The Guardian's Blog, page 22
February 1, 2016
Could Gone Girl on the Train be the next bestseller?
Are authors running out of titles? January and February’s offerings suggest they’re finding it increasingly difficult to devise new ones. Instead they settle for names that recycle, reference or rework those of other books or artworks.
Sometimes the aim is evidently to associate the new work with the old one in the buyer’s mind, as when Helen Ellis’s American Housewife brazenly recalls Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (just as Paula Hawkins’s mega-selling, girl-less The Girl on the Train nodded to Gone Girl). Or they suggest it belongs to traditions beloved of the author, like Christopher Brookmyre’s Black Widow, previously used for several films noirs and characters in comics; or that it might be a just-discovered posthumous offering, as with Robert Ryan’s Dr Watson mystery The Sign of Fear (modelled on Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four).
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January 30, 2016
Stephen King picks winner of Guardian short story contest
Wild Swimming, an epistolary tale of aquatic horror, stands out among visions of evil toys and post-apocalyptic survival
• Read Wild Swimming by Elodie Harper
The short story is alive and well in the UK according to novelist Stephen King, who this week picked the winner of a competition launched to celebrate his own latest collection, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams.
More than 800 creepy tales were submitted to the contest, run by the Guardian and King’s UK publisher, Hodder & Stoughton. King, who chose the winner from a shortlist of six, said: “I never expected such quality, and it does my heart good. Every one of these stories would be publishable.”
Related: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King review – dark stories with moments of magic
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January 29, 2016
The ominous ordinary: horror writers finding scares in the everyday
Some of the very best work in this genre comes from writers who embed their terrors into strikingly everyday settings
Long-lived short fiction magazines are a rarity today. And ones that have had a real impact on the wider landscape of storytelling are even rarer. So issue 50 of Black Static marks a important milestone for editor Andy Cox and TTA Press, who are responsible for two of the world’s most significant outlets for short fiction.
Reality, even comfortable suburban reality, is transitory and fleeting
We’re on the bus, up from Manchester through Salford to Bolton, on our way to go camping in Kearsley. We piled on at Victoria Station – we’d all been in the square between it and Chetham’s music school. It’s where all the kids like us’ll go – the moshers, the punks, the greasers and the goths.
All the ones like me and Biff.
Related: Horror fiction from Charles Dickens to Charlie Higson – books podcast
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Flash Friday: Legs
A couple sit on the floor in a short but intensely charged flash fiction instalment
By Libby Flores for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
They sat on the linoleum floor, the two of them. His watch was the only thing moving. Through the small window above the sink the rising sun was bleaching the room white. The sound of a garbage truck, a man calling his dog, newspapers hitting doorsteps. Her long, bare legs were out in front of her, knees like turned down saucers. He loved her legs. Something he’d miss. Their backs on the kitchen cabinets, his arm so close to hers. They were tired, but more thirsty. A glass of water would change things, she thought, if he would just get up and get a glass of water.
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Ahhhh! What are your scariest reading experiences?
To mark the birth of Frankenstein’s monster 200 years ago, the Royal Society of Literature has been asking writers for their most alarming moments as a reader – join them, if you dare
It’s 200 years since unceasing storms sweeping over Lake Geneva ruined Mary Shelley’s sailing jaunts and gave birth to a literary genre – when Lord Byron suggested to her and the other guests at the Villa Diodati that they pass some time by writing ghost stories. To celebrate the birth of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the Royal Society of Literature has been asking fellows to reveal their scariest moments in literature.
For Hilary Mantel, it’s the moment in Jane Eyre when Rochester pauses outside a locked door in the dark, low corridor of Thornfield Hall’s fateful third storey and asks: “You don’t turn sick at the sight of blood?” He leaves Jane locked into an attic room – complete with antique tapestry and a cabinet decorated with the 12 apostles, “an ebon Crucifix and a dying Christ” – where she must tend to a wounded man, dipping her hand again and again into a basin that gradually becomes a mixture of blood and water. As a 10-year-old reader, Mantel says she “didn’t know that if your name is in the title, you can’t die part way through the book. I doubted Jane would make it to see ‘streaks of grey light edging the window curtains’. But dawn comes – and we still don’t know who or what is beyond the wall.”
That I was living in a military dictatorship at the time of first reading might have had something to do with how much space he took up in my imagination with his unyielding personality, his ‘enforcers’ and – creepiest of all – the rest of the warren, too traumatised to flee even when the opportunity arose.
