "it's the way girls like living now … the main girl takes a furnished flat, and then shares out the rent … They fix it among themselves which one has the flat to herself which night a week."

That last feature turns up surprisingly rarely in literature: perhaps it was merely how Christie imagined it would be … But then we get to Tales of the City: when Michael Tolliver's friend and room-mate Mona brings home a young man, they decide to – how can we put it? – share even more. Armistead Maupin's 1978 book makes it clear that the days of single-sex accommodation are over: the San Francisco residents of Barbary Lane live together and have a past of shared flats and houses in every possible configuration – and Michael, one of life's natural sharers, takes a prominent role along with her-name-says-it-all Mary Ann Singleton.

The whole rich field raises many questions which I hope readers can answer. Examples, please, of men sharing flats. Which literary flat would be most fun to live in? Time to share your views along with your flats …

FictionHilary MantelMuriel SparkArmistead MaupinAgatha ChristieRuth RendellMoira Redmond
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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

A roundup of some of last week's conversations:

GetOver99:

Hello all, I've come for confession.

I've not been reading so much lately and I don't know how I feel about it. This has been going on for about a month, and may or may not have something to do with a video game released around the same time.
I hope I can be forgiven.

Of course there has been some reading, I've not gone completely to the dark side. I've read some Fitzgerald short stories, the highlight being The Rich Boy. There was a distinct similarity between this story and The Great Gatsby.

I've also been reading some of Phillip Pullman's re-working of Grimms' Fairy Tales. They are brilliant! I think it has made the stories much more aaccessible to younger readers/listeners.

conifer2:

Finished Les Miserables. And I don't mind admitting my eyes filled up at the end. Very impressed with Hugo's handling of dramatic events though the digressions became annoying towards the end.

Have now launched on another mega-read - War and Peace.

aliquidcow:

I've also been given a copy of Chris Ware's Building Stories, which, as many people will tell you, 'isn't really a book', being as it is a box containing 14 different pieces of various shapes and sizes, from mini fold-out pamphlets to a couple of hardcover books and broadsheet-sized newspaper type things, to be read in any order. I'm always paranoid about picking the 'wrong' order to read things in when it's like this, even though there isn't one. I have read a few of the pieces so far and from the various recommendations I've read, I think I picked the right starting one (the gold-spined book, for anyone else who's got it). I'd forgotten how intricate and clever his drawings can be, and how melancholy his work often is.

AlleinAllein:

I hate doing it, but I had to tap out of The Power of The Dog by Don Winslow about halfway through, and were I not reading on a Kindle, it would have happened much sooner. It was just so boring: Winslow's prose stayed consistently flat, his characters were empty cliches and all the vaunted research was dumped into the story rather than made part of it. I only decided enough was enough when I switched from seeing the page number instead of the time remaining in the chapter and realised that at page 300~, there was still almost half the book left.

AggieH:

Thanks to @PushpinderKhaneka's Libyan blog recommendation, I've just been mesmerised by a genuinely original book. Ibrahim al-Koni's The Bleeding of The Stone is intriguing, merciless and (excellently) peculiar. It matter-of-factly shifts shape throughout. There's realism, illusion and supernaturalism; the narrators are two humans and (excellently) a gazelle.

A selected list of the books we'll be reviewing and writing about this week:

Non-fiction:
• The First Bohemians by Vic Gatrell
• Darling Monster by Diana Cooper
• The King's Grave by Michael Jones and Philippa Langley
• Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner
• Yeah Yeah Yeah by Bob Stanley
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99)
• Penelope Fitgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee

Fiction:
• The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble
• Mount Merrion by Justin Quinn
• Sycamore Row by John Grisham
• The Encyclopedia of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg
• Pig's Foot by Carlos Acosta

Children's:
• Stay Where You Are and Then Leave by John Boyne

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Amazon should shelve the reading recommendations

Irrelevant, ill-judged and unwelcome, I could do without the online giant's advice on my next book purchase

Does it annoy you when a bookseller like Amazon keeps emailing you after a purchase with further suggestions for what it considers similar books? It seems to me that that the last thing I'd want to read after finishing a book is another just the same.

