The Guardian's Blog, page 38

Flash fiction: How to eat chicken wings

In the first of a series of short stories, as featured in Tin House magazine’s Flash Fridays, Kristen Arnett explores a love-hate relationship chicken wings

By Kristen Arnett for Flash Fridays by Tin House, part of the Guardian Books Network

Welcome to the Guardian Books Network

There’s a map bred in the bones of the bird. Before you ingest the chicken wing, you must know the vertices of its hinge, that place where tendons and gristle connect and shake hands. It’s all very scientific.

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Mark Haddon: a celebration of Allan Ahlberg

Quentin Blake, Roddy Doyle and Chris Riddell were among writers and illustrators who creatively saluted the venerable children’s author Ahlberg

Top illustrators pay homage to Allan Ahlberg – in pictures

In 2014 Allan Ahlberg was lined up to receive the inaugural Booktrust lifetime achievement award. Allan, however, felt uneasy about Amazon sponsoring it and politely declined. Which might have been the end of the story, except that Philip Pullman remarked to me – or perhaps it was I who remarked to him – that Allan very much deserved a lifetime achievement award and it would be a good idea if it came, not from the world of publishing, but from his peers. An award to celebrate not just Ahlberg’s own books, but those he wrote with his late wife, Janet, among which are some of the most well-loved children’s books of the last 40 years: The Jolly Postman, Burglar Bill, Peepo!, Each Peach Pear Plum …

But what might the prize be? A cup? A certificate? A statuette? A medal? In the end we asked 150 children’s writers and illustrators to send us a letter, a poem or a drawing to show how much Allan and Janet’s work meant to them. We would then bind them into a single book.

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'That's not poetry; it's sociology!' – in defence of Claudia Rankine's Citizen

Made up of prose, photographs and an essay on Serena Williams, this award-winning collection isn’t easy to categorise – but it’s as much a poem as The Waste Land

At a recent reception following a poetry reading by elder, experimental poets, an academic critic – of decidedly avant-garde tastes – overheard that I had been teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen for the last four semesters. I knew, in fact, that this scholar’s life’s work centered around championing unsung postwar US poets such as Clark Coolidge and Susan Howe, who were difficult, acquired tastes (that I shared). Howe, for example, is known to publish textual sculptures often quite literally illegible. Who better, I thought, to appreciate my teaching of a complex poem like Citizen than this brainy, patient scholar. Yet quickly he fired off: “That’s not poetry; it’s sociology!” My spirits sank.

Related: Poet Claudia Rankine: ‘The invisibility of black women is astounding’

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Lending books: share your horror stories

We all bear scars from beloved books that were borrowed and never seen again. Share your book lending horror stories here

Do you ever let someone borrow a book that really matters to you? Reader conedison asked this excellent question in our Tips, links and suggestions blog recently. The vanishment of borrowed books is one of the world’s mysteries, only comparable to lost pens – where do they all go?

From Books editor Claire Armitstead:

I used to be a reckless lender, but I’ve grown wary over time. One friend died before he could return a favourite book, another moved house and sent her entire library off to Oxfam. Nothing to be done in those circumstances, though I have been known to resort to guerrilla action: on one occasion, when I had agreed to feed a neighbour’s cat, I managed to “liberate” three books and a video which the neighbour swore she had returned or never borrowed.

When I was at junior school, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain were my favourite books. I loved them so much I decided that when I was a grown up my children would be named Taran and Eilonwy after the lead characters. In my teenage years, reminiscing with a best friend about the books we would happily re-read from our childhood, I had gushed about The Black Cauldron and The High King and begged my friend to read them. I can still remember taking them into school in a carrier bag and pushing them into her hands with evangelistic zeal. It was the last I ever saw of them; whenever I asked if she had read them she said ‘not yet’, and when we went our separate ways at sixth form I forgot to ask for them back. I bet she still hasn’t read them, and even the thought of it gives me indigestion.

Last night my youngest daughter who’s leaving the country for her gap year asked me if she could take with her my copy of Stoner [by John Williams]. Actually, she asked her mother to ask me on her behalf, figuring it would be harder for me to say no to both of them. I went into my daughter’s bedroom, told her it was ok and then she asked me if she could make pencil marks in it ... the horror, the horror.

I always have an old, spare copy of Master and Commander to lend. I usually get it back, but on the two occasions when I haven’t I just bought another cheap copy from the bookstall on the weekly market. For some reason, they nearly always have one, and it always costs £1. What surprises me even more is the number of people who have never heard of O’Brian. I never lend books or CDs that I don’t want to lose.

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Reading cities: books about Vancouver

As a relatively young global city, Vancouver can play up to its brash, breezy image. But some of its most celebrated books are rooted in harder times, as it struggled to find its place in the world, and to deal with racial tensions. Tyler Stiem takes a closer look

Which are your favourite Vancouver books? Let us know in the comments

“Are we going to be a resort town for the super-rich from all around the world, or a functional, integrated city?” wonders the essayist and comedian Charles Demers near the end of Vancouver Special, his witty and deeply anxious meditation on the past, present, and future of Canada’s “most livable” city. To live in Vancouver right now is to accommodate yourself to the slightly uncanny feeling that your future here depends less on anything you do than on the invisible hand of the global market.

