The Guardian's Blog, page 37
October 29, 2015
Harry Potter and the boycott of Israel: JK Rowling’s latest spell in politics
After signing an open letter opposing a cultural boycott of Israel, the author has revealed what the Wizarding War can teach us about the Middle East
Is it fair to compare the Israeli government to Death Eaters? Is Binyamin Netanyahu more like Severus Snape or Lord Voldemort? No, this isn’t a trick question, although the appearance of “Israel” and “Harry Potter” in the same headlines made it feel like Clickbait Christmas had come early this week.
Related: The Palestinian poet who inspired JK Rowling’s stance on Israel
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October 28, 2015
Last Night's Reading: sketches and quotes from book events in New York City – in pictures
Kate Gavino’s notebooks are full of doodles depicting writers at book readings in New York City. It all started in 2013, when she posted a portrait of author Junot Díaz on Tumblr. Two years later her online project Last Night’s Reading has been made into a book. Here are some highlights
Last Night’s Reading: Illustrated Encounters with Extraordinary Authors, is out today from PenguinContinue reading...
A special kind of performance: Can Xue on the course of a Chinese writer
Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue recounts her journey from working as a ‘barefoot doctor’, workshop employee and tailor in 1980s China to being a writer, and recalls how she fell in love with performance as a child
By Can Xue for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network
I have been fascinated by performances since I was three years old. But in my younger days my performances were very special—I performed in my mind. So no one around me knew my secret dramas.
Sometimes alone in my room, I would begin my drama. There was a fire and a lot of smoke in my home, and my grandma was too sick to move, so I supported her by her arm and ran out of the room with her. How happy both of us were!
Why did I learn to make clothes?… I badly needed time for my performances
Writing fiction freely was dangerous in those dark days in China
Our customers always interrupted my writing. So my time was fragmentary—ten minutes, fifteen minutes...
In the 80s in China, some writers wrote beautiful experimental fiction, but all of them returned to traditional writing
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October 27, 2015
Translation Tuesday: Breaking Through the Drum by Bohumil Hrabal
In the first of a series featuring translated works, Czech author Bohumil Hrabal explores life as a theatre usher in war-time Prague in this short story from his new collection Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, translated by Paul Wilson
By Bohumil Hrabal and Paul Wilson for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Welcome to the Guardian Books NetworkI never felt better than when I was tearing the stubs off people’s tickets and showing them to their seats. In primary school, I loved to make seating plans for the teacher. Then during the war, a weird thing happened to me. A kind of ticket-taker’s demon lit on my back and right in the middle of the newsreel, when the voice announced that eighty-eight enemy aircrafts had been shot down over Dortmund and only one German plane had gone missing, the perverse little imp whispered something in my ear, and I said in a loud voice: “Aw shucks, it’s bound to turn up again.” My voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else, so I turned up the house lights and ordered the person who’d said it to come forward. The other ushers and I walked through the audience, but no one confessed and so, invoking our official powers—we actually had such powers—I declared that the entire program, including the feature film, was hereby cancelled, the tickets were null and void and, as punishment, everyone had to go home without a refund.
I’d stand down by the front row and scan their faces to see if they were really watching the screen or not
Everything suddenly seemed so bizarre I thought my ticket-taker’s demon must have come back to play with my mind
The streetcars and human conversation, each thing responded to the other, like good footballers passing the ball
And forever after I was a rotten ticket-taker and a rotten organizer
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Ian Rankin and Rebus for November's Reading group
The bad-tempered but incredibly popular Edinburgh detective is the subject of this month’s investigation, starting with the first of his cases, Knots and Crosses
This November sees the release of the 20th Inspector Rebus novel, Even Dogs in the Wild. Which seems like an excellent excuse for the Reading group to have a look back at the gruff Edinburgh detective’s long career – and indeed to see what he’s been up to since he retired.
Ian Rankin has been writing Rebus novels since 1987. He was a formative influence on the Tartan noir genre, and he has been estimated to account for a mighty 10% of all British crime fiction sales. He also introduced the world to the valuable concept of FYTP. But the most impressive thing about the Rebus books is their quality. They are often truly bracing reading experiences: brutal, ugly and upsetting. But they are also fascinating, warm studies both of the complex, flawed and curiously appealing lead man John Rebus, and of that other great character, the city of Edinburgh.
Poem of the week: The Lay of the Trilobite by May Kendall
A Victorian satire on evolutionary theory cleverly subverts, through a covert feminist argument, Darwinist ideas about the subjugation of women
A mountain’s giddy height I sought,
Because I could not find
Sufficient vague and mighty thought
To fill my mighty mind;
And as I wandered ill at ease,
There chanced upon my sight
A native of Silurian seas,
An ancient Trilobite.
Out with barbarians, in with civil servants: the new age of fantasy
An exciting new generation of writers are re-engineering fantasy for fans who love the genre but laugh at its hackneyed gender roles
Look. I like Conan. If stories let us play out our secret fantasies in widescreen technicolor, then clearly there’s a part of me that longs to be a muscular barbarian, crushing my enemies and hearing the lamentation of their women. While Robert E Howard’s original Conan stories aren’t quite as good as the epic John Milius/Oliver Stone movie that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to superstardom, they are still gems of pulp fiction well worth reading.