It's not as if the suggestions are much use anyway. This week they tell me I would like Confessions of A Wild Child, Becoming Johnny Vegas, and Demon Dentist – none of them like anything I've read before, or would want to read. After I ordered Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, about Malaysians going to China to find their fortunes, they told me that Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge was similar: "It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dotcom boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town", as they put it. Uh, sorry?

I might, I suppose, be interested, when reading non-fiction, in knowing other authors who argue over similar ground. That is of course the way most tutors and lecturers prepare reading lists for their students. But the emotional experience of reading fiction should be exciting and fresh. So, after the depth of Laurence Durrell or Virginia Woolf, one needs – not another Justine or Mrs Dalloway – but a page-turner like Sherlock Holmes or one of John Le Carré's Smiley novels.

One colleague asked whether I felt the same about music. Curiously not. Listening to music is so much a purely abstract emotional experience that I often do want more of the same, be it jazz or classical. I will admit to difficulty once words become involved, in songs and to an extent with opera: I can't take Joni Mitchell after a session of Bob Dylan or Carole King. That's the joy of the iPod Shuffle: you never know what is coming next, but it is very unlikely to be the same sort of sound, unless your personal collection is very narrow.

The exception with books is wanting to read more by the same author. The excitement of discovery has stayed with me from my youth. Once I had read the first Tolkien, I was desperate for more, and it was slow to satisfy. JP Donleavy, thank heaven, kept producing fast, before stopping dead almost for ever. I experienced the same elation going down to the bookshop with my daughter at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter.

I have to confess to one other exception, the recommendations we give to our children. It's the pleasure that comes years after you are no longer wanted to read at the bedside, when they enjoy a book that holds memories for you. Then I fear that I am as guilty as Amazon in going to the bookshelf murmuring, "If you enjoyed that, I wonder if you would like this?"

BooksellersInternetE-commerceAmazon.comTim Maby
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Poem of the week: Finding the Keys by Robin Robertson

A vivid tableau of seasonal metamorphoses is as subtle as the biology keeping nature turning

This week's poem, "Finding the Keys", is from Robin Robertson's latest collection, Hill of Doors, just shortlisted for the latest TS Eliot prize. Symphonic in structure, interlaced with sinewy free-verse translations of extracts from Nonnus's Dionysiaca and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the collection has many more doors than a single poem can unlock. But "Finding the Keys" adds potently earthy harmonics to the metaphysical mix, and seems a significant poem in an overall trajectory from turbulence to equilibrium – neither of which, of course, is uncontested, or less than complex.

The first complexity you might notice is of the punning kind. The seeds of the ash-tree are commonly known as "keys". This sparks off a metaphorical infiltration of foliage by the locksmith's gadgetry: "handles", "hinges", "key-holes", "latches". Metaphorical implications apart, these are descriptively suggestive, a fresh-minted visualisation of the clean-cut shapes of twigs and leaves against sky.

The separate descriptive summaries forming lines one and two of the opening couplet lack a finite verb. All four sections of the poem, in fact, are engineered to contrast this kind of vivid "jotting" with fully-formed short sentences, like the interplay of keys and locks. The device gives each trio of couplets a unique rhythmic pattern, in which punctuation (the placing of different degrees of silence) plays a finely judged role.

Winter metamorphoses swiftly into spring in the opening segment, and it seems no more than a hairsbreadth from the bulbs' early shoots to the leafing trees, from anticipatory silence to the soft, excited sounds of life. The summoning of the deer perhaps helps us imagine how it might be to hear so acutely that we can pick up the "tick and crack" of opening buds. Energy is coiled in the verbal noun, "spur" (Dylan Thomas's "green fuse" comes to mind) besides an image of sharp-tipped new foliage.

