The Guardian's Blog, page 195

WG Sebald's quietly potent legacy

Out of tune with the hustling digital world, his singular, deeply personal books continue to inspire and intrigue

Whenever readers despair of contemporary book culture, pointing to the horrors of Dan Brown or EL James; or to the mind-blowing inanities of "writing classes"; or the death of bookselling; or the alleged crimes of Amazon, I have one simple answer: the name of a writer whose life and work – a strange and deep response to the atrocities of history – has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity. His name? Sebald.

WG Sebald first came to public attention in the English-speaking world in about 1996 with the publication of The Emigrants, a haunting mix of fiction and biography, interspersed with odd black and white photographs, a book that defied the conventions of narrative and at the same time triumphantly meditated on the Holocaust and its aftermath.

The Emigrants was followed by two more equally hard-to-classify volumes, The Rings of Saturn (1998), ostensibly about a walk through East Anglia, and Vertigo (1999). By the turn of the millennium, Sebald fever was sweeping the literary world. In some circles, he was being spoken of as a likely Nobel laureate. He himself was just beginning to become a shy, but familiar, figure at some literary gatherings. It was at this time that I first interviewed him for the Observer, a brief encounter now freighted in my mind with delight, sadness, and regret mingled with a fugitive, faint memory of some lovely ironies.

By now, the outline of his biography was familiar. Born in Bavaria in 1944. Studied German literature at Fribourg, with a degree in 1965. Then, leaving his homeland, worked as a research student at Manchester University in 1966. Married in 1967 to his Austrian wife, Ute. In 1970 became a lecturer at UEA, and appointed to a chair of European literature. Finally, the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.

And all the time, while the UEA Creative Writing course had been hogging the headlines, Sebald had been quietly writing The Emigrants, and his other books, in a kind of rare and elevated, quasi-historical, un-contemporary German. After their success in the GDR in the early 1990s, Michael Hulse had translated these books into English, work that was overseen by Sebald himself. The Emigrants was published by Christopher MacLehose at Harvill, quickly followed by The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo. Here was a miraculous story of dedicated literary fulfilment in a matter of a very few years, achieved without hype, or hoopla, or any of the antics that can sometimes blight the emergence of a fine new voice. Sebald, who was so hard to categorise, was always very gentle; and his success was gentle, too.

I know all this because this career came to startling fruition in the 1990s, when I was literary editor of The Observer. Sebald's was the story we were all following, as we avidly awaited his next book. By 2000, there was just one more on the horizon, another genre-defying volume entitled Austerlitz.

Then in 2001: tragedy (I remember the day so well). The news came in that Max – as he was known to friends – had been killed in a car crash just outside Norwich. His daughter, who was also on board, had mercifully survived. I went to my desk and, in a daze, wrote a hurried, inadequate "appreciation". Later, we were told that Sebald was probably dead (from an aneurysm) before his out-of-control vehicle had ploughed into an oncoming lorry.

There was widespread shock and incomprehension: a great writer's life snuffed out at the moment when, after the long and almost secret gestation of his gifts, he had finally achieved recognition, an audience, international sales, the possibility of a distinguished future. It seemed like fate's cruellest and most nihilistic reminder of a man's mortality.

But here's the strange, and heartening, thing – and also the riposte to the cultural pessimists (vide supra). Sebald lives on. Uniquely, among so many recently deceased writers, he and his oeuvre have had a rich and productive afterlife. Now only did he, between 1992 (the German publication of Vertigo) and his untimely death (2001), move from total obscurity to international renown, he then posthumously proceeded to influence a whole generation of writers, in the best possible way, as a spirit and an example. Today, the influence of his work crops up all over the place, in the most surprising quarters. Most prominently, in the UK, he has inspired Will Self, Robert Macfarlane, and Iain Sinclair.

More than a decade after his death (he was just 57), hindsight suggests that his extraordinary, genre-bending "method", that's so bewitching and hypnotic, is fully in tune with the spirit of an age that likes to mash up words and music, video clips and archival documents. Without fanfare, he has been one of the first to find the literary means by which to attempt a rapprochement with the horrors of the Third Reich.

Inevitably, it seems, Sebald is also beginning to become a source for documentary film-makers. In 2011, Grant Gee, celebrated for his film Joy Division, made a wonderful documentary Patience (After Sebald) about the author's life in Suffolk (partly inspired by The Rings of Saturn) with contributions from Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips, and many other devotees. Sebald is like that: he awakens the best kind of reverence.

