The Guardian's Blog, page 223

Endless fascination: in praise of novels without neat conclusions

Tidy narrative closure provide may be entertaining, but loose ends and ambiguity offer a truer sense of real life

I read Imogen Russell Williams's recent blogpost (Coming to bad ends: stories that refuse closure) with great interest. I do understand that she isn't proposing that novels without good and proper "endings" are in any way inferior to those that do, but something troubled me deeply about Williams's (and the vast reading public's, I would argue) desire for our narratives to reach closure.

The well-worn formula beginning/middle/end is the default mode for pretty much all of the commercial and "literary" novels that currently jostle for ascendancy on our bookshelves. We like our entertainment to make immediate sense, or if it doesn't at first, it should explain all at the end. Repeat ad infinitum. I would argue there is something crucial lacking in this formula: the power of ambiguity. Closure belittles the complexities of meaning: our meaning, our being here. So what does this desire for closure say about us as readers? Why are we so fearful of ambiguity? Why do we desire novels that, to paraphrase Alain Robbe-Grillet, do the "reading" for us?

Life isn't like the narratives that make up the majority of novels in circulation today, or like the well-rehearsed scenes we enjoy at the theatre, or in the movies. It's more complicated than that: steeped in confusion, dead ends, blank spaces and broken fragments. It's baffling at times, annoying and perpetually open-ended. We have no real way of predicting our future. So why do our novels have to tie all this stuff together, into a neatly packaged bundle of ready-made answers? Something doesn't ring true.

I read a hell of a lot of contemporary fiction, and the majority of these works, good and bad, are riddled with the same conscious/unconscious desire for the narrative to end. I can sense this peculiar event just over halfway into most novels: all those random elements that I ordinarily love suddenly begin to act rather oddly: they stop fizzing, they begin to unify, to all move in the same direction, hurtling towards the same fixed point with great force. This event is the author's doing, of course, forcing chaos towards order and natural events to act unnaturally. The author fears ambiguity, but more importantly the author fears the reader's own fears of ambiguity, and this double-edged event makes for a rather predictable read.

Here's an obvious example to support my argument. Would Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot be made richer if Godot suddenly entered stage right ("Ta-da!") at the end of the play? Of course not. Beckett's theatrical masterpiece is all the more powerful because of Godot's nonsensical absence. Does it even matter if Godot exists? Not really. The play's power stems from this ambiguity; it's this sense of instability that forces us to scrutinise things more closely. So, when I sit down with the text of Waiting for Godot and I sift through the humour, the repetition, the bleakness and acts of nothingness (you know, all that stuff that doesn't make "sense"), and I reach Vladimir's often ignored line: "Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?" the power of ambiguity suddenly hits me. Beckett is presenting to us a perpetual apocalyptic present, a catastrophe already happened/about to happen, in which something as horrific as the holocaust can occur without us noticing. Just like in real life. It's only when we hit oblique junctures such as this that we begin to realise the beginning/middle/end formula doesn't cut it. What gives us the right to such authority?

And it's not just Beckett: let's look at some of our other "great" authors, those who've possibly written works of true timelessness. Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Gass, David Foster Wallace, Vila-Matas, Pessoa et cetera … Not the biggest fans of endings either, are they? As Viktor Shklovsky has pointed out: "A novel can come to an end, but has no ending […] because finishing [a] novel would mean knowing the future, and we don't know the future." It's the same reason why Thackeray quipped that each time he wrote a novel he wished the man who shined his shoes could write the ending for him.

It's no surprise that most novels are ruined by their forced "endings"; by our collective desire for them to conclude in an orderly fashion, so that we can get on with our lives after we have closed the book (yes, The Road, I'm looking at you). Marx that told us the novel is a bourgeois construct, its very form reflecting the demands of the bourgeoisie who gave it sovereignty. We hold up our novels like vanity mirrors, hoping to reflect our own dreams, conceits, and liberal aspirations. Duly satisfied with our novels' conclusions, we put them back down, happy and content. A week later all is forgotten, the previous novel has disappeared from our lives and we've moved on to another that's hopefully a little bit more entertaining.

