The Guardian's Blog, page 188

I Am Legend author Richard Matheson was himself a real legend

The man behind the best ever vampire novel was a major inspiration to innumerable stars of SF and horror

I am meant to be writing a blog about how I Am Legend, by the late, immensely great, Richard Matheson, is the king of vampire novels. But after finding my old copy on the shelf downstairs, I've become somewhat distracted, and would really rather just get on with reading it.

The image Matheson provides, at the start of the novel, of Robert Neville alone in Los Angeles, is one of the most chilling, the most believable, in post-apocalyptic fiction. Shifting from practical and unemotional, to lonely and furious, Neville sits in his barricaded living room, trying to ignore the cries of the vampires, "their snarling and fighting among themselves", coming from the other side of the walls. Later, "he went from house to house and used up all his stakes. He had forty-seven stakes". So deadpan. So unnerving.

Then there are Matheson's vampires – written in 1954, and so much scarier, so much more interesting and memorable and believable, than the hordes of pallid high–school students who keep springing up today (and than the mobs in the Will Smith film version). Ben Cortman, howling outside his house every night. The corpses who walk the streets. And that ending! I won't give it away, for those who haven't read it, because it is just so disturbingly brilliant – but I'll remind those of you who already love the novel of the spine-chilling last line: "I am legend."

And so was Matheson, to so many readers and writers. In my edition of I Am Legend, Brian Lumley is quoted saying "a long time ago I read [the book], and I started writing horror at about the same time. Been at it ever since. Matheson inspires, it's as simple as that." Ray Bradbury, no less, calls him "one of the most important writers of the 20th century", Stephen King has said Matheson is "the author who influenced me the most as a writer", and that I Am Legend was "an inspiration to me", while the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the novel "perhaps the very peak of all paranoid SF".

Last year, the Horror Writers Association named it vampire novel of the century, ahead of the likes of Salem's Lot and Interview with a Vampire; Anne Rice took her loss in good spirits, saying it wasn't hard to be beaten by "a man whose stories were inspiring me when I was still a kid writing everything with a ballpoint pen in a school notebook".

(I love, by the way, Matheson's acceptance speech for this award: he calls it "a rather dubious but interesting distinction", and speaks of how he first read Bram Stoker's novel during basic army training, on the toilet at night. "Why, I don't know. I was pretty tired, I should have gone to sleep," he said. "I enjoyed it at the time, never knowing I was going to write a book about vampires and certainly not that it would be derived from the idea I had when I first saw Bela Lugosi.")

Tributes have, of course, been pouring in for Matheson since news of his death was announced, with a particularly moving one from Harlan Ellison. "If there is anyone out there who didn't know I worshipped him, from his first story, Born of Man and Woman (which I read the day it was published back in 1950), to his second story, Witch War, on through every book – western, mystery, fantasy – for a supernova lifetime of writing mentioned in the same breath with Poe and Borges, then they haven't read my many encomia to Richard's singular top-of-the-mountain talent … Frankly, I am downsmashed," he wrote.

Steven Spielberg said that "Richard Matheson's ironic and iconic imagination created seminal science-fiction stories and gave me my first break when he wrote the short story and screenplay for Duel. His Twilight Zones were among my favourites, and he recently worked with us on Real Steel. For me, he is in the same category as Bradbury and Asimov."

"He was a giant, and YOU KNOW HIS STORIES, even if you think you don't," tweeted Neil Gaiman. The horror author Joe Hill wrote: "Never met Richard Matheson, but his stories have been life companions. Books are human souls, in analog form. Go read his."

What a sad year it has been so far for the passing of science fiction legends: Jack Vance, Iain (M) Banks, and now Richard Matheson. I'm going to take Hill's advice and carry on reading I Am Legend, with The Shrinking Man lined up next. RIP Richard Matheson.

HorrorFictionScience fictionRay BradburyIsaac AsimovStephen KingNeil GaimanBram StokerAlison Flood
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Live webchat with Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer will be online from 1pm BST on Friday 28 June to discuss DH Lawrence and more. Post your questions now

Sam Jordison

       

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

Goodyorkshirelass last week reminded me that we are getting close to that time of the year when we must think about which books to take on holiday. I've kept Gone Girl for my week away. This has meant I've had to run away from many conversations so I don't hear any spoilers. I hope it doesn't disappoint. What are you planning to take to read on holiday?