Sebald's influence also lingers, like a benediction, in the world of print. This month, there has been quiet excitement at the publication of a posthumous collection of essays, A Place in the Country. And I am holding in my hand a beautiful, privately printed fragment, in a simple, burgundy binding, Austerlitz and After: Tracking Sebald by Iain Sinclair. It's a standalone off-cut from a larger book, American Smoke, due to be published later this year. Its typography, photographic illustrations and sensibility are inspired by – and make up Sinclair's homage to – Max Sebald.

It's redundant, surely, to observe that Sinclair's Austerlitz and After recalls a lost world in many senses. As a pamphlet, it could have appeared at any time in the last hundred years. Published by Test Centre, a lively London independent, in an edition of 300 copies, with 20 in buckram covers, it will not, presumably, be available from Amazon. So QED: books and culture live on, fighting against the tide. All is not (yet) lost.

WG SebaldRobert McCrum
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The Albion Beatnik bookshop: a viral success worth catching

A high-street indie drawing 81,000 web visits in a day might seem surprising – but there are many reasons why it should

• Enter a competition to win up to £250 worth of National Book Tokens, and enter your favourite bookshop on our interactive map

I woke up on Friday morning to find that several of my friends were sharing a rather nice picture on Facebook. You've probably seen it by now (the hits on photographic social bookmarking site imgur are well into six figures). It features a poster in a bookshop doorway with a poetic skit on Beatrice Warde's "This is a Printing Office" proudly declaring "This Is a Book-shop" with sentiments such as "refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time". Hmm, I thought, that looks a lot like The Albion Beatnik, the Oxford bookshop where I spend much of my leisure time, have given regular readings for the past three-and-a-half years, and which I posted to the Guardian's own literary map of Britain.

And then I got an email from Dennis, the store's owner, inviting me to an impromptu reading that night by Steve Luttrell, editor of longstanding US poetry magazine Café Review who was passing through. There was a postscript – 81,000 people had been looking at the shop in under a day, and he'd seen a link to a piece I'd written about it three years ago. So I really did recognise the picture.

Two minutes on Twitter and I found an article on Galleycat. Sure enough, there was a long quotation from, and link to, an article I'd written about the shop for the feminist literary website For Books' Sake back in 2010. How wonderful! What I've been saying for years is Britain's finest bookshop was finally getting the coverage it deserved. Not that there was a flock of tourists thronging to get in to hear Luttrell on Friday night, but a double-figures gathering for a damp afternoon poetry reading organised at about eight hours' notice is typical of the great response the clientele always drums up for events.

There are many things that are interesting about this story of an independent bookstore gone viral. Least of them though worth noting, are the disparaging what-a-snob kind of comments on imgur's notoriously reactionary sister site reddit. Likewise worth noting is the poster's indirect comment about ebooks. It's not new to see friction between ebooks and bricks and mortar stores of course, but conversations with Dennis over several years have made the impact of digital books on print sales, in Oxford at least, perfectly clear.

But what's most interesting here is that this story, and this poster, composed on the hoof and typed out in a font designed to recall the iconic cover of Howl, illustrates precisely what makes The Albion Beatnik, and many shops like it, such wonderful, vibrant, thriving places. Magritte-ly, the poster could just as easily have read "This Is Not a Bookshop". Because that is the key to the Albion Beatnik. And that is the way forward for many of not all great independent bookshops.

It's not just a surrealist statement, it's true. It was true back when I wrote the article for For Books' Sake back in 2010; even more so now. The Albion Beatnik is, more in many ways than more famous stores, the centre of Oxford's literary life. It is certainly the centre of the beating underground heart of Oxford culture. For four years now I've run Not the Oxford Literary Festival there, featuring leading figures from the literary margins who don't get a look in at the regular literary festival. Last November there was a month-long poetry festival, with events every single night featuring everything from local poet-activist Danny Chivers to workshops by Jo Bell and the obligatory Bernard O'Donoghue reading. Most nights, in fact, there is something happening there – from regular jazz nights to poetry from the likes of Michael Horovitz (it's not called the Albion Beatnik for nothing and I was lucky enough to read alongside the great man last year).

It's also the home to small presses (And Other Stories started life there, and used the shop as a home for its earliest events bringing together wonderful overseas authors such as Carlos Gamerro and translators). And magazines – Ferment, Structo, Oxford University Poetry Society's Ash, Dissocia – all have made it home, as have countless poetry groups like the Backroom Poets, Oxford Stanza, my own New Libertines. There's even an underground gallery space that hosts local artists, and Lucie Forejtova, the artisan stationer behind Immaginacija, who cuts, dyes, binds and sells handmade journals, and special edition chapbooks on site.