But not those novels without end, steeped in ambiguity, those novels stay with us. We can't shake them off, no matter how hard we try. They haunt us, mock us, they hang around waiting for us in the shadows, they disturb our working days, disrupt our sleep, torment us, force us to participate on their own terms. Much like real life does, novels without endings reveal to us the ambiguity that is crucial to our own desire to simply find out things for ourselves. You see, no matter how enjoyable, or how much good old, traditional "common sense" is to be found in our neatly packaged "endings", I would argue there's more reality to be found in a novel as supposedly impenetrable as Finnegans Wake, famous for having no beginning or end, than myriad formulaic novels that overtly yearn to capture what it is to be us in their well-worn beginnings, middles and ends. Viva ambiguity, I say!

FictionLee Rourke
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Two Costa nominations isn't the full picture for comics

Kudos to Bryan and Mary M Talbot and Joff Winterhart, but the graphic scene is full of authors worthy of mainstream awards

The announcement on Tuesday evening that this years Costa shortlists contain not one but two graphic novels was greeted in the press with the sort of collective intake of breath that generally accompanies the arrival of a dinner-party gatecrasher. Bryan and Mary M Talbot's Dotter of Her Father's Eyes joins Artemis Cooper, Selina Guinness and Kate Hubbard on the biography list, and Joff Winterhart's Days of the Bagnold Summer is rubbing shoulders with the latest offerings from Hilary Mantel, James Meek and Stephen May in the best novel category. Bryan Talbot, a national treasure in graphic novel circles who has over the years produced a fair few books that warrant serious critical attention (ranging from The Tale of One Bad Rat to his more recent Grandville series), said: "It is another instance of the growing acceptability of comics as a valid platform."

And he's right. It is. The danger, though, with literary milestones such as this is that readers new to comics (or graphic novels, or sequential art, or whatever we're calling them this week) might think that Dotter of Her Father's Eyes and Days of the Bagnold Summer are extra special; that they warrant more attention than other graphic novels, and should be shown into the drawing rooms of educated ladies and gentlemen throughout the land. Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to burst either the Talbot or the Winterhart bubbles. They are both enormously enjoyable in different ways. Dotter of Her Father's Eyes is part memoir and part biography, linking the upbringing of Mary M Talbot, daughter of a prominent Joyce scholar, and Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce and a woman who was (if this book is anything to go by) wrongly thought of as insane and who ended her days in an asylum. Certain stories, such as Lucia's relationship with Samuel Beckett, play out differently from how I've always thought of them, but this is not the only eye-opening element of the book. The most immediately arresting aspect is the way in which the Talbots audaciously marry the competing narratives. This is the kind of graphic novel that makes you feel cleverer as you read (always a nice feeling). Days of the Bagnold Summer, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish; a sort of low-key sitcom in which a dowdy mother and her seemingly ambivalent metalhead son rub along over the course of the eponymous summer – think Peanuts scripted by Alan Bennett. The art is scratchy, black and white, unadorned (when mum does the washing up, we see her in outline, the sink, nothing else). Days of the Bagnold Summer is a book that will make you chuckle and ponder, if you're that way inclined.

Yet as good as these books both are, the coverage of the prize should not treat them as anything special. What the commentators should be doing is sighing with relief. At last, we can all stop pretending that comics are for kids. Dotter of her Father's Eyes isn't alone in pinning non-fiction to a graphic form: over the last few years we've had Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Guy Delisle's exquisite travelogues, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, all of Joe Sacco's journalism, David B's Epileptic, David Small's Stitches, Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button – and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Similarly, Joff Winterhart is taking up the baton from Joe Matt, John Porcellino, Jeffrey Lewis and Adrian Tomine's early unpolished Optic Nerve work in producing punky, slightly funky strips that may look hurried and dashed off but are in fact the farthest thing from it. And that's not all. If you look around the comics landscape, you'll see this year has provided us with a bumper crop. From Chris Ware's majestic Building Stories (a copy of which should grace the Christmas lists of all serious literature fans) to the wealth of new talent that Random House, which really is at the forefront of publishing graphic novels by new and established talent in the UK, has encouraged – we're talking about Simone Lia, Brecht Evens and Karrie Fransman, among others – this really is a great time to be reading graphic novels and encouraging others to do so.

And who knows? If the literary establishment goes on tentatively peering within the pages of this long-ignored form, perhaps this time next year we'll all be cooing and arching our eyebrows in surprise at the inclusion of a graphic novel on the Booker list. Now wouldn't that be something ...

