The Guardian's Blog, page 204

Chinese fiction is focusing on the fringes – of both map and mind

China's writers are scouring the nation's borders for inspiration, as well as the far reaches of surrealist and fantasy writing

I've spent four weeks exploring the far south-west corner of China – the bit where there are herds of wild elephants and the temples have Thai–style pointy roofs – in the company of Han Dong and Yan Ge. It has brought home to me how independent–minded Chinese writers are becoming seriously interested in the geographical fringes of "China proper", drawing on its people, their traditions and conflicts at work. Just look at Ou Ning's Chutzpah!, which recently devoted a whole issue to Uighur and Kazakh writing – a first for any Chinese literary magazine. Or Chi Zijian's novel Last Quarter of the Moon – now out in English – which is about the demise of reindeer-herding nomads on the China–Russia border. An essay in Memory, Remains has the dissident Liao Yiwu writing with uncomfortable honesty about the hostility he met as a Han Chinese in Xinjiang. And there is a (no doubt intentionally) provocative new novel from Chan Koonchung, The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, about Tibet. Unlike the others, this book has already fallen foul of China's censors with its torrid sex scenes and references to Tibetan self-immolations.

Surrealist and fantasy writing (many writers cite Kafka and the Latin American magical-realists as their influences) flourish on another sort of literary fringe. You'll find stories such as Zhang Xinxin's Dragonworld, Sun Yisheng's The Shades Who Periscope Through Flowers to the Sky, and guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

James Herbert farewell, thanks for all the scares

Many of us cannot imagine our teenage years without James Herbert's particular brand of fear. He was our Stephen King

James Herbert felt like a fixture of the British horror scene, our version of Stephen King – perhaps not as prolific in recent years as the American author, but picking up a new book from our master of scares, you knew you were in good hands (I nearly wrote safe hands there – but nothing felt particularly safe when reading a Herbert novel). So I was genuinely shocked and upset to learn of his death last night, rushing to my bookshelves and tracking down my battered old Herbert paperbacks.

Tributes have been pouring in for the author this morning, many on Twitter – some from fans I might not have expected (@harikunzru writes "RIP James Herbert who scared the crap out of me when I was 11 and read The Dark in an old house"); some from those I definitely would (@neilhimself said "I just heard that James Herbert is dead. Gutted. Friends with Jim since 1984. A good man, & a better writer than they gave him credit for)". Sometimes Herbert's books didn't even have to be read to terrify: "Sad news about James Herbert. I remember having a nightmare once, after hearing the synopsis of one of his books my sister was reading," tweeted @SarahMillican75.

Lots of people marking Herbert's death echoed Kunzru's feelings – Herbert was someone they read as a teen, who introduced them to horror fiction, whose books they devoured. "A massive part of my teenage years. 23 novels, 54m books sold. Giant," wrote Lloyd Shepherd. That's how it was for me too.

I think the first one of his novels I read, probably around 13 or 14, was the utterly disturbing The Magic Cottage – even this short extract from Amazon sends chills down my spine:

"We thought we'd found our haven, a cottage deep in the heart of the forest. Charming, maybe a little run down, but so peaceful. That was the first part of the Magic. Midge's painting and my music soared to new heights of creativity. That was another part of the Magic. Our love for each other – well, that became the supreme Magic. But the cottage had an alternative side. The Bad Magic."

Then came Haunted, and I was hooked. At one point I even went on a mission to collect as many of his old paperbacks from charity shops as I could. Looking at my shelves last night, I found that ancient copies of The Rats, Domain and Lair still lurk there. I've read his more recent novels too, Crickley Hall and Ash, but it's the earlier novels (The Fog! So scary!) with which my horror-loving heart lies.

So farewell, James Herbert. And, as so many of your fans are saying today, thanks for all the scares.

James HerbertHorrorFictionStephen KingAlison Flood
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Did David Bowie pinch a cactus from TS Eliot?

In a 1974 interview with William Burroughs, Bowie denied any knowledge of Eliot's 'The Waste Land'. But are his lyrics more literary than he admitted?

Having spent the last month on the other side of the world (Australia, since you ask), I've only just succumbed to the current Bowie mania. But as a worshipper from the Hunky Dory era, I was fascinated by Jon Savage's account of a conversation the thin white duke had with William Burroughs in Rolling Stone magazine in 1974.