Not that it's all about arts and crafts anti-progress. At the very centre of the Albion Beatnik is an active Facebook page with more than 1,000 members where events are shared and crowds drummed up (our events have regularly attracted 50 or 60 people and spilled out onto the street). And, of course, there are the books. Specialist and beautifully presented, there are walls dedicated to Beat poetry, 20th-century American literature and translated works (want to go straight into somewhere and walk straight out – though you won't, you'll stop for one of the speciality teas and some jazz, and a chat with the devoted, enthusiastic and effusive devotees – with the Perec or Djuna Barnes you've been looking for everywhere? This is where to go) accompanied by Dennis' free zine-style reading guides with titles like American Literature of the 1920s or Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

This could not be better timing for a tourist snap to put a fabulous independent bookshop into the news, because The Albion Beatnik is the perfect illustration of everything that needs to be said about independent shops in the digital age. Yes, it is a great bookshop. But it is so much more. And that is what makes it both deserve, and achieve, its success.

Best bookshopsBooksellersDan Holloway
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Poem of the week: The Unquiet Grave

Concise and musical, this is one of the most popular versions of a much-reworked ballad of aching love and loss

This week's poem is among the most beautiful of the "Child" ballads. It's an unusually compact and harmonious narrative, constructed around a conversation between a young man and the ghost of his beloved, and with very little extraneous or expository material. In fact, the focused intensity is almost that of a lyric poem rather than a storytelling ballad.

The Harvard scholar, Francis James Child, collected these ballads mainly from printed sources. The resulting magnum opus, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1892-98), initially ran to 10 volumes, and that was without the commentary, which Child didn't live to complete. His unique contribution to the field of ballad scholarship lies in his meticulous inclusion of different versions of the same text.

Child prints a number of variants for "The Unquiet Grave". This one, the favourite of many folksingers and anthologists, is numbered 78A.

The first two stanzas are spoken by the young man (compare 78F with its female mourner). At first, it seems he directly addresses the dead woman, although it's not impossible that he's talking to a new, living beloved: "The wind doth blow today, my love,/ And a few small drops of rain." The reference to the "small drops of rain" faintly recalls the lovely quatrain from the early 16th century, "Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow/ The small raine down can raine?/ Cryst, if my louve were in my armes/ And I in my bedde again!" The speaker continues in lines three and four either to address his new lover, or to turn to another auditor: if the latter, the effect is of an "aside" spoken on-stage: "I never had but one true-love./ In cold grave she was lain." The device is more than expository: its simple directness confirms the speaker's emotional authority.

At first, the woman's death seems recent. But the pledged period of mourning ("a twelvemonth and a day") passes between stanzas two and three. The belief that graves become "unquiet", and the restless ghosts enact an angry or violent haunting because excessive grief prevents their leaving the earth, is an ancient one, far older than the poem.

This mourner refuses to accept that his time is up, and, as a result, "the dead began to speak". There's something eerie in the fact that the woman, though clearly the one referred to, is not specified: she is simply "the dead". Now the dialogue proper begins: the spectral woman asks whose weeping is disturbing her, and the young man promises he'll leave her in peace in return for one kiss.

The repetitions from verse to verse, a common mnemonic or musical patterning, here have the effect of bringing the lovers touchingly close, as if one echoed the other. "I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips" is reinforced almost tenderly by the response, "You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips", while the clagginess of the alliteration leaves a contrasting impression of un-sentimentalised mortality.

Although it could be the man speaking in stanza six, it seems more likely that the woman's ghost is the speaker throughout five, six and seven. Her description of the dead flower is a parable about loss and its acceptance. The mourner still wants to believe the "finest flower" (their love) can grow again. The woman knows regeneration is impossible: the flower is "withered to a stalk" and this withering happens to lovers' hearts, too: it's an inevitable fact of time. The message is harsh and sad, but the subsequent words are kindly. "So make yourself content, my love,/ Till God calls you away." Permission to forge new connections seems to be offered in that "make yourself content".

Contemporary readers largely share the realistic attitude shown by this thoughtful ghost. We stress the importance of "moving on" as the eventual aim of mourning. But we need to remember that, whenever this ballad originated, it was long before modern psychologising about death. The superstition that kissing a dead person results in one's own death would have had a logical basis at a time when many people died of infectious diseases such as the plague. Read with a historically distanced perspective, the ballad may be a practical warning about how the living should treat the dead (for both their sakes) rather than advice on how best to survive traumatic loss.