Costa book awardsComics and graphic novelsFictionBiographyAwards and prizesPeter Wild
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Self-published stories: How A Family Affair went wrong

Highly praised by readers and riding high on the ebooks chart, Mary Campisi's hackneyed tale is as uninspiring as many conventionally published novels

So, people, I did it. I read my second self-published novel. It was Mary Campisi's A Family Affair, chosen, as I explained last week, because it was riding high on Amazon.co.uk's ebook chart. It had tons of positive reviews, as well – an average rating of four stars, from 105 people, 43 of whom gave it five out of five.

That means it's got to be good, right? Well, not really. I don't want to rip this novel apart, because I respect the author for putting it out there; it can't be an easy thing to go it alone. And, as I said last week about Kerry Wilkinson's Locked In, it's really no worse than tons of the family drama-type books that get churned out by traditional publishers. But it has lots of big holes, and I wouldn't have gone on reading if I wasn't conducting my self-published reading experiment.

First up, the commas. She employs the scattergun approach. Second, characters say things like, "'May you rot in hell, Harry Blacksworth.' … 'You can count on it. You can goddam count on it.'" And "'This isn't a boardroom, it's real life.'" And "'by god, if you value our friendship, it better be the truth.'" The heroine, whose father's death reveals he's been spending four days a month for years with another woman, Miriam, with whom he has a child, takes about three seconds to decide she likes this homely new small-town lady more than her own, high society mother. The hero – son of Miriam – is clearly meant to be attractive; after all, he moves "with the graceful fluidity of a jaguar coupled with the overpowering strength of a mountain lion". But then he thinks things like "he could shack up with Natalie Servetti for the next few days; big tits but she talked too much. Damn, he didn't want to screw Natalie."

In fact, all the men are pretty dire. And Christine, our heroine, is horribly patronising at the novel's end, when she decides to move to the small town and "teach the people of Magdalena how to protect their money and make it grow, through investment strategies, savings, debt reduction. Maybe I'll even show them how to apply for a small business loan, analyse mortgage rates and things like that." What a saint.

I could go on, but I'm going to leave it at that. I didn't like A Family Affair, and I'm bemused by how many people did. Dan Holloway pointed out that I should have known better than to make Amazon's chart my starting point, so for next week, I'm picking one of the (many) suggestions you've all made. (Thanks so much, by the way, for bothering.)

Hannah Freeman and I have been going through them all, logging them into a document. I've been clicking on those that intrigued me, particularly those recommended by more than one person – repeated plugging of your own novel doesn't count! – reading some beginnings, stopping when wayward commas or irritating writing put me off. I don't think there's a particularly fair way to do this, although I'm open to suggestions, so I'm just going to plump for the novel that I thought looked most interesting.

I liked the sound of David J Rodger's The Black Lake, recommended by JadedDrVirgo, trencherman, DoctorTOC and Matthias Plunkett - its opening didn't immediately enrage me, and it's been recommended by SFX. Ditto Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales, pitched by garygibson, and Hugh Howey's Wool, recommended by many – I hadn't heard of this one, but apparently it's a self-publishing phenomenon, bought by Ridley Scott for a film, and in the UK by Century.

Bear in mind that I'm a sucker for SFF and thrillers, so this is going to be what I'm drawn to. Perhaps we could rotate this blog through different members of the books team, meaning each week we got a different flavour of self-published novel … What do you all think?

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to go for The Black Lake for next week, if people are happy with that. OK?

Self-publishingFictionAlison Flood
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London: fantasy's capital city | Damien Walter

The many mysteries of the metropolis provides an irresistible route map for the imagination

Mystery is the doorway to fantasy. Dark forests, far away galaxies, roads that wind into the distance: any space that allows our imagination to play without the interference of mundane reality can be a portal. And there are few places more expectant with mystery than cities. Every road, building and doorway is a new unknown. So it's no surprise that writers of fantasy find endless inspiration in cities, and in no city more than London.

The current trend for recasting London through the prism of fantasy metaphors began, arguably, with Neil Gaiman's television series (and later novel) Neverwhere. Gaiman imagines a fantasy underworld beneath the mundane reality of London, built around the names of stops on the tube map. Blackfriars, Angel Islington and Old Bailey become characters in the underworld. It's the kind of simple, beautiful idea Gaiman has a knack for; the sort you feel you might have thought of just a moment before he told them to you.

