The Guardian's Blog, page 32
November 27, 2015
Flash fiction: The Adjunct
The snow is falling, the drink is free, but why is the Dean suddenly so interested in the English Department? Michael McGrath conjures up an awkward university retreat in the latest from our flash fiction series with Tin House magazine
By Michael McGrath for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network
It was the final night of the Eagleburger retreat, held at a cluster of chalets owned by an alum’s shell corporation. The mountains were too close to see. Snow hissed into the jacuzzi. The Dean, the Department Head and the Adjunct stewed in the frothing glow. The Adjunct wore boxers. He had forgotten to pack swim trunks.
The Eagleburger Society, an influential and secretive body within the Board of Regents, required each academic department to nominate one student per year. Nominees received a travel voucher to the retreat, where they were invited to present their most intriguing ideas, predictions and theories. While the English Department invariably, even enthusiastically, attended, they were historically ignored by Eagleburger heavies, who sought synergy, seamless product placement, disruptive models, early access to advances.
[He lived] the predictably threadbare existence of a freelance Fellow and intermittent McCafé Writer-in-Residence
It pained him to see anything short of a full assault on their suite’s reliably refreshed mini-bar
“The first person to release their search history will get famous as fuck,” he’d said. “But it won’t be me.”
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Sports book of the year brings ray of sunshine to the William Hill prize
David Goldblatt’s The Game of Our Lives has broken with the awards’ downbeat tradition with a football survey that is not all doom and gloom
The £27,000 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize was awarded on Thursday to David Goldblatt for The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football, a book praised by the Guardian’s reviewer, the historian David Kynaston, as “an enlightening, enriching ... survey of the sport in post‑Thatcher Britain, aka the age of globalisation ... an exceptional book that falls just short of greatness”.
Related: David Goldblatt’s The Game of Our Lives wins William Hill sports book of year
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November 26, 2015
Food in books: the pumpkin pie in Little Town on the Prairie
A Thanksgiving visit to the US west coast leads Kate Young to discover the pleasure of baking the pumpkin pie from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s classic – and of family reunions around food
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
Ma was going to make a mammoth pumpkin pie and the largest milkpan full of baked beans, to take to the New England Supper.
There was no school on Thanksgiving Day. There was no Thanksgiving dinner either. It was a queer, blank day, full of anxious watching of the pie and beans and of waiting for the evening.
Little Town on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
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'Great snakes!' Tintin expert appointed UK's first comics professor
Lancaster University shows ‘full academic commitment’ to comics and graphic book art with the appointment of Benoit Peeters
Tintin expert Benoit Peeters has been appointed as the UK’s first ever comics professor, in a move which Lancaster University said marked its “full academic commitment” to comic book art.
Peeters, author of a biography of Tintin’s creator Hergé and other titles about the quiffed Belgian adventurer, will take up his three-year post as visiting professor in graphic fiction and comic art next summer. He will, said Lancaster, be delivering a series of lectures, running creative writing workshops and supervising post-graduate students. The university described his appointment to what it said was the first such position in the UK as “significant”, adding that it demonstrates its “full academic commitment to placing comic book art not just in its creative writing and literature department, but also across its wider disciplines, including philosophy”.
We are at a very important moment for the graphic form
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November 25, 2015
Tarzan in the 21st century: the trials of being a writer in Cuba
In this account of a day in his life, sci-fi author Yoss reflects on the chaotic and frustrating reality facing writers in Havana
By Can Xue for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
I walk on a lava desert, sweat runs down my forehead, my shoulders, my back, beneath my feet the blanket burns with boiling flames.
Eh … the blanket?
In this country one can never know what will happen, so it is best not to make many plans
How little is needed to make a Cuban writer’s day, regardless of how twistedly it begins!
Most Cuban writers have another stable job, as editors, popularizers, teachers of writing techniques
According to my hyper-optimist mother, the US deny me a visa once and give it to me the next time, so my next one is due
The only Cuban author who comes to mind who is truly well off thanks to what he writes and publishes is Leonardo Padura
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November 24, 2015
Translation Tuesday: from The Atlantic Grows by Julie Sten-Knudsen
The fourth in a series on translated work features a poetic investigation of the relationship between two sisters who share the same mother and yet are divided – by their different fathers, their skin colour, and the Atlantic Ocean. Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
By Julie Sten-Knudsen and Martin Aitken for Translation Tuesdays byAsymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Welcome to the Guardian Books NetworkIn the light of the desk lamp
that is yellower than the daylight
'It never ceases to amaze me that they should need to say mulatto before sister'
'Two moths have gone into the trap, their bodies are stuck to the paper, their wings are still flapping.'
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November 23, 2015
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 – it’s great to be back. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including a moving comment from a reader in Paris about the power of literature, an account of falling head-over-heels for Julio Cortázar, and an introduction to Switzerland’s Kerouac.
MarioCavaradossi is Embarking on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann:
It’s been on my to-read list for years. Thus far I’m barely out of base camp (150 pages in), but I’ll update more fully when I reach the summit. So far there are some interesting musings on the nature of time and a couple of very finely drawn characters. The narrative events seem to be unfolding in real-time so far, which lends an especially vivid quality to the narrator’s musings on the passage of time.
... an account of his journey east by car through the Balkans, Turkey and Iran to the Hindu Kush in the Fifties with a friend. (We’ve just reached Iran.) It’s a lovely book; he’s clever, compassionate and observant, and seems interested in everything – so, the ideal travel writer! You can’t really avoid the comparison with Patrick Leigh Fermor, but Bouvier is less dreamy and his prose, while still lovely, less lyrical. He’s interested in now, whereas Fermor is always chasing after then. Two different approaches, but equally enjoyable to read.