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January 27, 2016
The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: what should make the list?
The Observer has embarked on a two year quest to come up with a list of books that have shaped the Anglo-American imagination. Which are your top titles?
Follow the journey: the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeThe 100 best novels written in EnglishRobert McCrum loves a good list: after the author and Observer writer spent over two years compiling and reviewing his 100 best novels written in English, he’s now back to craft a “definitive” list of essential works of nonfiction.
Related: The 100 best nonfiction books of all time
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Why everyone should read Geraldine Brooks
Rightly revered in Australia for wide-ranging fiction and reportage, Pulitzer-winner Brooks has never written a bad book – and more people should read her. Here are five titles everyone should pick up
The most confounding thing about Geraldine Brooks’s writing is how consistently good it is: it doesn’t matter if she is recalling an interview with a disarmingly amiable Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran or spinning a Pulitzer-winning yarn about the missing father from Little Women – every book is remarkable. Working as a journalist did not beat the poet out of her – Brooks’s fiction is frequently beautiful, poetic at times, packed full of sentences to relish aloud – a river of “water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird” in March; the hero who “walked through the woods like a young Adam, naming creation” in Caleb’s Crossing.
Related: Australia Day honour 'hits me in a very deep place', says Geraldine Brooks
Related: The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks review – portrait of a humanised King David
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Politics in picture books: big questions for the smallest readers
For younger minds interested in how the world works, there are a number of erudite authors who make subjects like migration, war and equality accessible
Politics and picture books aren’t, perhaps, ideas that automatically go hand in hand in readers’ minds – especially if they are exhausted parents, absently chanting rhymes as their minds steal off. But political themes, both quiet and strident, are often interwoven with the usual suspects’ anthropomorphised cuteness, noisy transport and fairytale retellings. From feminism to climate change, war, immigration and human rights, picture books can provide an easy way into, and fruitful discussion points for, some complex and challenging concepts.
Related: Book doctor: Are children's books darker than they used to be?
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January 26, 2016
Translation Tuesday: A, from a 17th-century Spanish dictionary
From atheists (‘ungrateful’) to garlic (‘not a food for courtly people’): delight in the A entries from the first monolingual Spanish dictionary from 1611, part of our series on translated writing
By Sebastián de Covarrubias and Janet Hendrickson for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
From The Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language, by Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, translated by Janet Hendrickson.
It is so simple to pronounce. It is the first letter man utters on being born. It is pronounced, like the vowels that follow it, by puckering the lips and exhaling. The simplicity of the a is such that its utterance is not denied to the mute, who with the a and the help of their tone, the movement of their hands, feet, eyes, and body make us understand in a moment what the well-spoken could not with many words; the mute, as they walk together, prattle more than magpies. The a is doctrine, way, eternal bliss. The a, repeated three times, declares the mute’s impotence in speech; as for me, mute in what I seek, it means the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, imploring my God to give me His life to finish this work for His glory and for everyone’s use. I know of no one who has taken on this task, carrying it to the end I seek. They called a the letter of health.
Means the first beginnings.
Gathering dew from one flower and the next, the bee makes a liquor sweet as honey, moiling in its cunning honeycombs of wax. It alone among the insects was created for man’s benefit. The bee leads to discourses on its choice in flowers; its craftsmanship making its hexagonal cells; its king’s clemency. The bee is the symbol of the curious, who gather sentences as the bee gathers flowers, making a work smooth and sweet. The bee does not procreate through the coupling of the male and female, and they are no less fertile because of this.
Infinite congregation of water; the depth of the deepest valleys, where vision fades, gazing from above.
Where I am.
Water swallows the land, quenches fire, rises to the air and alters it and is above the skies themselves. It raises such a multitude of fish; it allows man to travel a great distance in a short time. Water has the virtue of cooling, cleansing, smoothing. It means the Holy Spirit. It means the wisdom of God, which is Christ. It means the peoples. Artificial waters, water of the angels, distilled with aromatic drugs, roses and the rest, orange blossom, jasmine, lemon blossom, myrtle.
The eagle kills the deer with marvelous guile: filling its wings with earth, leaping over the deer’s head, the eagle shakes dust in the deer’s eyes, by which it blinds the deer and makes it run, until the deer reaches a cliff, where the eagle lets the it fall; it kills itself or breaks its legs. The eagle snatches the serpent in its talons and lifts it in the air and tears it to pieces, but the serpent coils around the eagle and catches its wings; it does not let the eagle fly; both fall to earth. The eagle lifts the turtle in the air and drops it on a crag. The eagle is not afraid of lightning; when it thunders, the swan hides between the reeds and rushes of the lakes. The eagle means Christ among men, like the eagle, queen among the birds, for the flight by which Christ descended to the innermost part of the Virgin Mary’s heartstrings. Christ is the eagle with sharp vision; He beholds the sun.