China Miéville on the other hand has ideas you're not quite sure you get even after he's explained them. You can barely go a few pages through a Miévillian fantasy without encountering London in one form or another. Un Lun Dun is the obvious choice, but my personal favourite is Kraken, featuring truly evil underworld boss The Tattoo, his army of Fists, and a supporting cast of London police officers to go up against him. Miéville collides London's fantasy underworld with its criminal underworld, a trend at the heart of London gothic.

Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London is part urban fantasy, part police procedural. The book and its sequels Moon Over Soho and Whispers Underground have found an eager crossover audience of fantasy and crime readers. It's not as strange a collision of styles as it might seem; both genres deal with the traumatic events that disrupt the comfortable realities of the characters they depict. Aaronovitch's books share the cosy familiarity of many crime novels, and the fantasy elements are never allowed to disrupt the reader's belief in reality.

Paul Cornell's London Falling is a much grittier vision of a gothic, fantasy London, well balanced between its depiction of the city's criminal underworld and a horrifying fantasy reality that for most of the novel lurks just at the edges of sight. Its take on the crime genre is less The Bill, more The Sweeney. Cornell's undercover coppers and plain clothes detectives are a thoroughly seedy bunch of reprobates, and it's easy to imagine Ray Winstone taking the lead in any film adaptation.

The City's Son by Tom Pollock is a YA novel determined to bring London to life, in a very literal sense. There is a traditional coming of age adventure story at the heart of it, but Pollock's real joy seems to be in the creation of a huge cast of monstrous characters who manifest through the inanimate infrastructure of London. Reach, the King of the Cranes. Gutterglass, a servant made of trash and garbage. Pavement Priests. The Chemical Synod. Even the street lights are brought to life. Pollock's imagined London is intense and absorbing, and The City's Son is an urban fantasy in the truest sense of the word, intent on imbuing every corner of the city with life, wonder and magic.

Mystery is also the doorway to reality. Once we stray in to the forest, or reach the far galaxy, or just walk down the road, we find things both more mundane and far stranger than we had imagined. The reality of our lives in cities, even cities as full of character and life as London, is often rather mundane. We take for granted the incredible strangeness that arises from eight million lives all crowded in to a few square miles of land and architecture. At its best fantasy is more than an escape from reality, but a way of seeing again the true weirdness of the world around us. For that reason, novels of the London gothic are probably best enjoyed by people who know the city best.

FantasyThrillersDamien Walter
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Tips, links and suggestions: Our review list and the books you are reading today

Your weekly space to tell us what you're reading and what you'd like to see covered on the books site, plus our review list

Greetings one and all. Hannah has taken off on her holidays this week so I'm stepping up.

Last week's hot topic was self-publishing, and Alison Flood is even now valiantly wading through some of the most widely tipped suggestions in the hope of finding hidden treasure. Alanwskinner, for one, is grateful. "Self-publishing is awfully like sailing in the Bermuda Triangle: no one knows you even went in, let alone disappeared without a trace." Nicely put.

There were several other lively discussions, too, not least about the oeuvre of Rose Tremain, with SharonE6 confessing that she hated Trespass, and goodyorkshirelass, a self-confessed Tremain fan, suggesting that she might not be not alone in finding it "unpleasant".

TimHannigan reported from the Singapore Writers Festival, where he sat next to Pico Iyer and discovered a short story collection by a young Singaporean short story writer, O Thiam Chin. "It's called Never Been Better and it really is very good. He's my Excellent Writer No One In England Has Ever Heard Of of the moment."

TimHannigan also took the opportunity to pick an entertaining quarrel with the purveyors of hagiographic biography. "I kind of want to tell you about my own event at the festival - a flaming face-off with a very venerable Brit lit biographer - but that would be awfully spammy of me, wouldn't it?" he writes "Um ... you could have a look at this 'ere thingummy ... and note the response beneath, if you're at all curious..." We are, Tim, we are.

Elsewhere, broger wrote:

Just finished 'The Point of View' - an interesting experiment in multiple voices, epistolary; each writer corresponds with someone indirectly connected with the others and tells of their encounters on board a transatlantic liner with other passengers, some American returning home, some European and visiting, and what happens to them when they disembark. All have interesting and usually conflicting opinions of each other, and there are some very Jamesian apercus about the corrupt, decadent Old World and the thrusting, ingenuous raucousness of the New. There's an amusing portrayal of a 'radical' English MP who is weirdly reminiscent of D. Cameron.