It's interesting to compare 78B. There the lovers do kiss, and the poem ends ominously, as the male ghost tells the young woman, "I am afraid, my pretty, pretty maid,/ Your time will not be long."

Whatever the ballad's "message", its harmonies leave us in no doubt of the depth of the lovers' empathy. The images are memorably simple, almost archetypal. Intermittently liquid sounds and the flowing, predominantly iambic rhythm suggest at times a lullaby. The rain-flecked wind, the "earthy strong" breath and the green garden with its one withered flower are details that, although this is a "supernatural" ballad, create the impression of a natural cycle, ever-present and compelling.

Ballads are notoriously difficult to date. Some sources suggest c.1400; others say that there is no evidence that "The Unquiet Grave" existed in written form before 1800. In fact, not many of Child's ballads date from before 1600. In some versions, it's the young man who has died: like a medieval knight, he lies "slain" in the "greenwood". 78D has a literary diction at times, a hint of Scots dialect, and a nautical setting. The quality of 78A could reflect the later crafting and processing of some rougher, older material. But there are many versions in addition to Child's and you may have a favourite of your own.

The Unquiet Grave

"The wind doth blow today, my love,
  And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
  In cold grave she was lain.

"I'll do as much for my true-love
  As any young man may;
I'll sit and mourn all at her grave
  For a twelvemonth and a day."

The twelvemonth and a day being up,
  The dead began to speak:
"Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
  And will not let me sleep?"

"'T is I, my love, sits on your grave,
  And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
  And that is all I seek."

"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
  But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
  Your time will not be long.

"'T is down in yonder garden green,
  Love, where we used to walk,
The finest flower that e're was seen
  Is withered to a stalk.

"The stalk is withered dry, my love,
  So will our hearts decay;
So make yourself content, my love,
  Till God calls you away."

PoetryFolk musicCarol Rumens
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Which literary novels should a daredevil film director choose to adapt next? | John Dugdale

The same daredevil spirit that has informed many an apparently insane film or TV version over the past decade has seen adaptations of literary novels

When the Cannes film festival starts next week, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, adapted and directed by James Franco, will be in the lineup. The Spider-Man star is known for mixing bookish projects with acting in blockbusters, but has nevertheless raised eyebrows by selecting a novel with 15 narrators that tells the seemingly uncinegenic story of a southern matriarch's death and burial.

This month will also see Paul Thomas Anderson begin to shoot his version of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, the first of Pynchon's dauntingly complex works to be filmed; and Steven Soderbergh recently announced plans for a 12-hour TV dramatisation of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor ("If it works, it'll be super-cool. And if it doesn't, you won't be able to watch 10 minutes of it"), a rambling 750-page novel with an ill-advised title about an English poet in 17th-century Maryland.

Something is clearly changing, at least for adventurous auteurs, raising the question of whether any books still remain off-limits.

The same daredevil spirit has informed many an apparently insane film or TV version over the past decade, which has seen adaptations of literary novels (Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy) and epic fantasy works (The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, AKA A Game of Thrones) that would previously have been written off as impossible. Vast classic novels or sequences – A la recherche du temps perdu (on French TV), Parade's End, Les Misérables – have all been ticked off.

With adapters no longer inhibited or intimidated, works totalling over 1,000 pages are tamed by gleefully drastic slashing and/or exploiting the ampler air-time available in TV series. CGI technology means that magical happenings, supernatural beings, wild creatures or crowd scenes have ceased to be either avoided or introduced nervously. Taboos - against adapting short story collections, or first-person novels, or multi-stranded narratives - have been defied.

With movies based on Stephen King's 1,300-page The Stand and Flann O'Brien's metafictional mind-bender At Swim-Two-Birds reportedly in the works, and Cormac McCarthy's peerlessly repulsive Child of God (with a moronic protagonist who combines serial killing with serial necrophilia) already shot by Franco, there's no sign of any let-up in filming the unfilmable. What should the buccaneering directors – who also include David Cronenberg, adapter of Burroughs, Ballard and DeLillo – be looking at next?

Subject to authorial permission, translating One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity's Rainbow to the screen must be tempting. Better special effects should also inspire another go at Moby-Dick (John Huston's 50s version is ruined by its rubber whale) and renewed efforts to subdue Don Quixote, which defeated Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam.