Savage concentrated on the musical synergies – particularly the cut-up technique that Bowie picked up from Burroughs' work which, he explains, "would enable Bowie to renew his entire method of writing lyrics and making music".

But after tracking down the original interview, I was struck by the following exchange:

Burroughs: What is your inspiration for writing, is it literary?

Bowie: I don't think so.

Burroughs: Well, I read this "Eight line poem" of yours and it is very reminiscent of TS Eliot.

Bowie: Never read him.

Burroughs: (Laughs) It is very reminiscent of "The Waste Land". Do you get any of your ideas from dreams?

Bowie: Frequently.

There follows a long disquisition on Burroughs' dream life, which is of less interest 40 years on than the eight-line poem he mentions – so I went in search of it and, of course, there it is in all its Eliot-esque glory, piercing straight through to my old vinyl memories of Hunky Dory:

Tactful cactus by your window
Surveys the prairie of your room
Mobile spins to its collision
Clara puts her head between her paws
They've opened shops down west side
Will all the cacti find a home
But the key to the city
Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky

So here's a question. Was Bowie fibbing when he claimed never to have read "The Waste Land" – or did he steal his tactful cactus from Eliot's "The Hollow Men":

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star?

Bowie acknowledged his debt to Burroughs' own work – in particular his novel The Wild Boys – but what other literary influences, conscious or not, can be found in his music?

David BowieWilliam BurroughsTS EliotClaire Armitstead
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Oxford librarian dismissed over Harlem Shake video – that she wasn't in

Pity the poor librarian sacked after students made a Harlem Shake video in St Hilda's College library

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Librarians are fantastic. Sometimes they help you find the book you're looking for, sometimes they sing and dance around to keep your children occupied for half an hour, sometimes they make calendars for charity – basically, they're great. So how sad to read that a librarian at St Hilda's College in Oxford has apparently been fired – and over something which wasn't even her fault.

Calypso Nash, reports Oxford student paper the Cherwell, was sacked after 30 students made a Harlem Shake video in the college library. They've been fined by the college, but Nash, the librarian present at the time, lost her job.

The college's student body is now "calling in the strongest terms for Calypso to be rehired", arguing in a motion that "the Harlem shake did not cause a disturbance coming as it did at 11:30 pm on a Sunday evening" and that the event "only lasted roughly seven minutes".

Ellen Gibson, a student at St Hilda's, told the Cherwell: "The situation seems ridiculous. The librarian had nothing to do with the protest; she just happened to be there at the time." Junior common room secretary Katie Meadon said: "We are not trying to deliberately undermine any decisions made by college authorities, but we (and the rest of the JCR) believe that the dismissal of the librarian in question was unfair."

Good on the students for protesting her dismissal, and with any luck it will make a difference. "Speaking as an Honorary Fellow of @StHildasOx I'm baffled that my alma mater appears to have lost its sense of humour," tweeted crime novelist Val McDermid this morning. Hopefully, St Hilda's will track it down again soon – after all, the New York Public Library let the Ghostbusters into their hallowed halls a few years back, and I think even Oxford students can probably cope with a seven-minute disruption of their valuable library study time without lasting harm. Although next time, perhaps they might consider that the Harlem Shake doesn't actually have to take place in the library.

LibrariesHarlem ShakeUniversity of OxfordAlison Flood
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What's the best undiscovered book you've read?

Open thread: What is the best and most obscure book you have read? We want your recommendations


• Enter a competition to win up to £400 of National Book Tokens

Middlemarch: read. Nineteen-eighty Four: read. Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl: next on the to-read list.

But, My Elvis Blackout, The Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite or The Land As Viewed From the Sea? Probably not.

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Twitter asking for brilliant but not widely known books, and got a wonderful response, including these lesser known - at least to me - wonders:

@guardianbooks @hannah_freeman The Absence of a Cello by Ira Wallach. Wonderful slice of late 50s US middle-class angst

— errormessage (@errormessage) February 7, 2013

@hannah_freeman @margretgeraghty @samjordison One that bridges both is Narratives of Human Evolution by Misia Landau. (out of print)

— Margret Geraghty (@MargretGeraghty) February 7, 2013

@guardianbooks @hannah_freeman Older titles or newer titles? The Book of Mamie by Duff Brenna (1990) American MASTERPIECE!

