The Guardian's Blog, page 66

McSweeney's sweeteners: how much would you pay for an email from Nick Hornby?

In typically eccentric fashion, Dave Eggers’ publishing project is raising money through Kickstarter with inducements including an email exchange with Nick Hornby, and a chance to enjoy The Geoff Dyer Experience

Two days after McSweeney’s threw itself on the mercy of the crowdsourcing website Kickstarter in a bid to raise $150,000 (£100,000) “to keep our projects going and our lights on in the near term”, the San Francisco-based literary powerhouse is already more than a third of the way to its target.

The 691 pledges so far include $2,500 for an animal drawing by founder Dave Eggers, $1,000 for a personalised story by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti and $750 for a week-long email correspondence with Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch and A Long Way Down. While there are nine more chances to commission a pooch pic from Eggers, Heti and Hornby wisely limited their offers for bespoke work to one – as did short story writer Wells Tower, whose set of “state-of-the-art” Allen wrenches were snapped up at a bargain $250.

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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

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Welcome to this week’s blog and apologies for the delay in putting it up. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week:

Several conversations revolved around literature in translation.

I finished a new release from Istros Books (a kind gift from the publisher) called Farewell, Cowboy by Croatian author Olja Savačević (tr. Celia Hawkesworth). It’s the story of a feisty young woman who returns to her crumbling hometown from Zagreb to find an explanation for the suicide of her brother several years earlier. She looks after her mother, confronts a neighbour whom she believes knows what might have provoked her brother and falls for a handsome young man, all against the backdrop of a western movie that is being filmed in the area. But nothing is quite that simple. This is heartbreaking but also humourous and very original and dynamic in its use of language. I loved the narrator’s voice. This book has an entirely different tone than the other Balkan work I have read. Despite the underlying tragedy it is neither dark nor bleak.

Really struggling with this month’s choice for my literature in translation group, The Seamstress by Maria Duenas (trans Daniel Hahn). The choice for our first meeting last month, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, was always going to be hard to follow, but this truly is from the sublime to the ridiculous. I fully admit to being something of a book snob, but only in relation to my own choices; I think the most important thing is that people read, and if they want to read something I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, it’s fine with me. But this book is doing my head in; I’ve never read Mills and Boon (see above) but I suspect it must be something like this.

The highlight of the week for me has without a doubt been In the Beginning Was the Sea (Tomas Gonzalez). This story of a young couple giving up their city life to search for an unrealistic and naive rural existence was a beautiful and immensely powerful short novel. I’ve been very suprised reading around to see that it hasn’t been a favourite of a lot of bloggers, who seem to have found the characters (admittedly unlikeable) offputting. The book is powerful and the writing paints so physical a picture that at times I could almost smell the air and feel the sweat dripping down the back of my neck.

I saw this in a charity shop in Walthamstow and bought it for 10p. I picked it up for two reasons. One, it sounded hilarious and that particular Saturday turned out to be rather dismal. Two, E. B. White wrote the 'style guide' which was recently mentioned in a beautiful article in The New Yorker, by the Comma Queen. Best Buy Of The Year.

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By skeptical_sam

26 April 2015, 0:38

I’m reading The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome by Robin Lane Fox. Or, to be more precise, I’m reading the Greek half now and am leaving the Roman half for later in the year. The book runs from roughly 800BCE to the end of Hadrian’s reign in 138CE. What I really like is that Lane Fox has rejected the common approach of talking about the ancient world in thematic chapters eg Culture, Religion, Warfare. He says that it’s far too simplistic to assume that each of these themes remain unchanged across a span of history that numbers, very roughly, five hundred years for each of Greece and Rome. Instead he approaches the history more or less chronologically (with a bit of thematic mash-up) and sets himself the task of viewing the whole through three main subjects: freedom, justice and luxury. It’s a great read so far (I’m a third of the way through the Greek section) and it comes with bite-sized chapters which makes managing the reading easy for those, like me, who are put off non-fiction which looks unmanageably dense.

Saul Bellow’s first, Dangling Man is great and a mere 191 pages. Or for even more brevity I recently read a gem of a little book (only 140 pages), The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide.

I decided to join the discussion this week and read some short stories as well.

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By Sara Richards

26 April 2015, 20:09

I finished William Golding’s Rites of Passage. A sobering read - pulls you up short in terms of how you (mis)judge others. It goes into the top third of my Booker list so far.

Some links and a question. Here is Martin Amis reviewing the collected nonfiction of Saul Bellow:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/books/review/there-is-simply-too-much-to-think-about-saul-bellows-nonfiction.html
Amis gives a much more favourable impression of the book than Dwight Garner in an earlier review in the same newspaper:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/books/review-revisiting-saul-bellows-words-on-society-chicago-and-other-writers.html

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Is The Colour of Magic a good introduction to Terry Pratchett?

Reading group: Although Pratchett’s vast fictional realm is not yet fully developed in this first Discworld novel, it is already extraordinary – and extraordinarily funny

Would you recommend The Colour of Magic as a first book to someone who has never read Terry Pratchett before? Is it a good place to start with this month’s Reading group?

Those aren’t questions that I’d have thought of asking two weeks ago. But now I realise that they are open to debate. Not least because there’s been a fair bit of back and forth about them here. The argument goes that since The Colour of Magic is not Pratchett’s finest work, to focus on it is to undersell him.