It seems unlikely, though, that these movie-makers will settle for the easy option of great novels still widely read, if largely by students; they think like mountaineers, determined to conquer unclimbed peaks just because they're there. For the boldest, the obvious contenders would include Joyce's Finnegans Wake, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, William Gaddis's The Recognitions and Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison (even longer than Clarissa, and much less happens). After Faulkner, Pynchon and Barth, anything more obviously film-friendly would be feebly retrograde.

ClassicsScience fictionFictionCannes 2013Cannes film festivalFestivalsFilm adaptationsTelevision
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Which literary novels should daredevil film directors adapt next? | John Dugdale

The same daredevil spirit that has informed many an apparently insane film or TV version over the past decade has seen adaptations of literary novels

When the Cannes film festival starts next week, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, adapted and directed by James Franco, will be in the lineup. The Spider-Man star is known for mixing bookish projects with acting in blockbusters, but has nevertheless raised eyebrows by selecting a novel with 15 narrators that tells the seemingly uncinegenic story of a southern matriarch's death and burial.

This month will also see Paul Thomas Anderson begin to shoot his version of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, the first of Pynchon's dauntingly complex works to be filmed; and Steven Soderbergh recently announced plans for a 12-hour TV dramatisation of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor ("If it works, it'll be super-cool. And if it doesn't, you won't be able to watch 10 minutes of it"), a rambling 750-page novel with an ill-advised title about an English poet in 17th-century Maryland.

Something is clearly changing, at least for adventurous auteurs, raising the question of whether any books still remain off-limits.

The same daredevil spirit has informed many an apparently insane film or TV version over the past decade, which has seen adaptations of literary novels (Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Midnight's Children, Tristram Shandy) and epic fantasy works (The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, AKA A Game of Thrones) that would previously have been written off as impossible. Vast classic novels or sequences – A la recherche du temps perdu (on French TV), Parade's End, Les Misérables – have all been ticked off.

With adapters no longer inhibited or intimidated, works totalling over 1,000 pages are tamed by gleefully drastic slashing and/or exploiting the ampler air-time available in TV series. CGI technology means that magical happenings, supernatural beings, wild creatures or crowd scenes have ceased to be either avoided or introduced nervously. Taboos - against adapting short story collections, or first-person novels, or multi-stranded narratives - have been defied.

With movies based on Stephen King's 1,300-page The Stand and Flann O'Brien's metafictional mind-bender At Swim-Two-Birds reportedly in the works, and Cormac McCarthy's peerlessly repulsive Child of God (with a moronic protagonist who combines serial killing with serial necrophilia) already shot by Franco, there's no sign of any let-up in filming the unfilmable. What should the buccaneering directors – who also include David Cronenberg, adapter of Burroughs, Ballard and DeLillo – be looking at next?

Subject to authorial permission, translating One Hundred Years of Solitude and Gravity's Rainbow to the screen must be tempting. Better special effects should also inspire another go at Moby-Dick (John Huston's 50s version is ruined by its rubber whale) and renewed efforts to subdue Don Quixote, which defeated Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam.

It seems unlikely, though, that these movie-makers will settle for the easy option of great novels still widely read, if largely by students; they think like mountaineers, determined to conquer unclimbed peaks just because they're there. For the boldest, the obvious contenders would include Joyce's Finnegans Wake, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, William Gaddis's The Recognitions and Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison (even longer than Clarissa, and much less happens). After Faulkner, Pynchon and Barth, anything more obviously film-friendly would be feebly retrograde.

ClassicsScience fictionFictionCannes 2013Cannes film festivalFestivalsFilm adaptationsTelevision
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Reader reviews roundup

From the identity of Shakespeare to the horrors of Guantanamo Bay, this week's reviewers do battle with orthodoxy

The latest crop of reader reviews took me back to an earlier stage in my life when the authorship of Shakespeare's plays seemed a matter the utmost importance (I signed up to the Francis Bacon Tendency). A quarter of a century on, the argument is still raging, with many of its protagonists defending the same positions. Not least Stanley Wells, who has long been a leader of the Stratford Brigade. He has charged once more into the breach, as one of the authors of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy, which came in for this impressive drubbing by rosbarber (well worth reading in full).

In the hands of twenty-one orthodox Shakespeare scholars, the case for William Shakespeare of Stratford sounds plausible enough, and will reassure the already convinced as well as those who would like to be. But anyone versed in the primary material of the authorship question will emerge essentially unsatisfied.

Though she concedes that the book is well-written she argues that there are two big problems with it: "One is a blatant attempt to win the debate through semantics …

But the most significant failing of Shakespeare Beyond Doubt is that it attempts to support the orthodox position using evidence the sceptics do not contest - that there was an author widely known as 'William Shakespeare' - while failing to address recent scholarship.

