The Guardian's Blog, page 30
December 8, 2015
War of the Worlds gets a sequel 119 years on – but what about all the unofficial ones?
British author Stephen Baxter is writing a follow-up to HG Wells’s classic novel of Martian invasion, called The Massacre of Mankind – but War of the Worlds has a rich history of unofficial sequels
When HG Wells saw off the invading Martians at the end of his 1897 science fiction classic War of the Worlds, he didn’t envisage them making a comeback. But that hasn’t stopped a century’s worth of conjecture about what happened next.
It seems that, despite the best efforts of HG Wells and the common cold, you can’t keep a good Martian down: 119 years on, a sequel to War of the Worlds has been announced, to be penned by Stephen Baxter, one of Britain’s brightest high-concept science fiction writers. Co-author with Terry Pratchett of the Long Earth series of novels, the most recent of which was published after Pratchett’s death in March, Baxter has also collaborated with Alastair Reynolds and Arthur C Clarke, as well as having a wide body of solo work under his belt.
Related: Stephen Baxter interview: why science fiction is like therapy
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War of the Worlds gets 'official' sequel 119 years on – but what about the unofficial ones?
British author Stephen Baxter is writing a follow-up to HG Wells’s classic novel of Martian invasion, called The Massacre of Mankind – but War of the Worlds has a rich history of unofficial sequels
When HG Wells saw off the invading Martians at the end of his 1897 science fiction classic War of the Worlds, he didn’t envisage them making a comeback. But that hasn’t stopped a century’s worth of conjecture about what happened next.
It seems that, despite the best efforts of HG Wells and the common cold, you can’t keep a good Martian down: 119 years on, the “official” sequel to War of the Worlds has been announced, to be penned by Stephen Baxter, one of Britain’s brightest high-concept science fiction writers. Co-author with Terry Pratchett of the Long Earth series of novels, the most recent of which was published after Pratchett’s death in March, Baxter has also collaborated with Alastair Reynolds and Arthur C Clarke, as well as having a wide body of solo work under his belt.
Related: Stephen Baxter interview: why science fiction is like therapy
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December 7, 2015
The best British novel of all time: have international critics found it?
Middlemarch is No 1, according to a sometimes surprising top 100 ranking by books writers from around the world – excluding the UK. Could this be the definitive verdict?
The greatest 100 novels ever written: as picked by Robert McCrumThe world has spoken, and the greatest British novel of all time is Middlemarch, though hot on its heels are two novels by Virginia Woolf, who ties with Charles Dickens in having the most entries among the top 100 British novels as seen by the rest of the world.
The list was put together for BBC Culture by Jane Ciabattari, who polled 81 book critics from all around the world, excluding the UK. Each was asked to come up with a list of 10 British novels, naming one as the greatest. The result is a top five in which George Eliot’s masterpiece is followed by Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway, with Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre completing the line-up. Two more Dickens titles feature in the top 10: Bleak House (sixth), and David Copperfield (eighth). Woolf’s The Waves takes 16th place, and Orlando 65th.
Related: Kobo's top 10 authors of 2015 are all women
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Topography of short stories: Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel
Stalled subway cars, park benches and noisy cafes – writing short stories can be all about stealing every minute you can from your life and work. Lincoln Michel explains the erratic creative process behind his Upright Beasts collection
By Lincoln Michel for Topography of a Novel by Blunderbuss Magazine, part of the Guardian Books Network
Every book has its own texture, materiality, and topography. This is not only metaphorical; the process of creating a short story collection produces all sorts of flotsam–notes, sketches, research, drafts–and sifting through this detritus can provide insight both into the architecture of a work and into the practice of writing. Blunderbuss is excited to run this series, in which we ask writers to select and assemble the artifacts of a book in a way that they find meaningful and revealing. In this installment, Lincoln Michel shares the time theft techniques that allowed him to steal enough minutes to write Upright Beasts, published this autumn in the US by Coffee House Press.
Upright Beasts takes us to a world “similar to our own, yet twisted just enough to feel strange” (Publishers Weekly). Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. From this often surreal material, Michel spins tales that are “sometimes hysterically funny and sometimes quietly disturbing” (Booklist), and that ultimately coalesce into a collection that establishes him as “one of contemporary literary culture’s greatest natural resources” (Justin Taylor, Vice).