The books you were reading last week

Northumbriana:

I have just finished my first Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. It was mind-blowing, and brilliant. I intend to read more, but I might need to give the brain a rest first!

richardpierce:

Slightly intimidated by the length of the posts already here.

Am currently reading McEwan's Sweet Tooth - not very far in, but already have doubts. Seems like a huge info-dump with not much dialogue. Will reserve final judgment until I've finished.

veritypontiki:

Just fininishing Karl Barth's Dogmatics in Outline. It took a while to get into but it is as rich as a chocolate cake. I think I may have theological indigestion at the moment.

7sisters:

'The Panopticon' - Jenni Fagan;
This is a book by a first time Scottish writer of novels, Jenni Fagan is a published poet and it shows in the prose. The poetry in this book shines through the horrors of the story of lives lived in care today. By the end of the book you care for characters and wonder what will happen to them-a sign of a good story.

Our review list

Non-Fiction

• • Careless People by Sarah Churchwell
• Permanent Present Tense by Suzanne Corkin
• Lost, Stolen or Shredded by Rick Gekoski
• Fragile Empire by Ben Judah
• Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats
• Italian Ways by Tim Parks

Fiction

• Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain
• Tomorrow I Will be Twenty Years Old by Alain Mabanckou
• Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
• Adjacent by Christopher Priest
• Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston
• All The Birds Singing by Evie Wyld

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Summer reading is a holiday essential | Robert McCrum

An essential piece of travel kit, these books pack imaginative getaways of their own

There may not be much summer to speak of but – rain or shine – there's always the inexorable publishing cycle. We can still look forward to an imminent burst of summer (and beach) reading as the books pages limber up for the holiday season.

This is one of those rare moments in the year when the reading public comes together as a community, instinctively making a number of popular choices. A similar national conversation, at a slightly higher level, occurs in the run-up to a big prize like the Man Booker. It's a faint reminder of the kind of homogenous literary community that existed in the days of the Net Book Agreement, and bookshops BA (Before Amazon).

Last year, Fifty Shades was the (more than slightly shameful) airport No 1. Not long before, Victoria Hislop's The Island – ardently promoted by Richard & Judy – was another runaway hit. Further back, I can remember the time when Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel in verse, a work of great charm and erudition, was a popular choice. So it goes. This year, expect to see a lot of Dan Brown and plenty of Hilary Mantel, with a welcome scattering of Gill Hornby's The Hive, as you navigate poolside past the sun-loungers.

In the past, readers advertised their choices, willy nilly, through upturned covers. With the Kindle, the acquisition of holiday reading is both much easier (no reason not to take The Collected Works of Austen or Dickens) – and much more discreet. An e-reader will lighten your load and also disguise your choice.

Whatever the format, flying (and flight) goes with books. I would find it hard, if not impossible, to take a plane journey without a book or a notebook. Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest says that she never travels without her diary because – as Oscar Wilde has her put it – "One should always have something sensational to read on the train". A book for a plane should be engrossing, but not so compelling that you've finished it before you reach the departure gate.

There's more than just a question of entertainment at issue here. I'd suggest that books can offer two kinds of flight: an escape to other worlds in the unfettered space of our heads; and also, if we're lucky, some inspiration too, a take-off for the earthbound mind. In short, a magic carpet for the spirit and the imagination.

In my own travels into the world of airy nothing, I have some favourite companions: Joy In The Morning by PG Wodehouse; Like Life by Lorrie Moore; Nostromo by Joseph Conrad; The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; Women in Love by DH Lawrence; USA by John Dos Passos; and The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. A mixed bag, for many moods: that's what holiday reading demands.

Here's another dividend from the digital revolution. With a wi-fi connection, we can download impromptu choices anywhere and at any time. Summer, beach and holiday reading has never been so liberated. All we need now is some sunshine.