Conan’s rippling pectorals have proved a suitable fantasy vehicle for generations of geek boys, but the macho white male is only the fantasy ideal for a minority. As Lisa Cron argues in her excellent Wired For Story, the power of story reaches far further than mere entertainment. Our brain thinks in stories, but when stories don’t reflect our lived experience and our sense of identity, our brain will often reject them.
Related: Frances Hardinge's Cuckoo Song casts spell over British Fantasy awards
“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smokey cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser.”
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October 26, 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. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, including essential reads about race in America, non-challenging books for those times when real life is challenging enough.
Vieuxtemps bought The Complete Works of Primo Levi for, in every sense of the expression, a big splurge:
It’s a three-volume, 3,000 page hardback set (“Boxed, like Proust!”) published by Liveright. It weighs eight pounds. The individual volumes are beautiful, and it is almost a shame to open up the books and start the pawing. This set has everything; novels, stories, essays, and poetry, with a bunch of different (Italian to English) translators. I am so excited to have taken the plunge, as I haven’t read most of Levi’s work. I’m going to take my time reading this, and not mow through it. Sipped, not gulped. I’m starting with the poetry.
It’s the latest in her 10+ strong Inspector Gamache series. For those not familiar, the books are murder mysteries generally based in and around a small town in the Quebec Eastern townships called Three Pines. The murders are investigated by Chief Inspector Gamache, who is the head of the homicide department for the Quebec provincial police.
I’ve now read all of the series. Most are pretty good. Two or three are quite excellent. Their greatest achievement, however, are the characters Penny has built over time. Three Pines is populated by characters which are rich in detail and depth and who evolve over time. I look forward to reading what they are up to next.
Are they challenging? Absolutely not. But sometimes when real life is a challenge on its own, a nice easy sit down with a fuzzy novel and a cup of tea is just what you need.
The description on the cover tells us that if we want to understand the origins of the economic world we live in we should read this book, so that's what I'm doing. It's the story of the reasons for the great economic collapse in the late 1920's and the world war that resulted. It turns out that whether we realise it or not we're all still living with the consequences of the decisions made by a small group of central bankers and the politicians that relied on their judgement almost a hundred years ago.
The book is brilliantly written, and like all good historical writing brings the period, the personalities, and the mayhem resulting from their actions vividly to life. Highly recommended.
Sent via GuardianWitness
14 October 2015, 22:32
Never having read anything by the author before, I had no idea what the expect; to say I was shocked is an understatement. Is West’s world one of total nihilism? Is he a parodist having a (very grim) laugh at American religious fervour? Chapter titles such as Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb and Miss Lonelyhearts Goes on a Field Trip sound like something from a Ladybird Book (which it very much isn’t!) Saying that, I thought it was hauntingly – and brilliantly – original. Makes an interesting contrast with John Steinbeck’s stories of Depression-era America.
If you read just one book about race in America (and I hope that you read more), this is the book I’d say to invest in
I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. If you read just one book about race in America (and I hope that you read more because we need all the help we can get in talking about this open wound that may someday heal), this is the book I’d say to invest in. Rankine is a poet, and it never did clear up for me whether I was reading a series of prose poems or flash essays. It doesn’t matter; Rankine manipulates language like a poet. I’ve always been envious of the poet’s ability to make language sing. I’m still stuck in Flaubert’s world of banging pots, but Rankine manages to capture the beauty of that wide open American sky against which the bodies of black men lie in silhouette.
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October 24, 2015
Agincourt in literature – the list
The 600th anniversary of the battle will provide a cue for screenings of Henry V. Yet many writers have found other aspects of the hundred years war more compelling
The playwright’s third go at the war, after writing or co-writing Henry VI part 1 and Edward III when young, is less jingoistic, more nuanced; and so the character of Henry had to be simplified in Laurence Olivier’s patriotic 1944 film.
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October 23, 2015
Paradise abandoned: does it matter that John Milton's former home is decaying?
The disintegration of Berkyn Manor in Berkshire, where the poet lived in his mid-to late 20s, has caused an internet outcry - but there is another home to remember him by
A set of pictures has been all over the internet in the past 24 hours – they are of Berkyn Manor, a dilapidated old house in Horton near Slough, Berkshire, which has been abandoned since the death of its owner in 1987. They’re haunting, fascinating glimpses into a life, and into a collapsing building that was formerly a home, and are given added piquancy by the fact that no lesser a literary figure than John Milton once lived there, between 1636, or a little earlier, and 1638, a detail lending itself to many excellent Paradise Lost headlines.
Milton would have been in his mid-to late 20s while living in Berkyn Manor, which his family had rented. He’d left Cambridge, where he’d been recognised “as a nascent poet (he had published verses in both Latin and English) and a polemical and incendiary rhetorician”, and “returned to his parents’ house to pursue further private study”. In 1637, he would write Lycidas, after a friend of his drowned: “He must not flote upon his watry bear / Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, / Without the meed of som melodious tear.”
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