— TheBloomsburyReview (@BloomsReviews) February 7, 2013

@hannah_freeman Alfred Chester - The exquisite corpse, Newton Thonrburg, Cutter and Bone, Simon Crump, My Elvis Blackout

— Sam Jordison (@samjordison) February 7, 2013

@hannah_freeman @samjordison Fourth Mansions by RA Lafferty. Bonkersness that should be widely read: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Ma…

— David Barnett (@davidmbarnett) February 7, 2013

@guardianbooks @hannah_freeman how about The Land As Viewed From the Sea by Richard Collins? A beautiful book that seemed to pass readers by

— Sarah Noakes (@snoakes7001) February 7, 2013

What lesser-known gems have you come across in the secondhand shop, on a friend's bookshelf or in the depths of your own reading list, that deserve to be more widely read? Fiction or non-fiction, old or just overlooked by most. Tell us your recommendations

Best bookshopsHannah Freeman
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Robert Louis Stevenson on writing: lose the 'twaddling detail'

A newly published essay by Stevenson, written around 1881, is full of advice, with references to Shakespeare for true 'sensation'

I loved Elmore Leonard's – and many other novelists' – tips on writing a few years back, so I'm delighted to see that a recently discovered essay by none other than Robert Louis Stevenson provides yet more useful advice for the authors of today: leave out the excruciating detail.

"Suppose you were to be asked to write a complete account of a day at school. You would probably begin by saying you rose at a certain hour, dressed and came down to morning school. You would not think of telling how many buttons you had to fasten, nor how long you took to make a parting, nor how many steps you descended," Stevenson writes in the essay, published for the first time in the American magazine the Strand last week. "The youngest boy would have too much of what we call 'literary tact' to do that. Such a quantity of twaddling detail would simply bore the reader's head off."

The Strand's managing editor Andrew Gulli tells the Associated Press that the essay is believed to date from around 1881, when Stevenson was in his early 30s and working on Treasure Island. The novelist also has some choice words for his fellow authors. "In the trash that I have no doubt you generally read, a vast number of people will probably get shot and stabbed and drowned; and you have only a very slight excitement for your money," he wrote. "But if you want to know what a murder really is – to have a murder brought right home to you – you must read of one in the writings of a great writer. Read Macbeth, for example, or still better, get someone to read it aloud to you; and I think I can promise you what people call a 'sensation'."

For yet more sensation, how about a murder in Treasure Island itself, when Long John Silver breaks a man's back with his crutch and then "next moment … had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body"?

"When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head," Jim tells us. "Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his blood-stained knife the while upon a wisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly on the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had been actually done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since before my eyes."

Writers, says Stevenson, leave "all the dullness out". Or at least they should. My memories of reading Treasure Island as a child – fingernails totally bitten down, terror of the "black spot" – suggest he took his own advice. I'm feeling a re-read of young Jim's adventures is long overdue.

Robert Louis StevensonFictionAlison Flood
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Martín Kohan's powerful prose is both public and intensely personal

Nick Caistor, translator of today's water story The Mistake, on what it's like to render the Argentine's prose into English

It is hard to describe the slippery quality of Martín Kohan's Spanish. The two novels of his that I've translated, Seconds Out and School for Patriots, work on at least two levels. One is the public history of Argentina, which is full of omissions and silences that are dealt with in an allusive, glancing way. The other is the private worlds of the protagonists who find themselves caught up in this historical process. Here again, their individual responses are frequently made up of silences and misunderstandings that often have disastrous consequences. This means that the language Kohan employs often edges around silences, or alternatively becomes fixed in the moment, with the observers staring uncomprehendingly at the tiniest detail (each second of Luis Firpo's "knockout" of the world champion Joe Dempsey in Seconds Out for example, or the minute description of the urinal in the boys' toilet in School for Patriots), or finding themselves breathlessly caught up in events that are way above their heads, leaving them to pose themselves questions in lengthy inner monologues.

So Kohan's texts switch constantly between these two registers: the official one, that is almost always domineering and repressive, and the personal voice, the inner voice of someone trying to discern the truth behind all the lies and distortions, desperately anxious to remain positive, to believe that individual action can in fact produce a successful outcome.