Summer readingFictionRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: Pissarro's Orchards by Marianne Burton

An impressionist's manifesto for more naturalistic, less grandiose painting also makes the case for – and expresses – a more immediate poetry

This week, it's time to relax and enjoy a fruit-laden summer cocktail. Marianne Burton's "Pissarro's Orchards" is a kind of postmodern sonnet, with the names of 13 different examples of fruit woven into its 14 lines. It's from Burton's first collection, She Inserts the Key, which is itself a variegated garden of delights.

Something that always endears me to a new poet is seeing the pleasure she or he takes in language for its own sake. Of course, that capacity need not always be on show: it's fundamental to good writing, after all, and no less to poems that conceal the verbal craft which powers them. And there are plenty of such poems in She Inserts the Key. Burton has a gift for short, lyrically incisive stories. The atmospherics of specific times and places are memorably recorded in an extended sequence, "Meditations on the Hours", which forms the connective tissue of the collection.

Like many young poets, Burton savours the bizarre anecdote (there's the obese woman who, post-mortem, has turned into a large bar of soap, for instance). More unusually, she can write in a fresh way about the natural world – even bird-poems which don't induce immediate symptoms of avian déjà vu. Nonetheless, the poems foregrounding verbal technique – concrete poems, a riff on anagrams, and "Pissarro's Orchard" itself – are more than makeweights. They're fun, and interactive (with no accompanying technology for the reader to swear at). They're a reminder of poetry's unique status as an art whose subject is inevitably, partly, language itself, and an assurance that the poet is confident enough to know when to let the words call the tune.

"Pissarro's Orchards" is a loosely-rhymed dramatic monologue, spoken by Camille Pissarro, one of the first and finest exponents of impressionism. Pissarro took painting out of the studio into daylight and fresh air, to respond to real people in real landscapes. I imagine he is a significant figure for Burton, especially in her "Meditations on the Hours", where the response-to-the-moment has something in common with impressionist technique.

Pissarro painted many orchards, sometimes in radiant spring blossom, and sometimes at harvest-time, with fruit-pickers at work. But it was a rather pleasing still-life, Fruit in a Round Basket which particularly helped me appreciate Burton's poem. While the contents of Pissarro's basket are a lot less varied and exotic, I was struck by the analogy of a round basket with the sonnet-form. The weaving-in of the fruit-names suggests a hands-on local craft, and the tactile pleasure of objects retaining a homely thumb-print or seam. The names are looped over the ends and beginnings of lines, sometimes more-or-less audibly ("ban/anacondas"), sometimes more easily seen than heard ("gang/rapes"), but it's not a device the poet wants to hide, or not for long. As if inviting the reader into the workshop, she provides an explanatory footnote on the same page.

True to Pissarro's revisionism, the first eight lines amount to a manifesto, directed against grandiosity in art. The diction is sometimes slightly mannered, as if the painter were making a formal speech to the academicians of the salon and mocking their language as well as their prescriptions and proscriptions. His description of Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting, Cupid Complaining to Venus is deliciously arch: "No feather-hatted naked madam,/ son complaining as he is stung by nectar/-inebriated bees." Classical myth, religious set-pieces and "calendar art" are equally repudiated: "… no impudent kitten, its paw/pawing its mother". The repeated paw-dabbing it neatly pictured here, whilst the fruit-name is both immediately audible and visible, suggesting the way such art, too, plays to our most obvious sentiments.

After the list of "no-nos" the sonnet's turn introduces the artistically radical subjects Pissarro favoured. Although the word-game goes on, the diction is now precise and simple ("perhaps a woman/gossiping as she strings pea-trellises") and swiftly evokes the artist's characteristic subjects. His farmhands and serving-maids are thoroughly naturalistic as they stoop to their work or pause for a chat, yet there's an implicit social idealism in the paintings which the poem picks up when it talks of the "common plan", "taint, rot and worm avoided" and "one hope,/ardent and plain."

Pissarro applied radical ideas to his politics as well as his art. Much of the fruit in the poem is neither European nor orchard-grown. The orchards of the title are perhaps metaphorical, the fruit a symbol of Pissarro's cornucopia of ideas about painting and social justice, and his seminal influence on younger artists. It's a reminder, too, that he was born in the then-Danish West Indies, to a Sephardic Jewish father and Dominican Spanish mother. He inherits plantains and oranges as well as apples and pears.