Related: May’s Reading group: the novels of Terry Pratchett

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

My name is immaterial,” she said.
“That’s a pretty name,” said Rincewind.

Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorising the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.

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Bill Willingham's Fables heads for a fairytale ending

What will become of Snow White and Rose Red and where will Deus Ex Machina hang out when the award-winning series finishes its 13 years of mayhem

By the end of this month, after 13 years of stories, Bill Willingham’s multiple award-winning series, Fables, will reach its 150th and final issue. What a long, strange, sweet, weird, sad, rambunctious, irreverent, wistful and elating ride it has been.

Besides the series itself, there have the spin-offs: the 50 issues of Jack of Fables, two volumes of Cinderella adventures, 33 issues of Fairest, The Wolf Among Us and Werewolves of the Heartland and 1001 Nights of Snowfall and Peter and Max and The Last Castle.

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Recipes for the perfect picture-book blends of writer and illustrator

With the right personal alchemy, a writer and illustrator working together can produce storytelling gold

The best illustrated books add up to a great deal more than the sum of their parts. Alchemic interaction between the right words and the right images creates a soaring sense of departure, or total presence in the world of the story. Giggles are amplified into guffaws. Readers are wrung dry of tears and left, desiccated and snuffling, in a grey world of snotty tissue. Bafflingly, though, illustration is often still seen as childish, something to be swiftly moved past – “picture books are for babies”, “yes, but comics aren’t proper books” – en route to maturity, the realm of 8pt fonts and tundras of frozen text.

But this approach favours only the most resolute, confident young bookworms. Big, thick books, with text-dense pages largely unrelieved by images, are intimidating to many children, often representing a battle lost before it’s begun. And dynamic author-illustrator duos, striking the best kind of sparks off each other, enrich everyone, at any age or reading level.

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Poem of the week: Selling His Soul by Sophie Hannah

The formal conservatism of Sophie Hannah’s Selling His Soul does nothing to restrict this elegant love poem’s unsettling message

Selling His Soul

When someone says they have a poet’s soul
You can imagine laughing in their face –
A sensible reaction on the whole
But he convinced me that it was the case
And that his poet’s soul was out of place
What with his body selling advertising space.

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Is Salman Rushdie a Voltaire for our age?

His fierce defence of PEN America’s prize for Charlie Hebdo’s defiant provocations recalls the Enlightenment hero, but sets Rushdie against other public figures

The troubles at PEN America have been bubbling up since March, when the US branch of the international organisation that defends endangered writers and fights censorship announced Charlie Hebdo would receive its freedom of expression award for courage at its annual fundraising gala in New York on 5 May.

This decision prompted letters to PEN questioning the decision, notably from Peter Carey, who accused PEN of being blind to France’s “arrogance” towards “a large and disempowered segment of their population” (ie Muslims) and Deborah Eisenberg, who also saw the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “anti-Islamic” and argued there was a “critical difference” between “staunchly supprting expression that violates the acceptable and enthusiastically awarding such expression”.

Related: Salman Rushdie slams critics of PEN’s Charlie Hebdo tribute

Related: I admire Charlie Hebdo's courage. But it does not deserve a PEN award | Francine Prose

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The best books on Ethiopia: start your reading here

Our literary tour of Ethiopia covers the traumatic overthrow of the monarchy and the bloody revolution that followed, taking in past and present, fact and fiction

In 1954, a young Indian nun working at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa dies while giving birth to identical twins. Their father, a well-respected British surgeon, disappears, abandoning the boys. Fortunately for the twins, the two doctors who deliver them become their loving, adoptive parents.

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Open thread: which children's books defined their decade?

Was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone the defining children’s book of the 1990s? And how central was Adrian Mole to the 1980s?

Here’s a poser: the first Harry Potter novel wasn’t published until June 1997, but by July 1999 - when the third in the sequence, The Prisoner of Azkaban, was released - JK Rowling’s wizarding series was making muggles of everyone who ever doubted it (a roll of dishonour that included several publishers and a fair few early critics).

The impact of the books was undeniably swift, global and galvanising, but can they – as the actor and writer Brandon Robshaw asserts in a blog over on our children’s books website - be the defining books of the 1990s, given how late in the decade they came into being?

Related: Which children's books sum up the decade they were published?

@GdnChildrensBks @BrandonRobshaw Agree with a number of the choices, but for me the 60s has to be the outstanding Paddington #Hardstare

1920s - an era of hardened WWI survivors reaching peaks & poles: Christopher Robin has his own Expotitions! @GuardianBooks @GdnChildrensBks

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Open thread: which is your favourite WB Yeats poem?

In the 150th anniversary year of the Irish poet, pick your favourite work

News: Yeats honoured with worldwide celebrations

Would you rather arise and go now, slouch towards Bethlehem, or seek to tell the dancer from the dance? Is it the terrible beauty of Easter, 1916, the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart in The Circus Animals’ Desertion or the world more full of weeping from The Stolen Child that is closest to your heart?

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of WB Yeats, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, with worldwide celebrations. Nationalist, romantic, spiritualist; beacon of the Celtic Twilight, chronicler of everyday life and angry old man; Yeats went through many phases, and left many exemplary poems. In a 1999 poll to find Ireland’s 100 favourite poems of all time, he takes seven places in the top 10 (Heaney and Kavanagh hardly get a look-in), and dominates the list as a whole.

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