His short story The Mistake starts not with an omission, but with a loss, in a way that is common not only in Argentine literature but in that country's best-known cultural phenomenon, the tango. Something or someone is always missing, leaving a hole that the protagonist struggles to fill. The Mistake goes even further, suggesting that the city of Buenos Aires itself was created thanks to not one but many misconceptions, creating the feeling that nothing is quite what it seems, and leading individuals into grotesque miscalculations. This lends a tentative quality to any affirmation the protagonist may make, since what porteños proclaim so often proves to be mistaken.

Two recollections from some years ago were at the back of my mind while I was translating it. The first was a conversation with the novelist Osvaldo Soriano, in the aftermath of the Malvinas/Falklands debacle. What had been hardest for him to accept, he said, was that he had always thought the Argentines were the good guys, the cowboys; but now they were the Indians: a sad case of mistaken identity. The second dated back to the 90s, when I became quite friendly with the Argentine foreign minister, Guido di Tella. He always insisted that Argentina was in fact a European country, which found itself situated by mistake or accident some 5,000 miles from its neighbours.

Short storiesFictionWaterNick Caistor
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World's worst book covers: Stephen King leads the way

Can anyone find a worse design than this Brazilian jacket for King's The Shining?

From time to time we're so inspired by the cover artistry of the day that we feel compelled to relaunch our hunt for the worst book jacket ever. In our last survey, Alison Flood asked if anyone could top this cover for Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. She also drew attention to the website Good Show Sir, which continues to feature some eye-popping bad-taste from the world of science fiction.

But none of the recent Good Show Sir jackets can hold a candle to this recent design for the cover of The Shining, which was drawn to our attention by Gabe Habash in Publishers Weekly, who launched his own little detective trail into how it could possibly have come to be.

Commenter Regiano tracked down part of the answer: King was not uniquely put-upon in this Brazilian "Best of the Best" series. Check out what they did to Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol.

But lest anyone should think we're lusophobic, we take another commenter's point that the French have done their bit to restyle The Shining. The verdict of our own resident King expert, James Smythe? "Amazing. More horrifying than the book, almost …"

If anyone can find any better bad book designs, please let us know.

Stephen KingScience fictionDesignClaire Armitstead
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Gone Girl: what makes Gillian Flynn's psychological thriller so popular?

A tale of marital meltdown has Hollywood hot under the collar and is up for its first literary award – and deservedly so

It's a pretty impressive comeback: less than five years after the financial crisis brought Gillian Flynn's decade-long career at Entertainment Weekly to a close, she has hit the jackpot. Gone Girl, published in the US in June 2012 and out in paperback in the UK at the beginning of this year, has now sold more than 2m copies throughout the world – 300,000 of them over here. It stormed the New York Times bestseller list and the film version is set to be produced by Reese Witherspoon; it will feature in this spring's Richard & Judy Book Club and, less predictably, last week saw its inclusion on the Women's prize for fiction longlist, where Flynn is keeping Hilary Mantel, Zadie Smith and AM Homes company. As she might tell her former employers, that's entertainment.

Why is it so popular? Well: the straightforward answer is that it's pretty gripping. It immerses you almost instantly in a mystery – the disappearance of Amy Dunne, a woman in her late 30s who has left New York to accompany her husband Nick back to his native Missouri. A picture of marital disharmony is rapidly conjured up: the couple have both lost their jobs as magazine journalists and now live in a soulless, rented mansion, courtesy of Amy's trust fund. While Nick goes out every day to work in the bar that he and his twin sister have bought – once again with Amy's money – she struggles to fill her days. More deeply rooted problems hover in the background. Nick can't stand his cruel father, parked in a nearby care home; Amy loves her parents, but might have preferred them not to base a phenomenally bestselling series of children's books on their only daughter – or, at least, an idealised version of her.

And then, on their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy disappears. Crucially, she doesn't simply walk out of her life: mayhem at the mansion suggests a more brutal scenario and brings the cops running. And with that, we're off.