Elswhere, Tariq Mahmood brought a Pakistani perspective to The General, Ahmed Errachidi's account of his treatment in detention at Guantanamo Bay, which was all the more valuable for its juxtaposition on this book page to reviews by Guardian and Observer critics. Tariq Mahmood wrote:

What especially moved me were the tales of torture by ordinary American soldiers, doctors, lawyers who willingly and passionately cooperative in the daily routines of prisoner torturing. As a Muslim reader, I was thrilled with the very noble reaction and fightback by the brother Muslims in the face of such a determined and all powerful adversary. Ahmed and his fellow prisoners are not only wonderful ambassadors for Islam, but for the spirit of humanness as well. How they managed to deal with the constant torture is indeed a great testament of the human spirit's determination and adaptability.

It was a perspective that chimed nicely with the title of a review by one of our regulars, Lakis: Can somebody escape the past unscathed? In this case, though, the book under review is fiction - The Stranger, by Camilla Lackberg. Lakis writes:

If you are looking for an overcomplicated mystery, you'll like parts of this book; but if you're searching for a novel that speaks about damaged people and the many evils of modern society you'll simply love it.

And that's it for this week. As ever, if I've mentioned your review, drop me a line at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you another book to review.

William ShakespeareClaire ArmitsteadStanley Wells
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Poster poems: the erotic

Call it lust, lunging or love, actually – now is your chance to seduce us with your celebration of the erotic

The recent discovery of a previously unknown explicit love poem by Vita Sackville-West to her lover Violet Trefusis just happens to coincide neatly with the fifth egg of our Poster Poems dozen; the fertilised egg. Clearly someone tipped off Harvey James, the scholar who discovered and translated the poem, about my intentions. It's a small world, isn't it?

There's a long, if somewhat convoluted history of erotic verse in English, with Chaucer, often regarded as the father of poetry in the language, as something of a pioneer. In fact the Canterbury Tales are such a hotbed of lust that the reader is spoilt for choice. My own favourite is the fairly graphic story of the gulling of the rich man Januarie by his wife May in The Merchant's Tale. The poem contrives to be both funny and proto-feminist in its portrayal of an active young woman ruling the roost over her old and hoar husband.

While the Elizabethans tended to be a bit more high-flown with their poetic expression of desires, the metaphysicals tended more towards the physical, with even the cleric Robert Herrick indulging in a fondness for breasts; maybe the inclusion of the Latin phrase Via Lactea made his lust a touch more acceptable.

If Herrick and his contemporaries could be a bit risque, one poet of the following generation was positively Chaucerian. I'm referring, of course, to John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the bad boy of Restoration writing. Rochester's Signior Dildo is a riotous satire on the morals of the court, written to mark, oddly enough, the wedding of James, Duke of York and Mary of Modena. The poem is, among other things, a paean to female sexual desire and masturbation and a caution against an excess of virtue.

Aphra Behn, Rochester's near contemporary, was another who wrote frankly on the theme of women's sexual needs. Her poem The Willing Mistress lacks the crude energy of a Rochester, but it's nonetheless subversive of conventional notions of female chastity. If anything, the balance between frankness and modesty in lines such as "Which made me willing to receive / That which I dare not name" makes the poem more believable, more realistic than the Earl's extravagances.

After the bluntness of the Restoration poets, much of the 18th and 19th centuries seem very staid and respectable. Now, private body parts were not only doomed to go unnamed, they were airbrushed out of the picture entirely. However, the genetic imperative is strong and will generally find a way to break the surface. One such eruption can be seen in Emily Dickinson's Wild nights – Wild nights! Although it is less explicit than either Rochester or Behn, there can be no denying the unrestrained nature of the passion expressed in the poem. Dickinson's sexual knowledge may have been more theoretical than practical, but she was not afraid to explore her desires in verse.

With the end of the Victorian era, the moral restraints on poets and other artists began to loosen and poets began to celebrate their sexuality more openly. It is against this background that we must read Sackville-West's poem; the love that dare not speak its name started speaking, albeit in private and in French. Anna Wickham, born just a few years before Vita, was more interested in men and her The Fired Pot is a poem in praise of the invigorating power of desire and desirability, even if it is not acted upon.