Pissarro's Orchards

Fruit trees are beauty in themselves. I shall ban
anacondas seducing Eve, slithering over her lap
pleading for her to take a bite. I shall veto gang
rapes of nymphs by satyrs; will have no gods or
angels. No feather-hatted naked madam,
son complaining as he is stung by nectar-
inebriated bees; no impudent kitten, its paw
pawing its mother; no Susanna ogled by an elder.
Berry, leaf, blossom are enough. Perhaps a woman
gossiping as she strings pea trellises, an old man
daring to stoop and hoe, a haymaking group,
each worker committed to a common plan,
– taint, rot and worm avoided – one hope,
ardent and plain. Harvest is sufficient passion.

Note: This sonnet considers Camille Pissarro's philosophy of fit subjects for art. It includes the names of fruits broken between the beginning and end of lines.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

A golden review of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, an encounter with Rebecca Solnit and a plunge into Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane

Summer is finally here – if not necessarily in the real world, then at least in the cloudless world of Poster poems – bringing with it a sun-drenched review of Chad Harbach's feted debut novel, The Art of Fielding. Swithering begins by evoking the "honey-toned" charms of baseball, recalling the "warm summer evening long ago" when she first watched a game. She's not sure she envies Hardbach, though, whose novel struggles to live up to "that massive advance, the pre-publication hype".

Harbach is no modern Melville ... despite his playful allusions to classical and nineteenth century literature and his whimsically-named characters, he spouts no fire and brimstone and his plot interludes on the art of fielding are mercifully shorter than Melville's asides on blubber and scrimshaw. Indeed his smooth, lulling prose so rarely sings or shocks that I found little to flag for quotes beyond Henry Skrimshander's reflections on the terror and loneliness of the star rookie player, "You can't follow me here... you'll never know what this is like."

Some will compare Harbach with Jonathan Franzen, she continues, who blessed the jacket with a quote, but "mercifully Harbach lacks Franzen's tendency to bludgeon the reader over the head with social commentary."

Though she doesn't intend to damn The Art of Fielding with faint praise it is the admirable quality of hardback's "quality paper" and "elegant font" which seems to spark swithering's enthusiasm, and not Harbach's "plodding" novel.

When his characters face high stakes, he swerves, turns away: a shocking event morphs into a mere bumped head, a deus ex machina averts a college scandal, a much-dreaded former lover arrives from out of town only to fade like a Republican candidate after a Primary, a love triangle threatening heartbreak and broken bones is tolerated with no more than grumpy animosity, a minor pothole on the road of true bro-mance.

Of course stories need not always be full of incident, she sighs, but "any conflicts of heart and soul in The Art of Fielding are handled too gently to leave blood on the page".

RedBirdFlies is another disappointed reader, not because Rebecca Solnit's account of her mother's slide into dementia, The Faraway Nearby, is no good, but because it pales in comparison to her "spectacular" ability to captivate an audience. Full to the brim with an event hosted by Alex Clark at the London Literature Festival, RedBirdFlies pays tribute to the "anecdotes and philosophical meanderings of Solnit in person, as she spoke without pause, the voice of a poet". Solnit's account of "the year that passed while her mother was regressing" is "good", but on the page she "stops short of going too deep into her subject".

I understand this reluctance, for that percentage of women out there who had the kind of relationship with their mother that Solnit did, there will be many nods of the head in recognition of what she says without having to go into detail.

The review finishes by returning to the live event, where RedBirdFlies doesn't quite get the chance to ask if a challenging relationship, such as Solnit describes, can also be a gift. We'll never know how the author would have answered, but for RedBirdFlies the answer is pretty clear: "She may not have been able to fix her mother, but it may not be a coincidence that Rebecca Solnit is outspoken and active in terms of her support of nature, the environment, politics and art."

TBagpuss is far from disappointed with Neil Gaiman's latest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, suggesting that it's more than a "very good book. In fact, I think it is a great book." Gaiman captures vividly the impotence of children "in the face of adult power", the fears and joys of childhood and the disconnect between happiness and contentment.

This is a Gaiman book, so it's no surprise that there is magic and myth. Names, (true names) are important, and the triumvirate of the Hempstock women are undoubtedly related to the triple goddess of maiden, mother and crone.