Or not so invisible: from the pretty west-side neighbourhoods where Teslas practically outnumber Toyotas, to the humbler precincts where a crappy bungalow will still set you back a million and a half dollars, just about every corner of Vancouver bears the imprint of global capital. The flood of foreign investment since the late 1990s — mainly in the form of property speculation, first from nervous Hong Kong residents, pre-handover, and, much more intensively over the past few years, from newly prosperous China — has transformed the city. Forget the Vancouver Canucks and the ski hills whose clean, well-lighted slopes beckon from the North Shore suburbs; real estate, as Douglas Coupland observes in City of Glass, his wry hometown homage, is “Vancouver’s biggest sport … disturbingly central to the civic psyche”.

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Food in books: the pistachio cream puffs in Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend

When she read Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel, Kate Young couldn’t get the Italian cream puffs out of her mind. So she travelled to Italy for inspiration, and baked them

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

Welcome to the Guardian Books Network

Since her husband was the baker at the Solara pastry shop, things were done on a grand scale: there was an abundance of cream puffs, pastries filled with cassata filling, sfogliatelle, almond pastries, liqueurs, soft drinks, and dance records, from the most ordinary to the latest fashion.

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

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Pineapple and roasted nuts: Ru Freeman on Sri Lanka's enduring love of language and books

Sri Lankan-born author Ru Freeman celebrates her country’s cultural tradition of respect for language and books and remembers a childhood without a pair of scissors – but with an English dictionary

By Ru Freeman for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

Welcome to the Guardian Books Network

When I was a child, there was nothing much to do in my house in Colombo but write. Reading was desired, of course, but books were hard to come by, and that meant several things: my two older brothers and I read with great appetite, we fought over books, we memorized what we saw in black and white, and we dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives. We begged for books from our friends at school, from neighbors our own age and much older. Books were passed around and packed away quickly into school bags as though they might be confiscated. They were brought out and read with deep pleasure. They were traded for favors of all kinds. The brother closest in age to me and I often exacted payment in pages of a book. “The book you borrowed has only 253 pages”, one of us might say, “so you can only read 253 pages of the book I borrowed”. And so we had to also turn into book thieves, risking fisticuffs in order to get at the final pages of the others’ book.

But writing. That was different. That could be done without servility, or becoming emotionally indentured to ones siblings. What I couldn’t memorize in its entirety, I wrote down in notebooks. “Hooloovoo, a hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue”, I took from Douglas Adams, as a child.

But why take all this quite so badly?

I would not, had I world and time

We dreamed of caravans, midnight feasts, puddings, and snow, things we had never experienced in our own lives

The two Exorcist quotes, about good and evil, and about hope, defined a world view for me

There’s a particularity to the way language is acquired by a non native-speaker like myself, and how it is manipulated

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Welcome to the Guardian books network

We’re launching a space featuring a selection of our favourite literary content from around the world

Do you run a literary site, or have a favourite you think we should feature? Add your suggestions here

The internet has made journalism a two-way conversation. At Guardian Books, we have enjoyed the most joyful side of this – we are privileged to get regular contributions from a knowledgeable, diverse and engaged community with expertise in a vast range of subjects. But our resources are not infinite, and there are so many more areas we’d love to cover – so we are teaming up with some of the sites we like best around the world to share their enthusiasm and knowledge with our readers.

Related: Pineapple and roasted nuts: Ru Freeman on Sri Lanka's enduring love of language and books

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Who is Joseph Conrad's winner in Victory?

Given the title, it’s impossible not to expect somebody to come out on top in the novel. But it’s very hard to make out any character who triumphs

It’s possible to make too much of a novel’s title. After all, writers often juggle wildly different alternatives for the same work: War and Peace could have been All’s Well That Ends Well; The Great Gatsby could have been The High-Bouncing Lover or Among the Ash Heaps.

Related: How reading Joseph Conrad has changed with the times

I really would urge people to finish the book before watching any critic dissect it. Most of them go straight to the final scenes, and an awful lot of the power of that ending depends on not knowing what happens - and how.

Heyst seems to me to be an existential hero in the mould of Camus’ Meursault from L’Etranger, but with a critical difference. Heyst’s existential soul is not self-imposed like Meursault’s. Instead he, like Hamlet, is meeting a duty to his father which in reality runs against his nature. It is this stark dichotomy in Heyst’s soul that Lena is attempting to defeat.

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Is Edith Wharton's baby rattle worth a literary listing?

Up for sale for $16,500, this ‘most unusual’ antique is still a pretty ordinary object which won’t tell you much about the writer

Abebooks has identified what it thinks might be “the most unusual” item on its site: Edith Wharton’s baby rattle. For just $16,500 (£10,500), interested parties can purchase the “sterling silver and coral” rattle, engraved Edith, which the seller says Wharton gave to Lucienne Belugou, daughter of her close friend Leon Belugou, on her christening in 1920. (There’s “100% solid provenance” on the item, adds the bookseller.)

Related: The fight to save Edith Wharton's beloved home from itself

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