R042 wrote:

Recently I've been reading a good deal of the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, as I've mentioned before. He's a good fantasy author who tends to avoid the supernatural in favour of pseudo-histories which are the products of large amounts of research of their real analogues.

Some time back I wrote a short critical piece about what I think is one of his best novels, Under Heaven. Yesterday I was copied in on a tweet from the author himself, recommending other people take a look at my reading of his novel, which I thought was a nice gesture.

R042 concludes: "I suppose this - being tweeted about by an author - is the modern equivalent of writing to your favourite author and getting a reply?" Can anyone suggest a title for this new phenomenon?

If not, do keep on telling us about what you are reading in the thread below. Here's our review list for this week, but subject as ever to last minute changes.

Non-fiction:
Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture by I Cobain
The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater
Shakespeare's Restless World by Neil MacGregor
How to Love Wine by Eric Asimov
Murder at Wrotham Hill by Diana Souhami
Empire Antarctica by Gavin Francis
1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica by Chris Turney
The Crocodile by the Door: The Story of a House, a Farm and a Family by Selina Guinness

Fiction:
Two Brothers by Ben Elton
The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon
Herta Muller
History of My Assassins by Tarun Tejpal

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers
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Coming to bad ends: stories that refuse closure

Narratives that finish without resolving their plots – such as Brighton Rock and An Inspector Calls – are unending torture for readers

(WARNING – contains spoilers for JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, and Mo Hayder's Hanging Hill)

Fully resolved tragedy, leaving stage and page a-sluice with blood or tears, induces a washed-clean calm in the reader, even as it plays havoc with her mascara. Muslin-clad romances crushed in embraces on the last page, or chocolate-box mysteries tied off with a flourish of resolving ribbon, leave me sighing and replete. Even endings presaging inevitable sequels, wherein a vital protagonist or quest object has yet to be freed or found (YA trilogies, I'm looking at you) can increase my sense of wellbeing; if I enjoyed the book's world and its writing, another to look forward to is no bad thing. But there is a tiny subset of unresolved and evil endings that leave their protagonists poised, helpless, on the brink of cataclysm, with the reader forever conscious, forever appalled and forever powerless to intervene. I call these Sword of Damocles endings, and avoid them like the black catarrh.

The first of these beastly, brain-seizing denouements I encountered was a theatrical one – JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which I studied at school. It wasn't the relentlessly succeeding revelations about the Birling family's collaborative doing-to-death of Eva Smith, sacked, shamed and driven to suicide by bourgeois callousness and hypocrisy, that gave my 12-year-old head the dramatic equivalent of an earworm. It wasn't even the "fire and blood and anguish" the Inspector calls down on them in recompense, although I remember confusedly expecting literal flames, and possibly the appearance of the Demon King, on the class trip to the actual show. It's the fact that the play ends with a phone call about a young girl's suicide, and the family's realisation that while the Inspector might not have been what he seemed, they haven't been let off after all – their shame and sorrow have simply been postponed. Both the arse-covering elders and the repentant kids are held in that moment forever, without the possibility of ever facing their tragedy or finding redemption beyond it. Like Eva Smith, they're not given any second chance; only a brief bubble of illusory hope, which bursts as the curtain falls.

Similarly, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock plucked the lowest string in my brain when I read it in my teens, and has left it humming since. The precise, savage planes of the novel, sharp as a stabbing bird's beak, are clear to the reader from its justly famous opening ("Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him"). Pinkie the baby-faced killer and his simple-complex vileness, alternately treading down and encouraging naive Rose's spaniel love, makes for repeated wincing on the reader's part; so does his cheerful nemesis, Ida, and her somehow hideous implacability, peeping out like withered children from the jolly robe of the Spirit of Christmas Present. But its ending, which leaves the widowed, pregnant Rose walking "rapidly" towards "the worst horror of all", the disc on which Pinkie has recorded a hissed message of hatred instead of the love-words she thinks will give her courage, makes me want to beat on the glass panel between reader and book until it breaks, seize her by the shoulders and distract her while someone else breaks the record over his knee and sets fire to the pieces.