But what's really ingenious about Gone Girl is its structure: Amy and Nick take turns narrating events, but not from the same point in time. While Nick charts life from the moment of Amy's vanishing, she fills in their relationship from the very beginning, painting a picture of a couple so ludicrously, impossibly golden that we begin to smell a rat almost immediately. If things were so great then, we wonder, how can they be so crappy now? Could Amy possibly be embroidering reality? And when is she writing all this, anyway? Where on earth is she?

Flynn's coup de grace is to provide us with not one but two unreliable narrators. Just as Amy is sugar-coating the past, so Nick is being economical with the truth of the present day; we know he's lying to the police because he tells us so, but he doesn't tell us what he's hiding, or why.

It's clever stuff, and pacily written, with some deft touches – I loved the horrible truth of a couple who founder because he can't decode the romantic treasure hunts she constructs to demonstrate how close they are. And that might be the key to its success: lots of thrillers take place in families or marriages, but few are so adept at inhabiting two genres at once. More usually, you find yourself racing through the personal relationships to get back to the mystery, or shrugging off the whodunnit element because the characters are so engaging. Or, even worse, feeling that the author wanted to do the same. Gone Girl manages, somehow, to convince you that it can be more than one book at the same time. Whether that's enough to secure its further passage in the Women's prize for fiction, where it will come up against the irritatingly persistent question of what constitutes a "literary novel", is another matter.

ThrillersFictionWomen's prize for fictionWomen's prize for fiction 2013Reese WitherspoonFilm adaptationsAwards and prizesAlex Clark
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Will a spell in prison free Chris Huhne's inner novelist?

Now that the former Lib Dem politician has a little thinking space, a Jeffrey Archer-style prison diary feels inevitable

During the weekend, the recently convicted high flyer Chris Huhne, immured in Wanno, as its inmates call HMP Wandsworth, was reported to be "reading a lot, mainly novels".

Who has not, at some time or other, entertained the fantasy of all the reading they might do during a sustained spell of leisure? This might not have involved enforced leisure in prison, but let's say it applies. My wish list of cellblock reading includes Richardson's Clarissa, the complete Jane Austen, Byron's Letters and possibly the King James Bible (why not?). When PG Wodehouse was interned by the Nazis at the beginning of the second world war, he took just one book: the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Presumably, in Wanno, things are a bit different with an e-reader.

Prison – variously rendered as the nick, the slammer, coop, clink, cooler, glasshouse – has always had a literary dimension. Writers in prison, novels about prison. As an existential experience, the deprivation of liberty has been known to inspire a creative response. In simple plot terms, it's a winner. Turn the key on the cell door and you pose the question: how and when will the captive escape? It's a potent variation on the oldest question in the book: what happened next?

In the literary psychodrama of prison, the imposition of "durance vile" (a long prison sentence) was often mixed up with religious persecution and state repression. John Bunyan conceived The Pilgrim's Progress in Bedford County Jail. Walter Raleigh wrote the first volume of his History of the World in the Tower of London. Subsequently, the threat of prison became another kind of literary criticism. Daniel Defoe, a great survivor, was put in the stocks for his published opinions, and lived to tell the tale (many didn't).

In the heyday of Grub Street, books and penury went hand in hand. Many writers and journalists worked in the shadow of the debtor's prison. John Dickens, the father of the novelist, was thrown into the Marshalsea for debt, an experience young Charles never forgot – and used to brilliant effect in Little Dorrit.

But there's a danger in letting fiction romanticise prison. Victorian jails could be fatal destinations. Oscar Wilde's life was effectively cut short by his two years of hard labour in the 1890s. His experience yields perhaps two of the greatest literary responses to prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his neglected masterpiece, De Profundis.

After Wilde, a short list of writers in prison includes Jean Genet, Arthur Koestler and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the public response becomes steadily ironised. The story is told of Picasso, who was invited to contribute to a fund to help Russian writers out of the gulag: he refused. They write better in prison, he said.

And it can be true. Jeffrey Archer has never won any prizes for his prose – he probably wouldn't want to – but his three prison diaries have an honesty and directness, mixed with quality reportage, that put them into a different league from his fiction.

Will Chris Huhne use his enforced leisure to write? As the old saying goes: keep a journal, and it will keep you. Huhne might be short of money, and his prison story will have a market, so he may well write something. With a bit of luck those novels he's reading now will give him a boost.

Jeffrey ArcherOscar WildeAutobiography and memoirFictionRobert McCrum
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