Fans will also be prepared for the lack of a safe, happy ending, TBagpuss continues, "but there is hope. (And grief, and memories, and sacrifice, and fear, and love) And there is comfort, too." This is a book which TBagpuss says is to be read "again and again", a book which will resonate with those who remember childhood, and spark the memories of those who have forgotten.

Thanks for all this week's reviews. If I've mentioned yours, jog my memory at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk, and I'll see if I can find you something "very good", or even "great" from our cupboards.

Richard Lea
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Digital-only imprints in the ebook era: inclusive or exploitative?

New digital options from the big publishers offer opportunities and limitations. It's just a case of reading the small print

Poor old big-name publishers. Stick to your guns by insisting on the value of your traditional, print-centric gatekeeping, and you'll be shunted straight to the top of the endangered species list. Pander to the plebs by putting a fancy cover on fan fiction, and you'll be decried as an opportunist whore who has swapped literary values for trending hashtags. It's enough to make you run screaming out of your Bloomsbury redbrick and set up in a cheap little Hackney warehouse with a bunch of fixie-riding digital natives who can knock out a Dickens alternate reality game before breakfast.

For those brave soldiers who have remained in the barracks of trade publishing (the smell of fear and ink catching in their nostril hairs), digital only-imprints must seem like a promising hybrid. First, take a brand that both readers and authors trust. Next, put said brand in a genre-specific digital cage, with a ringmaster offering some editorial and production support. Kick off the show with a few established writers and, finally, allow the unsigned, self-published or unpalatably niche pen-monkeys in to play.

Random House has been one of the earliest and most comprehensive adopters, with Hydra (sci-fi and fantasy), Alibi (mysteries and thrillers), Flirt (new adult, or soft porn) and Loveswept (romance and women's fiction). Harlequin UK has Carina (multiple genres) while Little, Brown is breaking with convention to focus on literary and non-fiction with Blackfriars. This month alone, Penguin, Kensington, F+W Media, HarperCollins and Bloomsbury have announced new or expanded digital imprints. Democracy, speed and low overheads, plus author support and brand heft: what's not to love?

Cue a scandal around the "predatory" Hydra contracts, which have been derided for offering no advance, deducting costs such as editing and design, and retaining rights for the term of copyright. Follow that with Orna Ross, director of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), pleading with writers at the Literary Consultancy's conference, Writing in a Digital Age, to be "extremely wary" of "the new vanity publishing". Sit back, scroll through your RSS feeds, and watch the name-calling ensue.

"It's easy to see why this option is attractive for a publisher," explains Ross, who recently published an ALLi manual for authors called Choosing a Self-Publishing Service 2013. "They can push books into a growing marketplace at a much lower cost than with a conventional imprint, and reap the profits. From the author's perspective, though, such imprints seem to offer the limitations of digital-only publishing, without providing any of the offsetting advantages available to self-publishers – control over format, publication dates and pricing; creative freedom; better royalties. Authors need to think carefully about what value is being added here and look closely at the contract's terms and conditions, comparing them with what they get if they publish themselves."

But is this an example of yet more publisher-bashing? Should we be giving them credit for at least trying to find a compromise? Evidently, the imprints vary hugely in their aims and approach. "The Blackfriars contracts are conventional publishing contracts," explains Ursula Doyle – Blackfriars co-founder and ex-Virago and Pan Macmillan editor. "We acquire the rights – all for full term of copyright so far, as is usual, but allowing for certain reversions in certain circumstances – we remunerate the author and offer advances, and we bear all the costs."

Doyle is passionate about their integrity. "Blackfriars is a small list by the standards of many digital imprints, and it is as carefully put together as our other literary lists. The books are edited, designed and published in the same way as all our books. We have dedicated publicity and rights people who ensure they have the same shot at serial, review and interview coverage; one of our launch titles, Too Good to Be True by Benjamin Anastas, was serialised over four pages in the Observer Review last weekend. All our authors are remunerated for their work, and all of them so far have representation. We believe that a digital-only launch is the perfect way to publish wonderful books that otherwise might not be published at all, purely because the market for print is so brutal right now." 