As for Mo Hayder's Hanging Hill, it has bounced around my unquiet cerebellum since I read it earlier this year, and is still popping up every now and then to play merry hell with my peace of mind. Its protagonists, estranged sisters Sally and Zoë, navigate the book's moral maze clumsily and with frequent, increasingly cataclysmic false steps. The worse they do, the worse is done to them, and the greater the reader's agony on their behalf. Hayder's masterful evocation of how calmly murderous a parent can become in defence of a child – the moment when Sally sets fear aside, birthing "a thing that was skinless and sharp-toothed, with the long face of a dragon" – is closely followed by the cruel revelation that her saved child has blithely been sent off into a wilderness of unmapped lanes with a nondescript, gently-spoken killer, her mother missing the frantic phone messages that bring the news too late. Part of my mind is still driving through those lanes with a shotgun, and I think it always will be.

Is anyone else living vicariously under a suspended literary sword, desperate for the resolution they're never going to get without some Annie Wilkes–style author-kidnap? And can you steer me away from any other brain-melting not-quite-coups de grâce?

FictionGraham GreeneJB PriestleyImogen Russell Williams
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Live webchat: Jay Jennings on Charles Portis

Post your questions about Charles Portis now, for a live webchat with editor Jay Jennings this Friday from 1pm

I'm delighted to announce that Jay Jennings will be joining us for a discussion of True Grit and Charles Portis on Friday 23 November at 1pm GMT.

Jay Jennings is a writer and editor who has just put together Escape Velocity, a (wonderful) Charles Portis pot pourri containing journalism, short fiction and even a three-act play. He's also in the process of writing a guide to go along with the book's selection for The Big Read, a programme run by the US National Endowment for the Arts.

Elsewhere, Jay has also had an impressive career as a freelance journalist, has written a book called Carry The Rock about an American football season at Little Rock Central High School and the history of race relations in the city, and a popular literary anthology about tennis: Tennis and the Meaning Of Life. You can find out more about him at jayjennings.net.

I should also add that among his other qualifications, Jay is uniquely well-placed to talk about Charles Portis because, like the author, he comes from Little Rock, Arkansas and he has actually known Portis for a number of years. The only caveat here is that Jay will have to demur from answering personal questions. Charles Portis likes to keep his private life to himself, and we should all respect that. Besides, there's so much to talk about with the novels, films and journalism that we shouldn't have any trouble having a fascinating discussion.

To ask Jay a question, just post below the line. Feel free to get yours in early – and do join us on Friday!

FictionSam Jordison
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Looking for a great self-published book? Here's where to find it

Steer clear of the bookselling behemoths. For something really different, try out these literature blogs and review sites

It's wonderful to see the Guardian taking such an active interest in the self-publishing landscape. I was as frustrated as anyone to see such a splatterball response to Alison Flood's piece last week, because it asks such an important question when it comes to self-publishing: where on earth (well, on Google/Amazon anyway) do I start?

My first reaction was excitement, my second a dismissive snort at many of the comments. Hesitation followed, as I realised that if there were a self-publishing Archimedean point, it was well and truly rooted in quicksand. My overall reaction, however, was that I was pretty sure where not to start.

If we're talking "gems" or "masterpieces", we're not looking for a decent self-published book but one that does something traditional publishing doesn't. So don't start with booksellers offering self-published books that mimic regular books. And please, Alison, don't start with the Amazon charts, which are stuffed with examples of passably good self-publishing – but few "gems".

One of the sad things about self-publishing is that authors often strive to do what publishers do, from editing to cover design. Of course, it's understandable as a business decision, and I have nothing but admiration for the writers who do it. But when the media plays follow-the-news rather than make-the-news, as though what's good for entrepreneurial writers is good for literature as a whole, we get a reinforced message that points writers at a fixed model and robs readers of a wider choice. So, one place you won't find self-published gems is on the review sites purporting to filter the good from the bad by applying the criteria of professionalism.

The world of self-publishing provides a great home for the "midlist". These are authors whose books are unlikely to hit pay dirt and who are struggling to find a publisher with the funds to back them. They find themselves squeezed out of a market that needs the possibility of a big payoff (though that has changed in the past couple of years with the resurgence of small presses). Sites such as Indie e-book review and Self-publishing Review are good places to start looking in this regard.

What self-publishing does well is the new, the playful, the awkward, the uncategorisable – the glorious failure (or string of them). Self-publishing writers can take risks without worrying about how many times they fail. They are unconstrained by the standards of the traditional publishing industry. As a reader, I believe life is too short: if I want a great thriller, there's enough Mark Billingham and Tami Hoag to work through. If I choose to read self-published books it's because I want something different.