The coffee is cold, the trees are shriveling, and I played Candy Crush on my phone for an hour before getting out of bed
As a writer not rich enough to not have a job or antisocial enough to not want friends, you have to be a master thief
“We’ll sneak down that slope and make our way back to the road,” Iris said. “Then we’ll come back with police and guns and fucking rapid dogs.”
“Do you mean rabid dogs?”
Revision is important, but so is making sure your work is alive. Too much polish dulls everything to same shine
Submitting [stories to magazines] has to be thought of as a job for young writers
Continue reading...
Topography of Short Stories: Upright Beasts by Lincoln Michel
Stalled subway cars, park benches and noisy cafes – writing short stories can be all about stealing every minute you can from your life and work. Lincoln Michel explains the erratic creative process behind his Upright Beasts collection
By Lincoln Michel for Topography of a Novel by Blunderbuss Magazine, part of the Guardian Books Network
Every book has its own texture, materiality, and topography. This is not only metaphorical; the process of creating a short story collection produces all sorts of flotsam–notes, sketches, research, drafts–and sifting through this detritus can provide insight both into the architecture of a work and into the practice of writing. Blunderbuss is excited to run this series, in which we ask writers to select and assemble the artifacts of a book in a way that they find meaningful and revealing. In this installment, Lincoln Michel shares the time theft techniques that allowed him to steal enough minutes to write Upright Beasts, published this autumn in the US by Coffee House Press.
Upright Beasts takes us to a world “similar to our own, yet twisted just enough to feel strange” (Publishers Weekly). Children go to school long after all the teachers have disappeared, a man manages an apartment complex of attempted suicides, and a couple navigates their relationship in the midst of a zombie attack. From this often surreal material, Michel spins tales that are “sometimes hysterically funny and sometimes quietly disturbing” (Booklist), and that ultimately coalesce into a collection that establishes him as “one of contemporary literary culture’s greatest natural resources” (Justin Taylor, Vice).
The coffee is cold, the trees are shriveling, and I played Candy Crush on my phone for an hour before getting out of bed
As a writer not rich enough to not have a job or antisocial enough to not want friends, you have to be a master thief
“We’ll sneak down that slope and make our way back to the road,” Iris said. “Then we’ll come back with police and guns and fucking rapid dogs.”
“Do you mean rabid dogs?”
Revision is important, but so is making sure your work is alive. Too much polish dulls everything to same shine
Submitting [stories to magazines] has to be thought of as a job for young writers
Continue reading...
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, including modern ghost story recommendations, interesting reading practices, and huge and fascinating debates on gender and sexism in the writing and publishing worlds – ignited by Marlon James’s comments in this Guardian event and by Claire Vaye Watkins’s now infamous recent essay. Do take a look at last week’s thread.
But first, what’s the best book you’ve read this year? We would love to get the thoughts of the TLS community on the one book each of you has enjoyed the most in 2015. It’s been great to see some of you already looking back on the year’s reads, and no doubt many of you will do so on this thread. But if you feel inclined to also share this with us for an additional piece, please send a review of your chosen book (150 words minimum) by emailing marta.bausells@theguardian.com with the subject line “The best book I’ve read this year”. The deadline is Tuesday 15 December.
Starting on September, I had planned to read 52 books in 52 weeks, so starting Infinite Jest may compromise those plans
It goes a bit David Mitchellish at the end which necessitates too much clunky exposition in the dialogue but it does seem a bit churlish of me to accuse David Mitchell of being David Mitchell and I do recommend it. It’s just that it’s not perfect unlike my favourite modern ghost story which I recommend unreservedly to anyone looking for a shiversome read in December: Dark Matter by Michelle Paver is about a British expedition to the Norwegian Arctic in the 1930s and is just brilliant. Also short.
This week, I have dived head-first into David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan opus, Infinite Jest. While some peers have dissuaded me from the book based on its massive size and difficulty, I have been thoroughly enjoying it thus far. I was able to utilize some great online tools such as the page-by-page annotations and scene guide provided by the Infinite Jest wiki page. Starting on September 1st of this year, I have planned to read 52 books in 52 weeks, so starting Infinite Jest may compromise those plans since I am currently anticipating completing the book sometime around Christmas.