And what of authors? While some are raging about the small print they failed to read, others are celebrating this new flexible approach. Amy Bird, who has just signed a three-book deal with Carina, and whose first novel Yours Is Mine will be published next month, spent months bashing her forehead against traditional brick walls before the Carina team visited her MA creative writing group at Birkbeck, University of London.

She considers her contract more than fair – there is no deduction or charge for editing, marketing or design, and there are provisions for rights to revert to her after seven years if certain conditions are met. "True, there is no megabuck advance," she admits. "But I don't need an advance: I work part-time as a solicitor. And I am being offered 50% rates on royalties, which seems fair. And most importantly, nobody is asking me to get my cheque-book out."

She believes there are many misconceptions about the industry. "Digital publishing is not about dumping books on a Kindle. From my experience, it is about bright and talented editors finding work that they love and working with an author to get a book the best it can be. With Carina UK, I have gone through all the processes one would expect with a 'traditional' publisher: initial feedback with detailed suggestions for structural revisions; a full copy edit; consultation on title, cover designs and marketing. The amazing thing about digital for me is that I submitted my novel in late February, and it will be coming out in mid-July. Going digital is not for everyone, but for people like me, who have been tweeting, reviewing and blogging for years, it feels natural, exciting, and, frankly, kind of cool."

Of course, the truth of these imprints will be in the storytelling. Until we see them producing consistently exciting work over the long term, neither authors nor readers should be dazzled by their daddy's name. But I strongly believe that we should also get better at taking and celebrating risks. We must allow publishers to fail better, without engaging in continual media mudslinging, or citing specific horror stories as symbols of endemic rot. Otherwise that brave, imperfect future, of which we don't yet know the contours, won't take shape at all.

Self-publishingPublishingFictionEbooksDigital mediaMolly Flatt
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A brief survey of the short story part 50: Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev's work is imbued with sorrow but pulses with life, and bears powerful testimony to the fleeting beauty of existence

When Gogol died in 1852, Ivan Turgenev, the man whom many in Russia were calling his successor, was arrested for writing an obituary in praise of the great writer. In fact, the official reason was a pretext. Turgenev had already displeased the tsarist authorities with his series of sketches of rural Russian life, published in the journal the Contemporary between 1847 and 1851, and collected in 1852 as Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

This book, which it is claimed influenced Tsar Alexander II's decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861, comprises vignettes of peasant life as observed by a landowning hunter much like Turgenev. Not even Gogol had presented such rounded portrayals of serfs before. As the translator Richard Freeborn notes, while Turgenev would go on to greater things in both the short story and the novel, he was quite aware of the book's merits. At the time of publication he wrote:

"Much has come out pale and scrappy, much is only just hinted at, some of it's not right, oversalted or undercooked – but there are other notes pitched exactly right and not out of tune, and it is these notes that will save the whole book."

Of these, perhaps the one pitched most perfectly of all is Bezhin Lea. This masterful story begins with a description of a July day, and close rendering of the natural world represent one of the deep pleasures of Turgenev's writing. As Edmund Wilson writes, in Turgenev "the weather is never the same; the descriptions of the countryside are quite concrete, and full, like Tennyson's, of exact observation of how cloud and sunlight and snow and rain, trees, flowers, insects, birds and wild animals, dogs, horses and cats behave, yet they are also stained by the mood of the person who is made to perceive them".

Returning home at the end of this glorious day the hunter becomes lost, and as night falls he passes through a landscape of endless fields, standing stones and terrifying gulfs. The mood is that of fairytale, but rather than supernatural beings, the hunter eventually finds only a group of boys guarding a drove of horses. They are gathered around a fire telling ghost stories. Throughout his story Turgenev, the committed realist, repeatedly balances the unreal, the ghostly, with the simply human, fantastical terror with everyday pathos and empathy. The little ring of storytellers, gathered in a small patch of flickering light on a vast plain, effortlessly coexists as concrete setting and existential symbol. At the story's end, when the narrator reports that one of the boys died the following year, he moves quickly to defuse any supernatural tension. As Frank O'Connor notes, Turgenev did not want "the shudder of children sitting over the fire on a winter night, thinking of ghosts and banshees while the wind cries about the little cottage – but that of the grown man before the mystery of human life".

