The Guardian's Blog, page 71

James Herbert horror award chooses its first winner

Tom Hunter, chair of judges, explains why Nick Cutter’s book The Troop would have had the prize’s founding inspiration ‘chuckling in his chair’

It’s been described as “old-school horror at its best” by no less than Stephen King. Now The Troop by Nick Cutter, a novel which centres on a group of boy scouts camping on a barren island in the Canadian wilderness, has won the inaugural James Herbert award for horror writing.

This being a prize for horror, I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to reveal that for the boys on this particular trip, the Scout philosophy of Be Prepared falls horribly short. They are on the island to learn camping, hiking and bush skills. But after an emaciated man crashes into their camp begging for food, remaining alive becomes the main challenge. The horror they must face is: just what is it inside the man that he needs to feed?

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Winnie-the-Pooh made new: who should write the next chapters?

Another sequel to AA Milne’s children’s classic has been approved. Time to consider the authors who should write it, says Alison Flood

We live deep in the Hundred Acre Wood in our house these days. My daughter is finally old enough to enjoy – to love, actually – AA Milne’s stories of Winnie and Piglet and Owl. I, alongside other classics from my own childhood such as Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, The BFG, Pippi Longstocking and My Naughty Little Sister, am delighted to read them to her. (I love picture books, but wow, these are much more fun.)

So I’m both happy and anxious to hear that Egmont is planning an “official anthology sequel” to 2009’s Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus, itself the first authorised sequel to Milne’s tales. The publisher announcedon Wednesday that, to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the first Pooh book in October 1926, the adventures of Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh would be continued by four “outstanding writers with a real understanding for AA Milne’s characters and world”. Out next year, the book will be illustrated by Mark Burgess, who also worked on Benedictus’s sequel.

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Why crime fiction is leftwing and thrillers are rightwing

Today’s crime novels are overtly critical of the status quo, while the thriller explores the danger of the world turned upside down. And with trust in politicians nonexistent, writers are being listened to as rarely before

I spent the weekend in Lyon, at a crime writing festival that feted writers from all over the world in exchange for us engaging in panel discussions about thought-provoking and wide-ranging topics. They take crime fiction seriously in France – I was asked questions about geopolitics, and the function of fear. I found myself saying things like “escaping the hegemony of the metropolis” in relation to British crime writing in the 1980s.

What they are also deeply interested in is the place of politics in literature. Over the weekend, there were local elections in France, and a thin murmur of unease ran through many of the off-stage conversations with my French friends and colleagues. They were anxious about the renaissance of the right, of the return of Nicolas Sarkozy, the failure of the left and the creeping rise of the Front National.

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April’s Reading group: Venice by Jan Morris

As spring revives our appetite for adventures abroad, we’ll be looking at a classic of travel writing

Now that spring is bringing back its gentle warmth, it’s time to go travelling. Specifically, to Venice: a place that often seems like a feat of imagination as much as a real bricks-and-mortar city. A place that is forever being made and remade in fiction by writers as impressive and various as Shakespeare, Byron, Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, Daphne Du Maurier, Goethe, Stendhal, Dante. A place which, as Jeanette Winterson (who herself described the city memorably in The Passion) has said: “is quantum, a Schrödinger’s cat of a city, simultaneously dead and alive, true and false, solid and watery, firm and disappeared.”

No one captures this elusive quality better than Jan Morris. We’re going to look at her 1960 classic Venice, as well as exploring the broader literature of Venice and its history. I’m also delighted to say that Jan Morris has agreed to answer questions from you about this book and her long, brilliant career.

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JK Rowling's life advice: ten quotes on the lessons of failure

The Harry Potter author’s new book is based on an inspirational speech she gave to Harvard students. Here are some of the best quotes

JK Rowling has some inspirational advice for graduating students – or for anyone in this universe, really. Her new book, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination, out on 14 April, is her 2008 commencement speech at Harvard University, published by Little, Brown. Proceeds from sales will be donated to Lumos, a charity for disadvantaged children founded by Rowling, and to a financial aid programme at Harvard. Some of her wisdom from that speech, for those of you who weren’t in the Harvard audience, is collected below.

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution.

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.

Those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.’ That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

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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

Read more Tips, links and suggestions blogs

Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week.

MsCarey has just finished Master and Commander and is submerged in a Patrick O’Brian binge – which is not stopping her from pursuing other reading urges:

It was a strange sensation to be entertained so thoroughly and educated so charmingly by a book where I understood only three words in every four. Intelligent and satisfying storytelling. I will definitely be back for more. The lexicon, A Sea of Words, arrived just after I’d finished but I’m dipping in happily already in anticipation of Post Captain.

And now I’ve had one of those powerful urges for a particular read which sweeps aside all the books one has planned on reading. In this case it was an overwhelming desire to read something about India so I’ve just been out and bought William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Hoping this will do the trick.