Were you ever so engrossed in, enchanted by, delighted with a novel that you just didn’t want it to end and so you rationed the last 100 or so pages, reading 10, maybe, 20 pages at a time then putting the book aside? First time for me was last week with The Night Circus [by Erin Morgenstern]. I finished the final 23 pages last Saturday. Took me, literally, all day to reach the book’s perfect, I mean perfect, conclusion. I’ve been proselytizing friends and family all week. And I urge you, yes you, to read The Night Circus ASAP. Whew! How I do go on.
Every Christmas, I find the doorstop of a novel, the literary touchstone, the gaping hole in my reading, and I read it
I find the doorstop of a novel, the literary touchstone, the gaping hole in my reading, and I read it. Or two. Last year, it was Great Expectations, the year before that Moby Dick, the year before that Anna Karenina. This year, it’s Middlemarch. It’s been sitting up on my to-be-read shelf for far too much time, occupying far to much space. So it will be tackled. I’ve gotten about 16 pages into it and I can already tell by the twists and turns and convolutions of the phrases that I’m going to be in for the long haul on this one. It might take me the entirety of December. But it seems ephemeral and magnetic.
Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter
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Guadalajara book fair builds a bridge between Mexico and the UK
The giant event put a large contingent of Britain’s finest on display, and should provide an invitation for English-language readers to explore an unfamiliar new world of reading
The Guadalajara international book fair, or FIL as it’s better known, is a huge and hectic event: think the London book fair meets an Amazon warehouse, with thousands of schoolchildren thrown into the mix. Now in its 29th year, FIL is the most important book fair in the Spanish-speaking world, and the second largest anywhere – on two counts: number of publishers, after Frankfurt; and number of visitors, after Buenos Aires.
This year, the UK was the guest of honour, a reciprocal gesture after Mexico was Market Focus at the London book fair in April. In Guadalajara, the British Council endeavoured to make the UK delegation fully representative of the UK and its cultural diversity, delivering 30 writers spanning all regions, backgrounds and genres including Salman Rushdie, Philippa Gregory, Irvine Welsh, Owen Jones, Joanne Harris and Jeanette Winterson.
Related: Reading Mexico - books podcast
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Poem of the week: What is Man? by Waldo Williams, translated by Rowan Williams
A Welsh poem, translated by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, uses the form of catechism to gently address some universal dilemmas
What is Man?
What is living? The broad hall found
between narrow walls.
What is acknowledging? Finding the one root
under the branches’ tangle.
December 5, 2015
Did Morrissey deserve to win the 2015 bad sex award?
He may have won the bad sex award, but there are other writers on the nomination list who make Morrissey sound remarkably coy
When Arctic Monkeys won the Mercury prize in 2006, frontman Alex Turner’s reaction was to say “Somebody call 999!” on the grounds that a worthier winner on the shortlist had been “robbed”. Had Morrissey turned up to collect the Literary Review’s bad sex award this week, he might have said the same, for, in terms of the prize’s rubric and the evidence offered on the night, it wasn’t obvious how he emerged on top.
The former Smiths singer and lyricist clearly merited his place on the shortlist for the scene in his debut novel, List of the Lost, in which Eliza and Ezra form “one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation … a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth”. By sex-writing standards, however, this is remarkably coy and vague; the scene’s jumble of daft metaphors avoids the detailing of bodily moves and the anatomical terms that previous winners have revelled in – Eliza’s vagina mysteriously becomes “the otherwise central zone”; Ezra’s penis (which somehow “whacked and smacked” the rest of her, as if detachable) his “bulbous salutation”.
Related: Morrissey wins bad sex award for love scenes in debut novel List of the Lost
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December 4, 2015
On a plate: the top five spoilt suppers in fiction
From murderous revenge to gruelling hunger, calamity is on the menu in literature’s most unappetising mealtime gatherings
Splitting the bechamel sauce, mistaking coffee for drinking chocolate and reducing pasta to a crisp, charred coating on the bottom of the pan – I have spoiled my unfortunate guests’ dinners in countless ways. But in literature, these unimaginative faux pas would not cut the mustard. From turning your hosts to stone to spiking your guests’ cocktails, literature is ripe with suppers that soured spectacularly. Here are five of the most catastrophic literary dinners to truly whet – or dampen – your appetite.
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