Although Turgenev did occasionally explore supernatural themes, particularly towards the end of his life, his greatest achievements in the short story have love and youth as their main themes. He was at his best when writing autobiographically, and two of his finest stories, the novella First Love (1860) and Punin and Baburin (1874), draw deeply on his own memories. Near the end of his life, Turgenev said of First Love: "It is the only thing that still gives me pleasure, because it is life itself, it was not made up … First Love is part of my experience." This long and beautiful story powerfully evokes both a teenage boy's experience of love, and the complex sorrow of an older man looking back on his youth. The story unfolds over a summer when the narrator, Vladimir Petrovich, becomes one of a number of suitors clustered around Zinaida, whose mother is an impoverished princess using her daughter as bait to lure a wealthy husband. This story sees the first full flowering of Turgenev's ability to create and move between distinct, remarkably vivid characters and points of view, displaying what VS Pritchett calls the "curious liquid gift which became eventually supreme in Proust".

If this liquid sense infuses Turgenev's work as a whole, its point of origin is the individual phrase. Wilson writes: "Turgenev is a master of language, he is interested in words in a way that the other great 19th-century Russian novelists – with the exception of Gogol – are not." Constance Garnett, whose translations introduced most of the great 19th-century Russians to English readers, considered Turgenev to be the most difficult of them to translate "because his style is the most beautiful". "What an amazing language!" Chekhov wrote when rereading Turgenev's 1866 story The Dog. Whether writing of ponies groomed until they are "sleek as cucumbers" or the "steam and glitter of an April thaw", the large edifices of his stories are always built brick by brick, with immense and detailed care. In Death, from the Sketches, he describes the scene of a terrible accident:

"We found the wretched Maxim on the ground. Ten or so peasants were gathered round him. We alighted from our horses. He was hardly groaning at all, though occasionally he opened wide his eyes, as if looking around him with surprise, and bit his blue lips. His chin quivered, his hair was stuck to his temples and his chest rose irregularly: he was clearly dying. The faint shadow of a young lime tree ran calmly aslant his face."

That last detail is a master's touch, all at once visually anchoring the scene, conveying nature's indifference to Maxim's plight, suggesting the border between existence and oblivion, and underlining the solitariness of the moment of death as the observer notes a detail that Maxim never would. Turgenev may not have written quite as often as Tolstoy about the actual moment of dying, but was perhaps equally skilled at summoning the twin currents of dread and banality it so often encompasses.

Turgenev is a poet of disappointment, whose rapturous descriptions of youth are always filtered through an older consciousness aware that it "melts away like wax in the sun". The stunning evocation of childhood in Punin and Baburin begins with the words "I am old and ill now". In an essay of 1860, Turgenev divides heroes into prevaricating Hamlets and mad Don Quixotes, who get things done. As that distinction suggests, action in his work is often troublingly problematic – Baburin's costly outspokenness before his masters, Harlov's fatal destruction of his home in Turgenev's version of King Lear, A Lear of the Steppes – while inaction proves no more profitable (witness the pathetic figure described in The Diary of a Superfluous Man). Yet for all this sorrow and anguish, which led Henry James to speak of Turgenev's collections as "agglomerations of gloom", his stories pulse with a life as vivid as any in literature. In Fathers and Sons, one of the great novels of the 19th century, Turgenev writes of a character's "quiet attentiveness to the broad wave of life constantly flowing in and around us". It's this that his work channels, a wave that carries us ineluctably to our end, but that also contains all the powerful, fleeting beauty of existence. As Vladimir Petrovich says of love, so Turgenev seems to think of life: "I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it."

• Translations from the work are by Isaiah Berlin, Richard Freeborn, Constance Garnett and Michael R Katz.

Next: Sherwood Anderson

Short storiesFictionClassicsChris Power
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Author Alice Munro says she's retiring – but does she really mean it?

The Canadian writer, 81, has hinted at retirement before, but fans will be hoping this isn't the end of her glittering career

Sad news, for fans of Alice Munro, the short-story author whom Margaret Atwood once described as en route to "international literary sainthood", and whose writing Jane Smiley, awarding her the Man Booker international prize, said was "practically perfect". She has told Canadian press that she's retiring – and this time she sounds definite.