High summer illuminates the second section. The stony riverbed's "small-change colours" are named in shiny metals that re-connect to locks and door-keys. There's a preponderance of marvellous, fragmentary highlights throughout ("The long // spill of birdsong. Flowers, all/ turned to face the hot sky") finally sealed with the simplest of simple sentences, "Nothing stirs".

Clearly, to read the poem as a series of tableaux representing the four seasons would be to reduce it. Each segment describes transition, and each participates in a larger process of recurrence and change. The deer return in the next vignette, now making a seasonal disturbance of their own with "the woody clack of antlers". Those despised parts-of-speech, adjectives, earn every bit of their space in this poem, and "woody" is a particularly evocative choice, uniting the deer with their natural element. Then there are the colour-words, denoting different tonal values and playing their own part in the poem's negotiations between symmetry and asymmetry.

Pairs ("yellow and red", "stone and pink") both connect and disconnect. A single colour-word becomes an occasion. So when the "yellow and red" that signify the breaking down of carbohydrate in the still-living leaf mutate to "amber", this is the end. In a day, the trees are "lanterned" – a transformation of noun into verb which conveys rapid transition. Then the lanterns themselves are "blown". This is a particularly associative verb, opening up images of breakage: frail glass blown out, lightbulbs blown, high winds that sweep away everything but the "empty stars". Again, the unit is carefully closed, this time with the beautifully cadenced anadiplosis of "Smoke in the air; the air turning". The mid-line semicolon is perfect – and even looks like a keyhole.

Winter, no less than autumn, has its shifts and ambiguities. The first two couplets of the final segment are so "hinged" that both the clouds (rose and stone are cloud-tints) and the blackbird are implicated in the promise of snow. A colon asserts the bird's separation, setting off the contrast of its immaculate symmetry with the bunched, untidy "victory of worms". The syntax again becomes fragmented, and earlier images of regeneration are confirmed and developed: "The winged seed of the maple,/ the lost keys under the ash". The last line, with a jolt of relief and optimism, finds the keys where they should be (and were, all along?) These keys will unlock the genetic code for new ash-trees. Perhaps, after "the many griefs of Autumn", they also signify more-than-seasonal unlocking and rebirth.

Finding the Keys

The set seed and the first bulbs showing.
The silence that brings the deer.

The trees are full of handles and hinges;
you can make out keyholes, latches in the leaves.

Buds tick and crack in the sun, break open
slowly in a spur of green.

*

The small-change colours of the river bed:
these stones of copper, silver, gold.

The rock-rose in the waste-ground
finding some way to bloom. The long

spill of birdsong. Flowers, all
turned to face the hot sky. Nothing stirs.

*

That woody clack of antlers.
In yellow and red, the many griefs of autumn.

The dawn light through amber leaves
and the trees are lanterned, blown

the next day to empty stars.
Smoke in the air; the air, turning.

*

Under a sky of stone and pink
faring in from the north and promising snow:

the blackbird.
In his beak, a victory of worms.

The winged seed of the maple,
the lost keys under the ash.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway and Ayn Rand are among the writers under review this week

A classic, as Italo Calvino says, has "never finished saying what it has to say". This week LakerFan has been hearing some more from HG Wells, whose SF classic The Time Machine is "one of the best works in the English language".

In my opinion, the theme that continues to run through the narrative is this: 'Is that all there is?' The link to all events is exasperation. The Time Traveller is so confident about his expectations that he travels without luggage. An exasperating and comedic surprise awaits. I love this book.

Daveportivo headed back to the beginning of the 20th century with Ernest Hemingway's first world war classic A Farewell to Arms.

I was caught completely off guard by A Farewell to Arms … Hemingway's style allows his novel to take on great scope without ever feeling burdened or even epic. It's rooted and human even as one of the grandest dramas in human history unfolds. Best of all, it's a novel that, without force-feeding any great heroic or moralistic moments, will have its readers longing for its characters' survival.

Jonathan51 tackled a literary reputation of a different sort with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Rand's dystopian vision may be "frustrating, repetitive and self indulgent", but Jonathan51 did "persevere", finding to his "amazement" that "the plot actually started to grab me".

