The Guardian's Blog, page 44
September 25, 2015
Reading American cities: books about Miami
Miami’s heady optimism has always been matched by dangerous reality, a fissure that runs through its literature. P Scott Cunningham takes us on a journey through city in fiction, theatre and poetry
Which are your favourite Miami books? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll feature a selection in an upcoming readers’ listMiami literature and Miami as literature are two completely different things, a tale of two novels, as it were: one a gritty, dystopian thriller where poverty and violence are swallowing the populace, and the other a bildungsroman of eternal optimism. These two fictional states not only co-exist but are mutually dependent upon one another. For there to be progress, after all, there must be something to progress from, and Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is. So living here sometimes feels like living in the first third of a novel, in which the plucky protagonist is suffering setback after setback, but something must change, right, or why would there be so many pages left?
Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is
There’s an old saying that a quarter of every building in downtown Miami was made with money from the cocaine trade
Vega rejected his literary reception and instead worked as a bag boy at a local supermarket until he died at 86
Jennine Capó Crucet’s debut collection of stories, How to Leave Hialeah, is a hilarious guidebook to Miami culture
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His work has appeared in The Awl, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Court Green, PANK, The Rumpus, RHINO, and Columbia: a journal of art + literature, among others. He tweets at @cunningpscott. He lives in Miami, FL.
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The Samuel Johnson prize longlist is a giant step backwards for gender equality
There’s no shortage of choice, so why is there only one book written by a woman out of the 12 in contention for the award?
What is it with judges? This week a member of the UK supreme court, Lord Sumption, opined on why we should take only baby steps towards gender equality in the judiciary. He advises it could take 50 years. Meanwhile, the eminent adjudicators of the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction produced a cracking longlist of a dozen books that includes just one by a woman. The SJ jury is more diverse than those judged; comprising three women and two men. By contrast, our highest court contains only one female justice out of 10 and, unlike the Sam Johnson team, all of those male judges are white. A decade on, Baroness Hale remains the first and only woman to serve in such a crucial constitutional capacity. prize is no cultural laggard – the last two winners were women – and this list unarguably stands up among the very best of the year’s non-fiction. But, in 2015, it stretches credibility to suppose that 11:1 is the natural ratio of a functional meritocracy.
Sumption claims that senior women aren’t putting themselves forward in the law. That may or not be true. We do know, however, that publishers still submit more books by male writers for non-fiction prizes. The Samuel Johnson panel was given 200 books to whittle down to 12. My hunch is that the lopsidedness comes from a standing start of gender imbalance in publisher submissions.
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Urban fantasy fiction: there's more to it than sex with were-leopards
By riffing on the paranormal in a city setting, urban fantasy explores the gamut of human weirdness and has become a publishing phenomenon. How long until it gives us the next Game of Thrones?
The numinous. The weird. The fantastic, or even the spiritual. Whatever name it goes by, humans have a profound need to glimpse some greater reality beyond our mundane existence. And there’s nowhere more mundane than a modern city, where everything down to the light fittings is human-made, and even the darkest alley is under CCTV surveillance. If there is anything numinous in modern London, it must be perfectly camouflaged in the colours of a Caffè Nero.
That does not, of course, stop us from imagining. Urban fantasy has become one of the most successful genres in modern publishing, and can often be found occupying its own section in the bookstore. For most of the 90s and 00s, urban fantasy was only talked about by core fans, but today, popular characters such as detective Harry Dresden and vampire hunter Anita Blake have powered the genre to bestseller status. With a TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods due to start shooting in March, could urban fantasy be about to give us the next Game of Thrones?
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September 24, 2015
Queen of the Spanish-language literary world: Isabel Allende on Carmen Balcells
Thanks to the celebrated agent, a generation of writers, among them Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, could make a living from their work. She was the godmother of every word I have written
Carmen Balcells, the queen of the Spanish literary world, died last Sunday, 21 September. She was 85 years old and reigned as the supreme literary agent for half a century, representing almost all the great Spanish-speaking authors. She single-handedly created the “boom” in Latin American literature of the 60s and 70s, starting with Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, and managed to change the draconian publishing deals of the past, when authors signed open-ended contracts. Thanks to her, a generation of writers could make a living from their work and the Spanish publishing houses were forced to modernise and compete.
She represented several Nobel prizewinners and managed some of the largest literary estates in the world, including those of Neruda, Clarice Lispector and Carlos Fuentes. She was a tough negotiator, feared by some but revered by her clients, whom she defended with a knife between her teeth. She had an unfailing memory and an extraordinary zest for life, even in a wheelchair; she was bossy, direct, extravagantly generous and sentimental. The passion and kindness with which she took care of her authors won her the nickname “Mama Grande”.
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Bookmarks versus dog ears: how you keep track of your reading – in pictures
From old gig tickets to toilet paper and £20 notes, almost anything can be co-opted as a bookmark, as as a recent callout for pictures revealed. How do you mark your place in books?
If this sparked your urge to show us how it’s done, you can still take part hereThe humble “dog ear” was widely condemned by readers responding to a callout to share their bookmarking tips. The practice of turning down corners of pages was as sacriligeous to many as cracking the spines of books by lying them facedown. “Still smarting from seeing my friend turn down the corner of a page of my copy of Madame Bovary that I had loaned her,” lamented denisecaroline. “Cracked spines are the devil’s handiwork,” growled LeoToadstool. “Corner turning should be a capital offence,” agreed Paul Ward, who impressively “just” remembers where he left off. Robyn Morgan proposed “bus tickets, receipts, loo paper – anything will do” if it serves the purpose of avoiding the folding. That is, of course, if you can manage to hold on to the damn slippery things: “I have lost every single bookmark I’ve ever been given, so I just remember the page number. Scraps of paper feels rude to me...” said Rachel Quirke on Twitter.