Beautifully paced writing with a finely balanced structure. This book is a critique of class, liberal idealistic hubris, contemporary colonialism and the complicity of the “locals”, greed, and the financial services that both make and unmake us. It’s also an exercise in epistemology and emotion, an unusual combination that works because of the nature of the book’s principal characters, their interaction and the writer’s capacity to merge ideas, events and people. Above all, it is a story of a friendship that is deep and flawed and ultimately a betrayal, the friendship being a mirror to the international events that are both centre-stage and a backdrop. Am buying copies for my friends.

It takes a while to get into the story but then it hooks you with great pictures and situations that are not lost even in the German translation.

Inspired by the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish “vanitas” and “memento mori” paintings, personal symbols representing attempts to cope with, forestall and deny one’s personal, increasingly imminent, annihilation ... I particularly like the Warhol postcard (in place of the traditional skull) echoing the relative fifteen-minutes of fame quotation. Other personal possessions (such as my camera, running top and watch, perched on the edge of the abyss) denote me; the blingy candle needs little explanation: time is short ...

I just stepped away from my IFFP shadow jury marathon to slip in Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera (tr. Lisa Dillman). Two words: Read it! In nine short chapters you encounter all the magic of Alice in Wonderland, the darkness of Dante’s Inferno, the dystopia of McCarthy’s The Road. This infectious, gritty novel traces the passage of a streetwise young Mexican woman named Makina across the waters to the US to find her brother and deliver a message from their mother. Along the way she must make deals with shady characters, risk detection and interpret the strange land and peoples she encounters. The language is wonderful, at times completely original, to capture the feel of the original as the translator explains in her afterword.

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Poem of the week: ​April Fools’ Day by Elaine Feinstein

A biographical sketch of a misfit soul carried into the carnage of the first world war rises to an elegy for a ‘life half lived’

April Fools’ Day
in memory of Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

Does anybody know what it was all for?
Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,
to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,
writing his poetry by candle ends.
His fellow soldiers always found him odd.
Outsiders do not easily make friends
if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

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Go Set a Watchman book jackets: a designer reads the artwork

The newly revealed covers of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sequel are a graphic illustration of their publishers’ ambition to ensnare her fans

Cover for Harper Lee’s Mockingbird sequel revealed

Arguably the most hotly-anticipated novel in the world in 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, had both its UK and US jackets revealed to the world this week … swiftly followed by the world’s opinions.

My initial thought was how beautiful and restrained they were. Then I thought about the thinking behind their design – because, as a book cover designer, I’m used to seeing the process from start to finish, and I’ve heard enough discussions of why we should go one way or another to make a (somewhat) educated guess as to why HarperCollins in the US and Penguin Random House in the UK came up with these particular designs.

What is the most important information we need to communicate?

Firstly, author (obviously, “Harper Lee” will be large).

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Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall: fantasy and history converge

George RR Martin and Hilary Mantel’s stories come from different genres to address the same questions

The cosmetic similarities between Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall are not hard to list. Both occupy a similar period in history, soon after the fall of the Plantagenet kings (recast as the Targaryens in GoT) and the early history of the dynasty that succeeded them. Both wallow in the power plays of courtly intrigue and its brutal consequences, from the Blood Wedding of fantasy, to the endless beheadings of history. And both have dominated the recent consciousness of storytelling.

The differences are also quite clear. There are no dragons, dire wolves, blood magic, white walkers or talking tree roots in Wolf Hall, while GoT wanders rather drastically from the history and geography from which its fantasy is spun. Wolf Hall is crafted as a tight internal monologue that never takes us beyond the perceptions of its protagonist Thomas Cromwell, while GoT moves the reader from one point of view to another in a rather more workmanlike style. These are differences of emphasis: one is designed to play to mass audiences attuned to televisual storytelling, the other for audiences who value emotional depth above narrative lucidity.

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Can music truly chime with reading?

Trying to lose yourself in a book amid the clamour of the 21st century is a challenge. A composer thinks he’s found a solution - soundscapes tuned to different genres

In an ideal world, I suppose, we’d all be able to read in peace and silence. But we live in a world full of engine noise, pneumatic drills, headphone leakage, people yakking at mobile phones and, worst of all, piped music.

A few years ago, I tried to write a blog about using music to combat aural sludge and didn’t come up with anything ideal. I found some benefit in matching up Neil Young’s yowling, feedback-heavy Dead Man soundtrack to the gloomy westerns of Cormac McCarthy and made the obvious connection between A Clockwork Orange’s scenes of ultraviolence with Ludwig Van. Readers of the blog also made a few excellent suggestions – such as combining particle physics textbooks with Aphex Twin and mid-20th century heroin-inspired masterworks like The Man With The Golden Arm and Last Exit to Brooklyn with well-chosen jazz.

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