I am an avowed social democrat (your basic modern liberal who believes that fairness and equality and a welfare state apparatus are essential for a civilised society), so my motivation on reading this was to see the appeal of the ideological opposition … Basically it has to be taken as propaganda, and read either as that or as science/alternative reality fiction to be enjoyed.

Thanks for all your reviews. If I've mentioned one of yours, drop an email to Claire Armitstead at claire.armitstead@theguardian.com, and we'll send you a book from the cupboard.

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In praise of Nicholas Fisk and his odourless Great Aunt Emma

Forty years ago the harmless-looking Grinny brought taboo-breaking terror to children's bookshelves. Now Fisk is back in print to haunt a new generation

"Beth is right – Grinny isn't real." It's 40 years since the publication of Nicholas Fisk's ingenious children's science fiction novel about what happens when long-lost relative Great Aunt Emma turns up on Timothy and Beth's doorstep, but the title alone is enough to induce nostalgic terrors.

Great Aunt Emma, better known as Grinny, is a stranger to the children, but all she needs to say to adults is "You remember me", and they accept her at once. Gradually, though, we sense that there's something very odd about this "queer old bird": she never talks about the past, she's strangely uninformed about the way the world works and she doesn't smell. It's seven-year-old Beth who first senses that something is not right (cue lashings of 70s-style sexism about female irrationality and intuition), but as the evidence mounts up, older brother Timothy joins in with playing detective. The adults remain oblivious as the children run experiments on Grinny: to test her assumptions, her fears, her powers (in mind-training card games, "she decimated – obliterated – smashed us. Her performance was not merely outstanding but phenomenal. Her memory wasn't just retentive, it was Total Recall"). With superlative pacing, narrated in a nicely pre-adolescent mix of fear and bravado, matters come to a spectacular head.

The genius of Grinny is that the monster arrives in the shape of a little old lady whom nobody can ask to leave: in real life, elderly relatives can often seem, well, alien to the young, with intimacy an obligation rather than a choice. "There was a slight scene last night about kissing GAE goodnight," reports Timothy. "Later I asked what Beth had been pulling faces for and she said, 'Ugh! I hate kissing her, kissing Aunt Emma makes me want to puke!', etc, etc." Grinny's malevolence, and the children's aggression towards her, are both taboo-breaking narrative gambits, and Fisk has gleeful fun with the contrasts between the trappings of old age and the unknowable force behind them. Timothy asks Grinny why only the adults get hypnotised: "'See if you can guess,' she said. Again, her voice had that horrible flirty ring to it, the tone of voice you heard when respectable old ladies try to wheedle shop assistants."

Grinny comes back into print for Fisk's 90th birthday, packaged with its 1984 sequel, You Remember Me!, which puts a prescient emphasis on celebrity worship and jingoism. But these are far from the only gems in Fisk's extensive bibliography. My childhood favourites were Space Hostages, a cold war thriller in which a group of children end up in charge of a spaceship, and A Rag, a Bone and a Hank of Hair, about a future society that clones people from the past. Shuttling between shiny futurist dystopia and cramped second world war sitting room, the latter culminates in an unsettling finale, both tragic and strangely open-ended, that has stayed with me ever since.

Children and teenagersScience fictionFictionJustine Jordan
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Ghosts of books past haunt ideas for literary Christmas present(s)

Whether it's sequels, rewritten classics, ideas raided from history, or autobiographies, there's a retro look to the gifts we're most likely to receive from the bookshops this year

Visit your local bookshop now the pre-Christmas buying season has begun, and you'll find fiction tables awash with sequels, reworkings and continuations. Bestselling storytellers – Stephen King (Doctor Sleep), Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy) and John Grisham (Sycamore Row, a sequel to A Time to Kill) – have looked back to their own past. Literary authors have produced festive treats that sometimes update their predecessors (Joanna Trollope modernising Sense and Sensibility), but more often are pastiches set in the original period: William Boyd's homage to Ian Fleming (Solo), Sebastian Faulks's to PG Wodehouse (Jeeves and the Wedding Bells), Jill Paton Walsh's latest Dorothy L Sayers revival (The Late Scholar).

