The Guardian's Blog, page 26

Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme – serious frivolity

To give somebody these genre-bending short stories is to bestow on them a new sense of fiction’s possibilities

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

I first came across Barthelme at university, as I am sure is the case with many others. Like most people, I didn’t actually read him. His name was something to drop into conversation – a signifier of postmodern cool, a wink to the stalls. His fiction wasn’t actually discussed in seminars either: it was merely alluded to. But having now taken the plunge and read both of the most popular collections of his work, I cannot sing the author’s praises highly enough. I urge others to get stuck in, too.

I had read Sixty Stories, the first volume of his greatest hits, last year, so this year I took on Forty Stories. I say: “took on” because Barthelme is not an easy writer. Despite being best known for short stories that seldom extend beyond five pages, he is a high-minded artist who can be difficult to digest. His fictions are dense, surreal affairs that eschew conventional narrative and skip giddily between genres. Those looking for plot, character, linearity or any other hallmarks of creative writing workshops should look away now.

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Flash fiction: Hello from an Old Friend

In our latest original short story from Tin House, Erin McGraw explores the dangers of looking up old friends on the internet

By Erin McGraw for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network

The impulse comes over me when I’m bored and out of sorts. Paul would say that it’s Satan at work in me. Since I know what he would say, I don’t tell him.

Looking up Marla from high school leads me to Jody, posing with two kids and a car. Her husband works for Union Carbide. Reading about her reminds me of Lisa, living in Mobile now. She has a picture of a magnolia on her web site, and her husband works for the state.

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The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett – an extraordinary story of ordinary life

A portrait of a young woman, whose destiny remains unchanged by the historical convulsions around her, is a curiously uplifting read

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

“No English novelist ever suggested more unspeakable things, and got away without being understood, than me in that book,” wrote Arnold Bennett to a friend after The Old Wives’ Tale was published in 1908. The novel received almost universal critical acclaim – so much so that Bennett is alleged to have responded: “I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.” But appreciation for the book has been curiously muted ever since. It’s never been out of print, but it’s not exactly set the world alight, either.

I first read it out of homage to my Midlands industrial ancestry and expected an earnest exposition of the “it’s grim up north” mindset. I certainly didn’t expect scenes like this:

Her eye caught the guillotine again, and was held by it. Guarded by gendarmes, that tall and simple object did most menacingly dominate the square with its crude red columns. Tools and a large open box lay on the ground beside it. […] There was a clicking noise … She shrank down to the floor in terror and loathing, and hid her face, and shuddered. Shriek after shriek, from various windows, rang on her ears in a fusillade; and then the mad yell of the penned crowd, which, like herself, had not seen but heard, extinguished all other noise. Justice was done.

In vain she pressed her face into the pillow and listened to the irregular, prodigious noise of her eyelashes as they scraped the rough linen.

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Science fiction and fantasy look ahead to a diverse 2016

After years of toil below the mainstream radar, a more inclusive generation of writers is set for crossover success

After fans fought back at the Hugos, seeing off the Sad Puppies with a host of votes for “no award”, we can look forward to SF becoming a little less old, white and male in 2016. The growing range of authors breaking through to mainstream recognition, often after years of hard work in small presses, means the work is there to chose from. Books like Daniel José Older’s Half Resurrection Blues, NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Ken Liu’s

Food in books: boeuf en daube from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Take time out of your festive schedule to make a beef stew that will reward you with enough flavour to inspire a masterpiece of modernism

By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network

... an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine ...

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

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The Convenient Marriage by Georgette Heyer – swash and swoon

All hail the queen of the Regency romance, whose glorious romps demand to be shared with new generations of readers

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

I adored Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances when I was younger. My mother had tons of them and, starting with Regency Buck – instantly captivated by the beautiful Judith Taverner, she with the “decided air of resolution in the curve of her mouth” and the fabulous romance with her guardian, the Fifth Earl of Worth – I raced through them all. I’ve not read her for some time, but after a recent sojourn into the hugely enjoyable novels of Harriet Evans, into each of which Evans manages to shoehorn a Heyer reference, I picked up the novel which was my favourite in my teens, The Convenient Marriage, and have been in a reading bliss ever since.

It opens with despair in the respectable but poverty-stricken Winwood family: eldest daughter Lizzie, the Beauty, is about to be offered for by Lord Rule, but is promised to Edward Heron. The family need the money the marriage to Rule would bring: son Pelham has run up a fair few gambling debts (“the Fatal Tendency in us Winwoods”). Middle sister Charlotte isn’t interested – “The very notion of Matrimony is repugnant to me. I have long made up my mind to be a Prop to Mama” – and so Horatia, just 17 and with “nothing that declared her lineage except her nose”, courts scandal by setting out to Rule’s house to offer herself as a Sacrifice.