Winning the Trillium book award for Dear Life, Munro told the National Post that the prize was "a little more special in that I'm probably not going to write any more. And, so, it's nice to go out with a bang," adding that this was definitely it for her, and she has "very much" come to terms with the decision.

"I'm delighted. Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be. It's like, at the wrong end of life, sort of becoming very sociable," she said.

Asked, mournfully, by the Post if she might reconsider her decision, given the number of people who will be disappointed to hear of her retirement, Munro declined. "Well, tell them to go read the old ones over again. There's lots of them," she said.

I'm pinning my hopes on the fact that this is something Munro has hinted at before – in 2006 telling the Globe and Mail: "I don't know if I have the energy to do this any more." Since then, she has found the energy to write an enormous amount.

In 1994, she told the Paris Review: "It's not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It's the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write. This is what I wonder: what do most people do once the necessity of working all the time is removed? Even the retired people who take courses and have hobbies are looking for something to fill this void, and I feel such horror of being like that and having that kind of life. The only thing that I've ever had to fill my life has been writing. So I haven't learned how to live a life with a lot of diversity. The only other life I can imagine is a scholarly life, which I probably idealise."

But Munro is now 81, and told the New Yorker last year she's "losing names or words in a commonplace way", and that "this time, I think it's for real". Philip Roth, at 80, has certainly stuck to his promise that "I'm done … Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life."

Not that there's a correct age to stop. Ruth Rendell, 83, was horrified at the suggestion she might ever put down her pen, saying earlier this year: "It's absolutely essential to my life. I don't know what I would do if I didn't write. I have to. One fears one might have a stroke or something, and then perhaps I couldn't write, but that is something to be terrified of, to dread." Having read her latest novel, The Child's Child, written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, I hope the day of Rendell's retirement is far, far away.

And I'm going to keep crossing my fingers that Munro might still change her mind.

Alice MunroFictionRuth RendellAlison Flood
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The standing man of Taksim Square: a latterday Bartleby

Herman Melville's reticent scrivener is the ideal symbol for this new wave of passive protests as well as for the original occupy Gezi events

Last Monday at 6pm a young man wearing a white shirt and grey trousers appeared in Istanbul's Taksim Square. He walked towards Ataturk Cultural Centre, adjacent to the Gezi Park, which had turned into a battle ground. But the young man didn't go inside the park. Instead he stopped in front of the Cultural Centre, placed his backpack on the ground, put his hands in his pockets and stared at the building for eight hours. Curious bystanders surrounded him. They asked questions about his identity, occupation and intentions. Four police officers body-searched him. His backpack contained plastic cards, a gas mask, a bottle of water, goggles and a pack of biscuits. They asked him whether he was waiting for someone. Did he have a problem? He was calm and mute. He didn't have a problem: but in the following hours, as his pictures and his mysterious alias ("the standing man") spread on Twitter, he turned into one, at least for the police. More than 300 people joined him to do the same thing, standing still, facing the Cultural Centre and refusing to leave. Like a scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, his posture spread among people in different parts of the city who started standing still in the exact same way. On Wednesday protestors who were against the standing man arrived at the square. The double negation amounted to affirmation. After half an hour they left.

When I saw legions of standing men and women on Istanbul's streets I remembered Alain Badiou's idea of the "event" as the fundamental component of politics. But what about a literary parallel? Herman Melville's reticent scrivener Bartleby was obviously the best candidate. After all, it was he who "would prefer not to" do anything dictated to him. He championed idleness, cynicism and non-compliance through his inactivity. Bartleby was an ideal symbol, not only for this new wave of protests but for the original occupy Gezi events as well.

There are numerous Bartleby translations on the shelves – including my own – and I saw Bartleby in the library in Gezi Park; people read it as a way of protest, metres away from the riot police. Bartleby's influence on the Occupy Wall Street movement has already been discussed. I wouldn't have been surprised to see the book in the original standing man's backpack. In fact, I am surprised it wasn't there.

Herman MelvilleTurkeyOccupy movementProtestKaya Genç
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