Many of the above have been the most heavily promoted and most talked-about fiction titles of the autumn season, bound to dominate the bestseller charts; and while others have taken on contemporary or near-contemporary settings, they are prone to use lenses borrowed from earlier novelists, with Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) and Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge) indebted to Dickens's baggy city novels, and Dave Eggers's Silicon Valley satire The Circle drawing on Orwell and other dystopian fiction.

Four of the Man Booker shortlist – including Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, the third historical novel to win in the past five years – were largely or wholly set in the past. Five of the Samuel Johnson finalists are either history or historical biography.

As that suggests, non-fiction is, if anything, even more prone to look backwards. Move on to the inherently retrospective biography section, and the big titles are either settling scores (memoirs by Morrissey and Alex Ferguson), having fun with the writer's past follies (Jennifer Saunders) or celebrating the late great (Charles Moore's Thatcher biography). This is not new, but the shortage of other kinds of non-fiction – reportage, current affairs, essays, polemics – seems more marked each year.

In 2013, even the most-touted cookery titles give a sense of deja vu, with Paul Hollywood proselytising for the baking revival and Jamie Oliver and Nigel Slater producing guides to simple, quick meals that recall the cooking on a budget manuals of yesteryear. It may not be a merry Christmas for book-lovers, but it looks bound to be a retrospective one.

FictionAutobiography and memoirBiographyChristmasFood and drinkJohn Dugdale
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Ray Bradbury's unknown universe of realist fiction

A legendary figure in SF and fantasy, Bradbury was also a – little-known – master at depicting the everyday

Sixty years ago Ray Bradbury, one of the finest ever writers of science fiction and fantasy, was sitting down in a Dublin hotel to write the screenplay for John Huston's adaptation of Moby-Dick. While the writer, who died last year aged 91, is rightly considered one of the masters of the fantastic, especially in the short story form, his months in Ireland sowed the seeds for a wonderful legacy of realist stories.

It was late October in 1953 when Bradbury took up residence in the (now demolished) Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin, and his time there formed the inspiration for a number of stories. One of the most striking of these is "The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge", first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1961 as "The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge". The protagonist is a writer working on a screenplay, staying with his wife (Bradbury was in Dublin with his wife Maggie), who finds he cannot leave his hotel without attracting the attentions of a cohort of colourful street-people. One in particular fascinates him, a cap-less accordion player on the O'Connell Bridge. "The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O'Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free."

At first suspicious and frightened of the beggars, disbelieving their hard-luck stories, the writer becomes obsessed by the singer, pondering whether his lack of headwear is merely a ruse to elicit sympathy or a genuine sign of poverty. It's a salutary tale, especially resonant in today's economic climate. Asking the hotel manager how the needy can be distinguished from the conmen, he is told: "Some have been at it longer than others, and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn't. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel."

The encounters with the beggars – particularly one woman holding a baby – appear again in Bradbury's semi-autobiographical 1992 novel about writing the Moby-Dick screenplay, Green Shadows, White Whale, replete with tales of Dublin life. Bradbury had a flair for recording the subtle surrealities of Ireland – witness his short story "The Anthem Sprinters", about the very Dublin sport of seeing who could flee the final curtain on a movie before the band struck up the Irish national anthem, obliging the film-goers to stand in solemn appreciation and cutting down valuable post-cinema drinking time.

Bradbury evidently fell in love with Ireland and wrote in a letter to his friend Dolph Sharp (reproduced on the website of Sharp's daughter EE King): "The country beyond town is a long soft green endless Emerald Country, the country around Oz, hills, rivers, thousand miles of blackberry bushes, great autumn-fired trees (my first autumn in 20 years!) and landscapes of such beauty as to give you chills." Perhaps, in an alternative reality, Bradbury stayed in Dublin and eschewed science fiction and fantasy altogether, instead becoming one of the great recorders of Irish life, comparable to Joyce or JP Donleavy.