’D’you suppose she killed him, Pom?’

‘Might have,’ said Sir Roland judicially.

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Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff – piecing together a shattered mind

This story of a man who suffers from multiple personality disorder is a masterful blend of horror and romance

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

I’m one of those people who believe that books aren’t for sharing at all. They’re for stumbling across, keeping closely guarded secrets - and our most precious books are all the more special because of that. I rarely read books that other people give me, and even more seldom cajole others into reading books I like. Which makes it all the odder that there is one particular book I’ve repeatedly bought for (a few select) other people.

Matt Ruff’s 2003 novel Set This House in Order isn’t on the surface anything different. It takes place in and around Seattle in the late 1990s and its hero, Andrew, suffers from multiple personality disorder (or, more accurately, is one of many personalities inhabiting an individual with that condition).

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Jamaica Journal gives a genteel view of slavery

The reflections of Lady Nugent, wife to the island’s governor in the first years of the 19th century, provide a fascinating window on the colonial mindset

More from the Guardian Reading group

The Long Song is a book that gives voice to the silent black majority who endured slavery in Jamaica. There are no surviving narratives written by those slaves, so it fills an important gap. It does not, however, exist in a vacuum. There were contemporary books written about life on the island. Levy drew on these while writing her novel and I thought it would be interesting to end our look at Long Song by looking at one of the principal sources we have from that time: Lady Nugent’s Jamaica Journal.

I’ve read it so you don’t have to. You’ll be pleased to hear that you’ve missed a lot of material about “excessive heat” and dinner parties – although, in truth, it’s surprisingly well written, sometimes even elegant. Lady Nugent is a sharp observer and a good-humoured writer, even if there’s much about her that today seems strange and difficult.

Related: Andrea Levy's Jamaica has vivid colours, but many shades of grey

Related: Andrea Levy's The Long Song gives the silent majority a compelling voice

At each cauldron in the boiling-house there was a man, with a large skimmer upon a long pole, constantly stirring the sugar, and throwing it from one cauldron to another. The man at the last cauldron called continually to those below, attending the fire, to throw on more trash, &c; for if the heat relaxes in the last, all the sugar in the cauldron is spoiled. Then there were several negroes employed in putting the sugar into hogsheads. I asked the overseer how often his people were relieved. He said every 12 hours; but how dreadful to think of their standing 12 hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the same thing; and he owned to me that sometimes they did fall asleep and get their poor fingers into the mill; and he shewed me the hatchet that was always ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means of saving the poor sufferer’s life! I would not have a sugar estate for the world!

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Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by Timothy Mitchell

It’s not exactly a festive read, but this analysis of the politics behind climate change deserves to be widely shared

Guardian Witness: which books do you love to share?Read more in our ‘A book to share’ series

How much do you know about energy? How much do you care? I learned about electricity at school, and the Victorians and their coal mines. But A level history and half a history degree went by without, so far as I remember, a single minute’s discussion of the rise of oil.

I have a thrilling memory of candles in the kitchen during one of the power cuts of the 1970s, and of course I remember the miners’ strike. I revelled in the spectacle of the oil barons’ ball in Dallas. But energy was utterly peripheral to my sense of what history, politics and life were really about. When it was said that oil was behind the 1990-91 Gulf war, was in fact crucial to most of what went on in the Middle East, I didn’t know what to think.

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Picture books grow up for an older audience

Illustrated books for an audience beyond the youngest readers are a welcome growth area in publishing, renewing the worth of paper books

As e-readers and tablets challenge print books to prove their worth, asking what exactly paper can do that screen can’t, illustration for young readers – apparently well beyond picture-book age – is having a quiet revolution. Middle-grade and young adult novels, even without the “graphic” prefix, are increasingly moving beyond occasional line-drawings and chapter headings to involve the adventurous use of images throughout. And the results are often spectacular.

SF Said’s partnership with Dave McKean, which gave us Varjak Paw (2003) and, most recently, Phoenix, sets a strong precedent. It’s impossible to envisage the amber-eyed fighter Varjak other than in McKean’s lean, angular interpretation; and the galactic quest at the heart of Phoenix would lose much of its breathtaking scope and feel if the book’s interwoven images were lost. This is hard-working, deep-rooted art, not an optional extra or decorative flourish, or a “cheat” doing the reader’s imaginative job for them. Here, the images are as challenging and complex as the story’s words, and as essential in communicating its meaning.

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