Of course, these poems are relatively tame. It is interesting to compare the uncomplicated celebration of female infidelity of the old Sanskrit poem I Like Sleeping with Somebody Different with Wickham's more circumspect "remembering my duty" to realise how tame. But a mid-century poet like Allen Ginsberg might well be weighed against Rochester and not be found wanting in explicitness. Ginsberg wrote widely about his own sexuality, but perhaps Footnote to Howl is as near as he came to a definitive statement of his position. Sex takes its place among the holy things of the world, an integral part of what makes us human. And whatever you might think of Beat overstatement, it's hard to argue with that basic message.

And so this month's Poster Poems challenge is to celebrate the erotic. You might want to be subtle or forthright, romantic or lustful, the choice is yours. The only thing I ask is that you bear in mind the lexical sensitivities of your fellow poets and keep the use of French to a minimum; we don't have an in-house translator available.

PoetryRomanceBilly Mills
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

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

Hello all. For those of you coming to this blog for the first time, this is a space where you can discuss the books you are currently reading, what you think of them, offer recommendations, and post your suggestions of things you'd like to see us covering on the books site.

It is also the place to post links to interesting book or author pieces you've discovered elsewhere on the web and would like to share. Here are a couple from me to kick things off:

• I'm enjoying Ian Rankin's tweets
• This book chart of top selling titles, including five self published books in the top 20, I thought was interesting.
• And I enjoyed Brain Pickings piece Literary Pets: The Cats, Dogs, and Birds Famous Authors Loved which complements nicely the photo at the top of the blog, kindly posted by mjeshenton.

Finally, a quick reminder that, as well our our weekly Reader reviews roundup, we're now featuring your reviews in a regular space on the front page of the books site. This week's pick is an excellent interrogation of a book about Shakespeare's authorship from rosbarber. We send free books to anyone featured in that spot, or mentioned in our editors' picks, or in the roundup, so why not join in. You can always contact us via this thread.

This is our review list, subject to last minute changes of course.

Non-fiction

• Drone Warfare by Medea Benjamin
• Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin by Fiona Hill and Clifford G Gaddy
• CS Lewis: A Life by Alister McGrath
• 1913: The World Before the Great War by Charles Summerson
• Stanley Matthews by Jon Henderson
• On the Muslim Question by Anne Norton
• Hello World: Where Design Meets Life by Alice Rawsthorn

Fiction

• Fuse by Julianna Baggott
• The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett
• Box of Birds by Charles Fernyhough
• The righteous mind by Jonathan Haidt
• The Best of all Possible Worlds by Karen Lord
• Between Two Thorns by Emma Newman
• Banner of the Passing Clouds by Anthea Nicholson
• The Grim Company by Luke Scull

Children's

• After Tomorrow by Gillian Cross

Cultural OlympiadHannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Art of fear: which are the best books inspired by the second world war?

As a weekend of talks and music at the Southbank Centre explores our cultural debt to the 1940s conflict, we ask which other great works were born on the battlefield

The Rest Is Noise, a festival of 20th-century culture at London's Southbank Centre, continues this weekend with Art of Fear: two days of talks investigating the music and art of oppression and war.

Literary highlights include a talk by Will Self about Franz Kafka and his influence on totalitarian music; a look at Mikhail Bulgakov's Stalin-era satire The Master and Margarita, led by actor and director Simon McBurney (who himself adapted a version of the novel for the stage); a lecture on the political landscape of Europe between 1930 and 1950 from Pulitzer prize-winning author Anne Applebaum; a survey of the political and social upheavals during the same era led by pre-eminent Russian historian Orlando Figes; and a panel of poets and critics reading from and discussing the work of the Russian poets (and victims of Stalin) Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam.

Another essential talk will be given by Orange prize-winner Helen Dunmore about The Long Shadows of War – billed as a discussion of what "society chooses to memorialise and what to forget in the decades following periods of conflict". I don't want to second-guess this talk – beyond the fact that it should be very interesting, and draw on Dunmore's own explorations of memory in novels such as The Siege. But the root conceit is fascinating and provocative. How far have our memories of the war been curated by an earlier generation?

Far removed from the second world war, today most of us have no idea what has been forgotten – or how much remains in the minds of ageing survivors. Still less do we know about the decisions regarding which version of history was handed to us, and which jettisoned. It's hard to imagine much has been lost when there is so much vivid documentation, both remembered and reimagined. Especially, to return to books, when so much of it has fed into the literature of the postwar world.

The fact is that contemporary cultural life still draws from the terrible upheavals of the 1930s and 40s. It's also an uncomfortable truth that just as war produces beneficial technologies, it also inspires enduring and precious artworks. Evelyn Waugh's The Sword of Honour, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet are the first three works that spring to my mind – but you could add hundreds of works to that list.

