The Guardian's Blog, page 35

Why the Inspector Rebus novels will endure

As well as portraying a fascinating character who won’t grow old, each book offers a finely rendered snapshot of a moment in the social history of Edinburgh

Around 10 years ago, I mocked the idea of any sane person wanting to read an ebook. I’ve been wary of making predictions ever since. All the same, I hope I’m on safe ground when I say that the Inspector Rebus novels are going to be of lasting interest to posterity.

I say this not because of the quality of the prose, or the sheer number of people who currently read the books. I may think they have artistic interest, but I can’t speak for future generations.

Related: Inspector Rebus: the birth of a real heavyweight

Crime fiction is going through a second golden age. It seems to me … that the literary novel is actually looking back. The crime novel is dealing with illegal immigrants, paedophiles, drugs, and it’s dealing with the big moral questions of good and evil.

Hood held up his mobile phone. ‘It’s a WAP,’ he explained sheepishly. ‘Just got it today. Sends emails, the lot.’

She’d wondered what it was that made the Scottish people reach for the comfort foods, the chocolate, chips and fizzy drinks: was it the climate? Or could the answer lie deeper, within the nation’s character?

‘I’m guessing,’ she said, ‘that you like a fry-up on a Sunday.’

‘Am I so transparent?’

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David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation'

The Booker-nominated author – now winner of the World Fantasy award – cites novels of Dickens and Orwell as ‘shot through with fantasy’

Author David Mitchell has let loose the latest salvo in the perennial “literary vs genre” war by saying that those who dismiss fantasy and science fiction are committing a “bizarre act of self-mutilation”.

Mitchell is one of the handful of authors with a foot in both camps. He’s beloved of the literary establishment, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize twice, and longlisted on a further three occasions. On the other hand, on Sunday he lifted the best novel trophy in the World Fantasy awards for his 2014 novel Bone Clocks, and his latest book, The Slade House, is an unabashed haunted house story.

Related: World Fantasy award drops HP Lovecraft as prize image

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Topography of a novel: The Hopeful by Tracy O'Neill

Every book needs help coming into the world. Here, Tracy O’Neill explains the role hot coffee, soft pants and a sweet puppy played in the creation of a hypnotic debut

By Tracy O’Neill 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 novel 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 instalment, Tracy O’Neill shares the soft pants and goddamn multiplication tables that helped her write The Hopeful .

In The Hopeful, 16-year-old figure skating prodigy Ali Doyle feels her Olympic dreams shatter along with of her two vertebrae. When she finds herself addicted to amphetamines, however, something more than a gold medal might be on the line. This debut novel has been described as “hypnotic” (KarolinaWaclawiak) and “brilliant and bold” (Julia Fierro), and earned O’Neill a spot on the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list.

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Writers on the pain of hindsight in publishing: 'It's like a bad breakup – you have to move on'

How do you let go of a book you’ve written? Viv Groskop, Sathnam Sanghera and others offer their advice for bouncing back from the post-publication blues

My first book came out a year ago. It wasn’t a bestseller, and it wasn’t intended to be one. In Spite of Oceans: Migrant Voices is a quiet book of short stories based on real, everyday family lives. The stories are about how people deal with the messy stuff life throws at them; about relationships coming together, or unfolding, or crumpling under the tension of it all.

Over the course of the last year, I have started to feel out of sorts about the book. Several copies of it lie in my hallway cupboard, next to a box of old doorkeys, unintentionally kept over the years.

They say hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a writer, however, it’s irritating, an itch in an awkward place

Related: Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure

Authors have to leave a work behind. You can't fetishise the writing

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Poem of the week: Search by Christine Marendon

A sequence of sharply visual impressions animates a wild animal’s darting mind as it comes upon a hunter – and meets its fate

Search

Bowls of milk in the rain. A rabbit’s wet head.
Here’s someone walking through meadows with rolled-up
trousers. Owl pellets. Banks of fog. Hillsides.
Cranes in flattened grass. Dripping cloths.
A look. Here’s my mouth in the reeds. And there.
My breath on the lake. One breaking wave and I’m
no longer I. The place. The roof-tiles. The day,
forgotten. There at the edge. Where the darkness
lives. There in the valley. The gate at the end.
Wooden boots, a mirror of water between lips. Silent.
Come the flood, the stones sink. A handful of forest.
And a blow. The impact of a word. White bird,
white feather. You. Quivering fish. Scurrying fox.

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Stephen Spender prize – a judges’s perspective

Allen Prowle’s translations of Dutch poet Rutger Kopland’s ‘Johnson Brothers Ltd’ was chosen from 299 entries spanning 46 languages to win this year’s Open category

Translation is an act of close reading. More than that, it is an art of listening, and in the execution it can also involve luck, like producing an inspired passage of brushwork. After a summer immersed in the music and meaning of the translations entered for this year’s Stephen Spender prize, my fellow judges and I chose winners from Dutch, Greek, Italian, German, Swedish, ancient Greek, Bulgarian and French. Despite 299 translations from 46 languages to choose between, consensus was quickly reached in this year’s Open (adult) category. The judges – Josephine Balmer, Katie Gramich, WN Herbert and myself – shortlisted all five of Allen Prowle’s superb translations of Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, and eventually chose as the winner the elegiac “Johnson Brothers Ltd”, a moving memory of the poet’s father. Second was Francisca Gale’s “Long-Distance Conversation” by Anéstis Evangélou, which delicately conveyed the poignancy of the original Greek and the rueful surprise at the end. Martin Bennett’s fine version of Guido Gozzano’s entomological “Acherontia Atropos” came third.