Bradbury didn't limit himself to Ireland, of course – some of his greatest realist tales are set in Mexico, where he travelled in 1945, locating Indian masks for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum. One of his most powerful stories full stop is "El Dia De Muerte", Hemingway-esque in its sudden brutality and hot, dusty imagery, about a boy's anticipation at the Day of the Dead celebrations intercut with the primal, beautiful horror of the bullfight and the angrypresence of a shiny automobile bound for tragedy.

Bradbury's non-fantasy stories are perhaps all the more special for being hidden away in his many collections, among the stories of Mars and invisible boys and spooky smalltown America, rather than separated out in a deliberate bid to delineate between the mainstream and the fantastical. Like Bradbury's poetic view of Ireland, they are no less magical and are indeed of "such beauty as to give you chills".

Ray BradburyFictionScience fictionFantasyDavid Barnett
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Why becoming a mother has censored my reading

They used to be some of my favourites, but it's no longer possible to enjoy stories where children are in danger

Over the past couple of years an invisible force has deprived me of some of my best-loved reading matter. The culprit is not bookworm, damp or light-fingered bibliophile pals. It's parenthood.

Pre-infant, I used to crave thrillers in which children – that most precious thing, in the abstract – were lost or endangered. With such high stakes came a frequent, fast-paced urgency that found me willing the good guys on while remaining insulated from the horror's personal application. Reginald Hill, Mark Billingham – compressing myself into a secure corner of the sofa, brew, biscuits and blood-curdler to hand, used to be one of my greatest pleasures.

I'm a theatre director, and have directed tragedies such as The Duchess of Malfi, in which the murderous malcontent Bosola utters the chilling line: "Some other strangle the children", without turning a hair. Euripides could hurl the baby Astyanax from the walls of Troy without my needing to put down the text and flee the room. I could enjoy Martin McDonagh without distress.

A friend in the throes of parenthood warned me soberly that 25% of the world's literature and art would be lost to me as soon as I had a baby. Merrily child-free at the time, I scoffed, knocked back a beaker of the blushful Hippocrene, and stayed out till 3am.

Here is a brief selection of the books I've recently had to stop reading, physically prevented by a nauseous, hormonal impulse to protect the imperilled victims:

Val McDermid's The Vanishing Point, in which a child is abducted at an airport. This saddened me no end. In a small way, it encapsulated a great change – my old delight in a new thriller by a favourite writer and an evening stretching away towards the vanishing point is a thing of the past. I can take the sleepless nights and potty-training. I didn't expect parenthood to steal my penny dreadfuls too.

Joyce Carol Oates's The Cornmaiden and Other Nightmares, in which a group of classmates, led by the charismatic Jude, decide to sacrifice one of their peers. The novella of the title opens with Leah waiting at home for Marissa, her "innocent girl with hair the colour of cornsilk", who has never been late home from school – until today. I picked up, put down and picked it up repeatedly, but the panicky flutterings in my stomach meant I eventually had to admit defeat. Again, I've always enjoyed being scared witless by stories – and I dearly love tautly-written, keep-you-guessing psychological horror – but apparently, without my brain being consulted, a committee headed by my uterus and adrenal glands has decreed that certain subjects are now verboten.

Finally, I had to turn away from Edward Bond's Saved, a play in which a baby is stoned to death. I've lost the detachment I once had as a director, the ability to focus solely on how a play will look and sound on stage, and how to sidestep technical issues while ramping up the emotional impact for the audience. It alarms me to see how clearly and unexpectedly I have been affected – I will never now be able to direct or read this play.

In the past, I've often given up on books I was bored by, but I never used to experience this unwilled self-censorship, like new lizard-eyelids that drop automatically when prohibited reading matter appears. Has anyone else lost favourite authors or genres after kids appeared on the scene – or after other irrevocable changes to your life? Is 25% an accurate ballpark figure? And do you ever get your cool detachment back?

FictionVal McDermidEdward BondJoyce Carol OatesImogen Russell Williams
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