The wind, for being moving air or being caused in air. It would take too long to declare here how and where and from what are created the mist, the dew, the rain, the snow and hail that falls, the thunder and lightning, the comets, firebrands, exhalations, vortices, and yawnings of the sky.
Garlic is so well-known one need not describe it. Garlic is not a food for courtly people. The leopard abhors the smell of it; if the leopard’s lair is scoured with garlic, the leopard forsakes it. Garlic rubbed against the trunk of any tree keeps caterpillars away.
What is that? Nothing but the dawn as it walks among the cabbages.
We ask, “Is it something?” We answer, “It’s nothing.” A term that comprehends all that can be.
Some say that women have three wombs on the right and three on the left and one in the middle; some wombs create males, the others females, and the one in the middle hermaphrodites. And others attribute even more wombs to women, and many allow for none of this.
Rings were worn on the finger closest to the pinkie on the left hand because there anatomists found a delicate nerve that runs from that finger to the heart; by it gold, like the stone, communicate their virtue, by which they comfort.
The symbol of sadness and weeping.
It makes no noise, except when it brays, at which point it is insufferable. A child can take the ass where he wants; the ass brings us bread and wine; it pulls the waterwheel; it carries the wheat to the mill; it cleans the house and dungs the fields; sometimes it plows; it threshes in season and harvests grain; it has no bile. The ass seems inept for war, but some nations have used it in war; the asses of Palestine were nimbler than horses. Its head, affixed to a sown field, not only shoos birds but fertilizes the land. They make sieves to sift wheat from its hide. A hard callous grows on asses’ knees; mixed with aged oil this callous is so potent that when one anoints oneself with it, even if one is a woman, a beard grows there.
He is ungrateful.
Those little specks that float in the air and can only be perceived with the sunbeam that passes through a chink in the window.
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January 25, 2016
Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week – with marvellous letters, cats and a call for the creation of “bookaholics anonymous”.
kushti shared:
Finally got round to reading an obvious omission from my reading history – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, which was voted by an assembly of critics as the best book of the [21st century so far]. And yes, it is a great read, it has a fabulous dynamic energy about it which is irresistible.
For a complete change from the rather emotionally draining Diaz, I have gone to the outer reaches of experimentalism with You & Me by Padgett Powell, which concerns a pair of Vladimir and Estragon type characters talking rubbish to each other, and nothing else, to very amusing effect.
... and really enjoyed it. I’m a big fan of Tom Cox’s writing; his turn of phrase is brilliant and there’s a genuine warmth and affection that runs through it all. Some wonderful descriptions of the Devon countryside too. My one very minor gripe is that some of it is slightly rehashed from his (sadly now defunct) Guardian column, such as Roscoe’s pub adventures, but it’s so well-written that I can’t really complain about that.
A friend recommended it to me. I’m a 19 year old man/boy and some of the stares I get on the train are quite funny but the book is pretty good and scarily relatable. I’m quite an anxious person and I struggle to make the distinction between reality and what’s going on in my own head (which are usually extremes) far too often. That’s the sense that I get with Chris’ infatuation in the book.
Oh, this book is marvellous! I’d forgotten how much I love collections of literary letters (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor was my previous gold bar, but this one may have toppled it.) I’m a life-long fan of Maxwell, but was only vaguely familiar with Warner. Over 40 years the correspondence between Maxwell and Warner grows from the formal, editor/writer relationship, to a true and lasting love between these two, though they only met in person a handful of times. At times Maxwell appears almost besotted with Warner (though he is equally adoring of his wife Emily and their daughters.) I learned of Warner’s politics, her relationship with her partner Valentine Aukland, her friends and foes in London literary circles of the 40’s and 50’s, and she emerges as a fascinating character. It doesn’t hurt that there are frequent references to cats, both Maxwell’s and Warner’s. It took me two library renewals before I could brace myself to read the last six pages – Maxwell’s eulogy at Warner’s funeral.
Unless there’s a Heaven that allows you to b.y.o.b (bring your own books) I’ll never have enough time to read what I own. And yet ... and yet I just ordered two more novels. Does anyone else here in our community share this tragic affliction?
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