Which brings me back to where to start. I'm a great fan of the click-and-see approach. I begin at one of my favourite base camps, a site steeped in the kind of writing I love, such as htmlgiant or 3:am or Sabotage Reviews (the last styled as a guide to the ephemeral, which makes it fabulous for chapbooks, zines and true one-offs). From here I click on an author's blog, and keep clicking on sidebar links until I end up goodness knows where, discovering on the way such self-publishing treasure troves as Paraphilia Magazine, Sam Pink's blog and Toronto Poetry Vendors.

An excellent introduction to the breadth of self-publishing authors can be found in ezines and websites that collate short works. As well as htmlgiant and 3:am, there are the likes of Metazen, Housefire and the very best of the author platform sites Fictionaut, each featuring hundreds of authors creating experimental and often incredibly beautiful work. A good idea is to start there and branch out one click at a time.

A lot of writers who publish their own work online engage with digital technology itself, creating new forms of literature that capture the rhythms and cadences of web-based communication, and ask questions about online identity and community. These writers use the internet as a tool for disseminating their work and also as the forum in which every part of their relationship with their readers takes place. Nowhere is this more interestingly done than in Alt Lit, a movement that adopts the idiom of chatroom speak while supporting a community of writers. Alt Lit is already beginning to seep into the mainstream; Tao Lin, the movement's high priest, has sold his new book to Vintage, and his breakthrough, Shoplifting from American Apparel, has just been filmed. But there is a whole seam of wonderfully put together Alt Lit ebooks out there, as well as standalone pieces. Great places to start looking are Alt Lit Library and Beach Sloth's blog.

In short, the question "Where do I start?" is easy. If you go where you usually do in your search for good books, you will find the kind of books you usually find. But what a waste when self-publishing has so much to offer, and so many alternative places to find it.

Self-publishingDan Holloway
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The rise of literary genres | Robert McCrum

In an ever more tightly focused books market, divisions into niche appetites are ever more specific

A week ago, writing about 62-year old Hilary Boyd's Thursdays in the Park (Quercus), I coined the term "gran lit". Hardly original, you will say, (no dispute there), but it caught on. Subsequently, variations on "gran lit" appeared in the Times, the Telegraph and the Independent, as well as getting recognition in Australia's Herald-Sun.

The gran in question (Mrs Boyd) also popped up on both the ITV News at Ten and the Today Show, challenging the conventional wisdom: just because you're over 60, you're not interested in having a fling. I'm wondering how long it will be before gran lit joins chick lit, and the rest, as a term of art. That's to say, as a shorthand for a now-booming genre of fiction for the "grey market".

The development of the literary marketplace in the past 30-something years has been echoed by a new, and acute, sensitivity to the place of genre within the trade. In a market-savvy creative economy, you could say that genre has become everything. I have been able to identify 15 contemporary shades of "literature". No doubt, readers will think of others, but here are some obvious first nominations.

1. Lit lit
Two versions here.
a) Poetry. No higher form - a straight line from Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Hardy and Hughes.
b) Fiction. Also known as "literary fiction"; a genre whose contemporary exemplars include Julian Barnes, Philip Hensher and Zadie Smith.

2. Ghost lit
A surprising number of successful books (bestselling memoirs especially) are written by ghost writers. But there are also ghosted novels, too. By definition these wraith-like creatures have no names and are known only to their fellow spooks – and the publishers who depend on them.

3. Graphic book lit
Manga novels have been a booming genre for the past 10 years. The Observer sponsors a graphic short story prize, but graphic books have yet to become an established part of the mainstream.

4. Chick lit
The motherlode. There's far more of this lit than most readers realise. If, as some suggest, it began with Bridget Jones, there's now a second or even third generation.

5. Gran lit
A new entry: see my opening comments, above

6. Erotic lit
The quintessential expression of this genre is, of course, EL James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which has now begun to acquire some respectability with a nomination for a National Book award. My own guess is that it's a craze that will soon (if it doesn't already) seem embarrassing and ridiculous.

7. Booker lit
Fiction that plays well with Booker prize judges is sometimes characterised as unreadable and pretentious, with some justification. On the other hand, the Booker's track record of winners is impressive. As a prize, Booker is rivalled only by the Orange prize, now the women's prize for fiction. In a larger category – prize lit – Booker and Orange are the market leaders.