After reading the first five stories and the beginning of Hopscotch, I announced that I had found a new favourite writer, and I stand by that. Unfortunately, some of the stories towards the end were not as good – they are less surreal, and the prose is lifeless. But there are still the brilliant ones, such as Axolotl, House Taken Over, Letter to a young lady in paris, and Bestiary. Fortunately, I’m now turning to Hopscotch, and the writing is brilliant. His sentences are always unexpected, such as “sparkling clean like a great big beautiful cockroach”. They make me smirk.
Voices from Chernobyl reads less like fact and more like a work of post-apocalyptic fiction
[It] is a collection of reportage on the famous nuclear catastrophe and its aftermath, published about a decade after the event. It is presented as a sequence of monologues by people who were caught in the chaos and/or its aftermath: those who lived in Chernobyl and the surrounds, those who returned, scientists, politicians, soldiers deployed to “liquidate” the poisoned countryside, etc.
There is next to no authorial intervention, subjects speak for themselves, and what transpires is a harrowing oral history that reads less like fact and more like a work of post-apocalyptic fiction. In fact, in its portrait of a society that changes for the worst in the blink of an eye, leaving the most basic of human behaviours and interactions a matter of life and death, Alexievich’s book most resembles the novel Blindness, by Alexievich’s fellow Nobel Laureate José Saramago. Among some of the more nightmarish episodes are of a man’s body disintegrating before his wife’s eyes, the culling of household pets for fear that they would spread radiation, and the actual burying of radioactive villages (and the topsoil to boot!). Of course, the shadow of the callous Soviet bureaucracy looms over all of this, and things didn’t seem to improve much with the system’s collapse a few short years later.
I needed to go to my bookshop nearby this morning ... I just wanted to be among books and among people wanting to read. I picked up L'Urgence et la patience because I like Jean-Philippe Toussaint and because I liked the cover. It's about the experience of writing. Then I picked up Jean-Pierre Vernant's La Traversée des frontières. He was that absolutely wonderful specialist in Ancient Greek literature but was also a high figure of La Résistance during WWII. This book is about memory, about heroism, in a constant and beautiful movement between Ancient Greece and Occupied France. That strong face on the cover helped me through the day. I've read both books today . I needed to. Feeling lucky I was able to ...
Sent via GuardianWitness
By Bluebird63
14 November 2015, 20:36
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November 21, 2015
My correspondence and cornflakes with JD Salinger
‘We only met once,’ recalls novelist Nils Schou, the author of Salinger’s Letters. ‘It was like meeting Elvis Presley.’
I wrote to Mr Salinger (never Jerry) from a military base in Greenland in 1962 after reading Franny and Zooey in an aeroplane, a normal fan letter. I wasn’t surprised that he answered; maybe I should have been. We wrote to each other right up to his death, always about Søren Kierkegaard and Isak Dinesen, but latterly also about zen. I met him only once, in a New York hotel restaurant one morning in 1966. He was with a fireman, a friend from the war, eating cornflakes, and even today I eat cornflakes the same way. I gave him some papers from the Kierkegaard Library, but we didn’t talk much. He was very charming and very beautiful. For me it was like meeting Elvis Presley.
From my window now I see the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, on my way to work I pass Kierkegaard. Without my knowledge of them, I would not have had the contact with Salinger. Kierkegaard wrote much about melancholia, sadness and the way out. Andersen wrote fairytales, as do I, for small children, but also for adults. Both of them wrote about the art of telling stories, their healing effects. They followed the advice of Salinger’s favourite, Dinesen, said: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” Salinger’s Letters is a novel I told him I’d write one day. He didn’t comment. It’s a fairytale and it’s about sadness.
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November 20, 2015
Literature vs genre is a battle where both sides lose
Literary fiction is an artificial luxury brand but it doesn’t sell. So nobody benefits by fencing it off from more popular writing
It’s always a problem when one of literature’s big beasts wanders off the reservation into the badlands of genre. The latest to blunder through the electric barriers erected around the safe zone is two-time Booker prize nominee David Mitchell, whose new book Slade House is undeniably a haunted house story. Or, as the Chicago Tribune put it, his “take on a classic ghost story”. As if the thousands of genre ghost stories written every year by horror writers weren’t also one individual’s take on that classic form.
Slade House is a good ghost story, but is it quantifiably a higher form of fiction? Margaret Atwood’s dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale certainly has fewer gunfights than Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, but does that make it more or less realistic? I’m happy to call Doris Lessing’s Shikasta series far superior to Isaac Asimov’s stodgy Foundation novels, but thousands of sci-fi fans would disagree. And yet the literary world is determined to claim, even while it’s stealing genre’s clothes, that it somehow wears them better.
Related: David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation'
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Wonder follows wonder as British Library celebrates Alice’s 150th birthday
A new exhibition brings together the original manuscript and an array of illustrated editions that reveal the enduring allure of Alice, writes Frank Cottrell Boyce
There’s a maths to most stories. In a farce, the consequences of the indiscretion keep squaring themselves. In a detective story, you have to find x. In a romance, one and one make two. The maths of Alice in Wonderland – the 150th birthday of which the British Library is celebrating in a new exhibition that brings together the original manuscript and an array of illustrated editions – is “one and one and one and one and one and one and one … ” Wonder follows wonder with no twist, no revelation. It shouldn’t really add up.
Related: Alice in Wonderland: the never-ending adventures
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