Hundreds of wonderful, life-altering, uplifting books – all of which have their origins in terror. This is unsettling. Does it mean literary enrichment can come as a direct result of suffering? Are we the war's beneficiaries? But then again, there's cause for hope if so much that is worthwhile and enduring can emerge from such darkness and chaos; so much that speaks to the better part of humanity.

In a spirit of validation, it might be worth trying to compile a list of books inspired by the second world war in the comments below – and maybe adding a few words about why they matter. But we can only do that if we accept that it will be a list without end, as impossible and bewildering to complete as a list of the war's victims.

We might also go for a second list of great late-20th-century novels that haven't been somehow touched by the shadow of the second world war. But off the top of my head … Watership Down? Does that count?

Will SelfHelen DunmoreEvelyn WaughLawrence DurrellFictionFestivalsSecond world warSam Jordison
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Was there ever a better letter from an author?

Sylvia received a remarkable bit of post from an author. Have you received replies to fan letters?

Here, courtesy of Publishers Weekly, is the "best author letter ever". Children's writer Elizabeth Bluemle recounts the story of an unpublished manuscript of hers, Iris Spectacle: Accidental Private Eye, a "picture book … about a little girl who uses her nearsightedness to solve crime". It never made it into print, but when she saw a librarian looking for a book about girls who love their glasses, she sent off a copy – and never heard back. Until now, a decade later, when the little girl who received the manuscript wrote to say thank you.

"When I was eight I had already spent the previous six years of my life unable to see more than one foot away and even then not very clearly," wrote Sylvia, now 17. "With some great technology and fabulous doctors I was given these enormous larger-than-Harry-Potter glasses that barely fit on my face. And I could see, which you think would get me leaping for joy at figuring out the sky is blue, and that there actually is a sky, and all sorts of things. But I was terrified. The world was too big to fathom and I'd rather just make myself a small nook and stay there forever. And then I learned to read.

"But as I kept reading with my newfound vision I ran into a problem. There were great children's books about girls and how great they were and there were great books about boys with glasses and how great glasses were, but nobody seemed to have combined the two. Being an avid fan of both girls and glasses I begged my parents to get me books about girls who had glasses and loved them, like me. Of course, my parents are not literature experts and had nothing for me, so I enlisted the help of one extraordinary world-class children's librarian, Charlotte Rabbit."

The librarian sent her Bluemle's manuscript – "the coolest thing that had ever happened in my eight years" – and she read it again and again. "And I loved it. And I brought it to school and bragged about my connections in the literary world and basically felt invincible. Hopefully you remember the book but if not, you wrote it. Anyway, finally I had written proof of how cool girls with glasses are."

There's more and it's all wonderful, as is Bluemle's reaction: "This is a kid with moxie, and a way with language. I fully expect to host her at an author signing at the bookstore some day. And if that happens, I will still be glowing from this gift of a letter."

Did anyone else out there ever write to the authors they loved as a child? These days, of course, we can tweet them, or connect on Facebook – but it's not quite the same as a manuscript of your own, is it? Science fiction author Harry Turtledove went one step further when he learned that a fan of his alternate history novels had terminal cancer. After tracking down Turtledove via Reddit, a friend wrote to the author: "It is my duty as a friend to do whatever I can to fulfil Nachu's last wishes. Is it at all possible for you to send him copies of the remaining books in the series? I understand the risks involved in sending an advance copy of your books to him and I understand the potential copyright issues and backlash from publishers. That said, my friend needs some good luck and kindness to balance out the awful stream he's been on, and I couldn't imagine a better person for it than his favourite author."

Turtledove not only sent an early copy of his next novel, but "agreed to spoil the entire War series in a phone call (or possible face-to-face meeting) with Nachu", reports io9.

Wow. Sure beats Stephen King, who wrote in his second Dark Tower book that he had "received hundreds of 'pack your bags, we're going on a guilt trip' letters", including one from an 82-year-old grandmother with a year to live: "While she didn't expect me to finish Roland's tale in that time just for her, she wanted to know if I couldn't please (please) just tell her how it came out." To be fair to King, he says he would have given both the grandmother and the death-row inmate who "promised to take the secret to the grave with him" a summary of Roland's adventures, but he himself had no idea how things would turn out.

Please share your stories of the authors who have written back to you. The only fan letter I ever got around to writing as a child was to Enid Blyton, via the long-defunct address in the back of my ancient copy of Five Go to Smuggler's Top, and it was intercepted on its way out of the house by my parents, probably because she'd been dead for years.

Children and teenagersPicture booksFictionAlison Flood
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