8. US lit
For me, the big names here are still Philip Roth, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo. Of course, US fiction (and poetry) is too vast a canvas to be reduced to a single frame.

9. Commonwealth lit
The literature of the Commonwealth used to get a lot of commercial and critical attention. Changing readership patterns in the world have reduced the significance of "Commonwealth" writing, but it will probably survive, in some form, for another generation. (see also: 10 and 11)

10. Oz lit
Australian writing, a sub-genre of 9, used to be fashionable enough to deserve a category of its own. The market leader is Peter Carey, followed by Christos Tsiolkas, Kate Grenville and Thomas Keneally, among many.

11. Indian lit
This could be seen as a subset of either Booker lit or Commonwealth Lit, and is represented by Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and many others. For a while, it seemed as if the English literary tradition would be sustained exclusively by writers from the sub-continent.

12. Kids' lit
The past 20 years have seen a wonderful flowering of writing for children, from Philip Pullman and Julia Donaldson to Michael Morpurgo and JK Rowling. Later generations will work out why this should have been so.

13. Translated lit
The British reading public's appetite for foreign prose and poetry is (compared with that of our European neighbours) patchy. There was a boom in translated fiction in the 1980s (Kundera, Vargas Llosa, Márquez etc) but that has slowed in the last decade.

14. SF/fantasy
Science fiction is the cockroach in the house of books: it survives on scraps and never goes away. Occasionally, as in the work of HG Wells and JG Ballard, it becomes sublime.

15. Blog lit
A new entry to the field. Blogs that become books. The latest is schoolgirl Martha Payne's blog, which was published last week. Payne hit the headlines with her blog on school meals, won the support of Jamie Oliver and went on to raise £120,000 for charity after her local council banned her from posting photographs and scathing critiques of her school dinners online. Her book, written with the help of her father, takes its title from her blog, NeverSeconds. A more serious example of a blog that became a book is The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross.

Book blogs, generally, remain virtual: as they should.

Robert McCrum
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Reader reviews roundup

A biography of Cezanne, and novels from Herman Wouk and Catherine Fisher are among this week's choices

Art history comes in many shapes and sizes, from coffee-table glossies designed to be more admired than read, to minutely detailed monographs headed straight for the university library stacks. AnnSkea picked up Alex Danchev's biography of Cezanne hoping to find a guide for the enthusiastic amateur. Instead, she found herself lost in a maze of pictures and references. She concedes that it is well illustrated:

However, the coloured illustrations are not in the order in which they are mentioned in the text, which means that one has to page back-and-forth through the book to find them. To take just two examples: in a single paragraph dealing with self-portraits the colour plates referred to are numbers 3, 28 and 25. All are in the first group of illustrations, but separated from each other by five or six pages. In another place, a portrait reproduced in plate 5 (front section) is compared with one reproduced in plate 59 (back section).

It's a good example of how the way in which a book is printed can set its tone, though Danchev himself appears, from AnnSkea's reading, to be a structurally unforgiving writer who avoids any clear linear narrative.
"So, did I enjoy reading the book?" she writes. "No. Did I learn anything from it about Cézanne and his art? Yes... For those with patience, there are amusing and interesting parts to this book and insights to be gained." I suspect Danchev and his publishers would settle for that.

It was a minor classic from the 1940s that caught CinziaSy's attention this week. Herman Wouk's second novel, City Boy, was written three years before his Pulitzer prize-winner The Caine Mutiny. It's a coming-of-age story involving tubby Herbie Bookbinder's attempts to find love and success on a summer vacation from the Bronx in the 1920s. "It's not a 'timeless classic'," writes CinziaSy, "but its certainly a jolly, chuckle-worthy, charming American novel which accurately depicts the mindset and emotions of an ambitious, studious child without allowing the comical elements to patronise or ridicule the protagonist."

And finally, to the chilly start of a new series from Catherine Fisher, which gets a warm welcome from SMPugh. The Obsidian Mirror is a winter-set time-travel novel involving two characters who want to journey through the eponymous mirror and a third who is bent on destroying it.

"As usual," writes SMPugh, "the narrative impulse was so strong that I devoured the thing in a ridiculous hurry and will need to re-read". Just right for those long cold winter evenings, then.

As ever, if I've mentioned your review in this article, please get in touch at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll send you a treat from the cupboards. Thanks for all your reviews.

Claire Armitstead
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