In the 18-and-under category, Anna Leader’s sensuous translation of contemporary German poet Jan Wagner’s ode to weeds that “sneak back like old guilt” took joint first place with Beatrix Crinnion’s version of Tomas Tranströmer’s “Allegro”, a praise poem to Haydn, whose melody “says that freedom exists” and shall never “render unto Caesar”. Maud Mullan’s elegant “A Lament at the Door” by the Ancient Greek poet Callimachus was awarded third prize.

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Poster poems: canals

Scenes of forgotten industry, secret urban networks or picturesque leisure resorts, these quiet waterways suit verse. Get on board with yours

Coming, as I do, from a long line of people who worked on and around canals, inland waterways have always held a fascination for me. My interest has been refreshed by reading The Narrow Boat, LTC Rolt’s classic tale of wandering the canals of England in the months before the second world war. The book did more than anything to save those very canals and popularise leisure boating on them.

Rolt’s book was an attempt to capture the dying world of the working canal boats and, by extension, an entire rural way of life that was passing away, buried under ever growing urban sprawl. He celebrated the pubs, villages and people found along the towpath, hidden corners of a gentler world. It’s a vision that finds an echo in Ian McMillan’s Canal Life, where the longboat crews “tied up in the places the map never showed us”.

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Marlon James: ‘Ultimately, I’m a rock kid’

The Man Booker winner’s 6 Music DJ set includes songs by Black Sabbath and Sonic Youth – a far cry from the conventional choices of most literary musos

For a Man Booker winner, listing much-loved music on Sunday lunchtime radio is one of the prize’s perks: you typically undergo a mild grilling by Desert Island Discs’ Kirsty Young or Private Passions’ Michael Berkeley a few years after winning, and a selection unfolds that tends to be either all classical (eg AS Byatt), a mixture of classical and jazz (Julian Barnes), or similar but including one or two token pop or rock selections (10cc for Howard Jacobson, the Platters for Margaret Atwood) as if to prove that you were young once.

The way Marlon James, Jamaica’s first winner, handles the opportunity is markedly different as he presents 6 Music’s Paperback Writers – a solo DJ set, rather than an interview-based programme, already available online – less than a month after collecting the award. Not only are there no jazzmen or orchestras, but he strongly leans towards guitar bands (“ultimately I’m a rock kid”) rather than music with lyrics and voices uppermost.

Related: Marlon James wins the Man Booker prize 2015

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It's a fact – children's non-fiction is worth discovering

For some young readers, real-world stuff – science, history, nature and more – is far more appealing than made-up stories. Please share your finds

Whenever literacy, the joys of reading, and the need to inspire children with a lifelong love of books are discussed, story and character are frequently found centre-stage. I have no beef with this – I am still thrilled, scared and moved by the stories I was first read and that I first read for myself, and in love with (or secretly pretending to be) a lot of my favourite characters. But this focus on fiction risks leaving out a large part of the story. Non-fiction and reference books deserve considerably more acclaim and recognition for the work they do in making children into readers.

Although I’m not a fan of generalising by gender, many boys, especially at the emergent reader stage, are keener to pick up science and non-fiction books offering satisfying chunks of fact than to immerse themselves in longer-form stories. Girls, too, like a break from relentless princess-and-pony narratives; and all of them enjoy stunning adults with memorised trivia. Whether it’s the usual suspects – dinosaurs, space, food – or something a bit more esoteric, such reading is a grand alternative to the stories which leave some new readers cold. There are good early readers from Dorling Kindersley and Orion, and Egmont is getting in on the action, too – Dr Mike Smith’s The Hot Book and The Cold Book, aimed at older readers, are full of science, history and wildlife knowledge, focused on fascinating extremes of temperature.

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The internet is an ideal home for the essay

As literary culture reels from the web’s dominance, American women are leading a rebirth of Montaigne’s venerable form online

The streets of America may be “haunted by the ghosts of bookstores”, with writers hovering “between a decent poverty and an indecent one” as Leon Wieseltier suggests, but even as the internet has wreaked havoc on literary culture, American women have been fomenting a renaissance in the essay. Leslie Jamison, Meghan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay and Maggie Nelson are just some of a new band of writers who have taken Montaigne’s project to know the self into the digital age.

Just look at Gay, who won the PEN Center USA’s Freedom to Write award earlier this week, a writer who built her career from contributing to sites such as Htmlgiant and the Rumpus. Her work ranges from literary criticism to critiques of rape culture to the political responsibilities of being a writer and intersectionality. Her writing about pop culture resembles the “thick description” pioneered by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. One of the hallmarks of Gay’s writing is a combination of justified anger and personal vulnerability which resonates with the reader. In 2012, in response to commenters who wanted to hold an 11-year old-girl culpable for her gang rape by 20 men, she wrote:

Maybe we don’t know how to talk about children or even think about children because we don’t want to remember how little we once knew or face how much we would someday know.

Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they’re born.

Related: Roxane Gay wins PEN Freedom to Write award

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy slept with her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. You learn to start seeing.

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