Here are some of our favourite examples of the objects you use to keep track of your reading. No judgment. And, if you want to share yours, you still can here.
I find the loads of unnecessary receipts I get from cafes and so on really useful as bookmarks. I also (as a buyer of used books) have found some amazing time capsules in the form of postcards and photographs used as bookmarks.”
I can’t bear to mark my books myself but oddly cherish all the markings and ephemera I find in second-hand books I buy
I was really tired after quite a few hours of study and used a post-it note to mark where I was up to on my iPad.
Have also used my iPad as a bookmark for paper books. :/
Sent via GuardianWitness
By MouseMouse
17 September 2015, 1:27
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September 21, 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, in which we’ve seen quite a lot of September reading blues – but don’t despair: you still recommended excellent reads.
SharonE6 has been “getting a bit demoralised with my reading this year as nothing has been really grabbing me”. However:
I’ve just read We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (recommended by my son) and loved it. It’s a dystopian novel completed in 1921. George Orwell was heavily influenced by it when he wrote 1984. People have numbers, not names and live in glass buildings. Almost every minute of their day has set actions/tasks. It’s pretty chilling, particularly the ending, and it seems odd never to have heard of it until now.
I have a huge pile of books from carboots ready to take to my nana (she can’t get out to the library as has stopped driving. i often send her stuff from Amazon too). Anyway on this pile was a book that caught my attention – Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. The Japanese/American relationships caught my attention and I thought I would give it a go before I see my nana this weekend. Well, I am 100 pages in and enjoying it so far. A fisherman is found dead at the start and the rest of the story takes place in a courtroom, flashing to and from events in the past.
I read Snow Falling on Cedars at Christmas last year, and thought it was wonderful – a novel that on the one hand, despite being fiction, felt like a piece of classic American long-form narrative journalism – a careful reconstruction of a crime and its investigation, and on the other was an intimate portrait of longing. I’d never even heard of the author before being given the book, and haven’t read anything else by him since.
It’s a truly strange novel; odd, and magical, and really funny, too. Its protagonist is ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, whose delightfully imperturbable nature makes up much of the humour. At the beginning of the novel a neighbourhood friend gifts Marian a beautiful baroque hearing trumpet, through which the first thing she overhears is her son and daughter-in-law conspiring to put her away in an old people’s home; soon enough she finds herself in this “Institution” and from there the novel manages to get even more bizarre — which is a very good thing.
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The Good Son by Paul McVeigh – close, but no Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Mickey Donnelly, a 10-year-old narrator coming of age during the Troubles, has earned McVeigh’s debut comparisons with Roddy Doyle that are hard to shake
Just over a decade ago, Roddy Doyle made the headlines by suggesting that “Ulysses could have done with a good editor” and complaining, “If you’re a writer in Dublin and you write a snatch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce.”
It’s with a certain relish, therefore, that I’m now going to compare Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son to Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. The shadow of Paddy Clarke grows longer as the years go by. It looms over anyone going for a vivid, heart-wrenching description of Irish boyhood, whether in the Republic or the North. It clouds, in other words, any reading of The Good Son.
Related: The Good Son by Paul McVeigh review – Belfast boy in the 80s
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Top five Jackie Collins novels
From The Stud to The Bitch, the queen of the bonk-buster revelled in a world of sex, scandal and glamour. Here are a few of my guilty pleasures. What are yours?
As a teenager, I knew that other people were reading Jackie Collins. After all, her books screamed “No 1 bestseller” on the front. But I didn’t shout about my choices, perhaps because in my early teens I was hiding my raunchy reading material from my parents, and in my late teens the books were a guilty pleasure for someone who was meant to be getting to grips with The Merchant’s Tale for her A-levels. Well, I should have done: “sex-filled, escapist, utterly unpretentious”, as the New York Times puts it, Collins’ novels are an over-the-top, steamy delight. Clearly she had as much fun writing them as we do reading them. Looking back through her writing to compile the list below, I can’t help imagining the wicked grin spreading across her face as she whipped up her patented mix of sex, scandal and glamour. Here are my five favourites – though I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise.
Related: Jackie Collins, novelist of Hollywood glamour and sex, dies aged 77
Related: Jackie Collins: a life in pictures
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Poem of the week: The Tides by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Awash with syntactical and structural fluctuations that embody its central theme, Longfellow’s restless Petrarchan sonnet ranges far beyond technical virtuosity
The Tides
I saw the long line of the vacant shore,
The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Then heard I, more distinctly than before,
The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,
And hurrying came on the defenceless land
The insurgent waters with tumultuous roar.
All thought and feeling and desire, I said,
Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song
Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o’er me
They swept again from their deep ocean bed,
And in a tumult of delight, and strong
As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me.
Related: Poem of the week: From Longfellow's translation of the Divine Comedy
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The Rainbow Picnic by Daphne Fielding – one bright young thing on another | Rachel Cooke’s shelf life
Scour the secondhand stalls for this delightful biography of the poet, actor and Modigliani model Iris Tree
As I watched the first part of All Change at Longleat, the embarrassingly gripping BBC series about the warring eccentrics who inhabit that amazing Wiltshire house, something kept nagging at me: hadn’t I once read a book by a member of the family of the Marquess of Bath?
After a while, it came to me. Daphne Fielding, bright young thing and the late mother of the marquess, was a writer: the author of, among other surprising volumes, a short biography of Iris Tree, The Rainbow Picnic (1974). I still can’t remember how I discovered this lovely little book, but I do know what must have drawn me to it. Dedicated to my beloved Diana Cooper, it begins: “Iris Tree was the most truly Bohemian person I have ever known…”
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