The Guardian's Blog, page 8
May 11, 2016
George RR Martin publishes new chapter from The Winds of Winter
Game of Thrones author stresses that he is not yet finished with the long-awaited sequel, however
George RR Martin has tossed another morsel to the hordes of his hungry fans – a new chapter from The Winds of Winter. Told from the perspective of Princess Arianne Martell, the excerpt sees her travelling the countryside and reporting the news she gleans back to her father, Prince Doran Martell of Dorne, while attempting to control her wayward cousin Elia Sand. There’s talk of bearding dragons in their den and of forthcoming battles, plus a rather lovely foray into a deep cave system.
Daemon Sand moved to her side and raised his torch. ‘Look how the stone’s been shaped,’ he said. ‘Those columns, and the wall there. See them?’
‘Faces,’ said Arianne. So many sad eyes, staring.
Related: George RR Martin: when writers just can't finish their books
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May 10, 2016
Translation Tuesday: Albina and the Dog-Men by Alejandro Jodorowsky – extract
Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has a new novel coming out in English today, a supernatural love-and-horror story full of the dark magic that characterises his work. Read an extract here, in partnership with Asymptote
By Alejandro Jodorowsky and Alfred MacAdam for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network
Like all Chileans, Crabby spoke in a singsong way, her voice vibrating in her nose. She laughed at everything, even celebrity deaths, and made cruel jokes. She drank red wine until she collapsed in snores, only to wake up barefoot because someone had stolen her shoes. She ate empanadas and sea urchin tongues in green sauce seasoned with fresh, extra-hot chili. Whenever the cops beat a “political agitator” to death, she turned a blind eye, pretending not to notice. Actually she wasn’t Chilean but Lithuanian.
She landed in Valparaíso when she was two, pulled along by her mother, a fat redhead who spoke only Yiddish, and her father a tall (almost seven-foot), skinny fellow as light on his feet as a bird. His profession was the most pedestrian imaginable: callus remover. Using prayer, he made the calluses on people’s feet fall off. Since his name was Abraham and his wife’s name was Sarah, he dreamed—for too many years—of having a son he could name Isaac, which in Hebrew means, “he laughs.” After anguished efforts, ten months of gestation, anemia, forceps, a cesarean, a strangling umbilical chord, Sarah finally gave birth to a daughter. Abraham stubbornly insisted on naming her Isaac, but very early in life, even before she began to walk, the girl would burst into an angry fit of wailing the instant she heard that persistent “Isaac.” Only a teaspoon of honey would calm her down.
Related: Alejandro Jodorowsky: 'I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul'
I am a wound awaiting the gaze of another in order to heal. A frog who will never turn into a princess.
Related: Lennon, Manson and me: the psychedelic cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky
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Continue reading...May 9, 2016
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 Mary Beard on everyday life in ancient Rome, laughing at Thomas Pynchon on a train in Asia and brainstorming great novels set during world war two.
elfwyn has finished Mary Beard’s SPQR:
...in the paperback edition, which is a lot easier for reading in bed. For someone who has never managed to muster much interest in Ancient Rome, apart from Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels, this has been a revelation. It’s full of fascinating detail not only about Roman myth, customs and history, and what Romans thought of themselves and their place in the world, but about the lives of ordinary people. One moment you think, “Oh, they’re just like us,” and then you’re brought up short by some amazing and completely unexpected fact that proves emphatically that no, actually, they weren’t like us at all. Highly recommended (and her current TV series, though not based on the book, features many of the same events and locations).
Lord, even when he’s trying to appear as though he’s not really trying very hard at all, Pynchon’s a fantastic writer. Loved the intricate, yarn-like complexity of the plot, which was deeply satisfyingly wound-up and honked multiply throughout, including on a crowded train to a lake in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia, to the bemusement of local people. Goodness gracious, he’s a funny man.
It doesn’t have the “magic realism” of One Hundred Years of Solitude, aside from a couple of surreal exceptions (the protagonist’s cat comes with an instruction manual), and the prose is lighter, without the page-long paragraphs. It’s rare to come across a text which is sinister and charming at the same time, and I’ve enjoyed it enough that I’m going to have to read his whole catalogue.
What do people think are the great novels set in WW2? I have Vitaly Grossman’s Life and Fate, Anatoli Rybakov’s Dust and Ashes, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (for an Australian perspective.) Would be interested to hear people’s thoughts, suggestions.
Continue reading...Interview with a Bookstore: Albertine, a little Paris in New York
A bookshop opened to promote French literature in the American metropolis is full of eccentric regulars and great stories – Albertine’s booksellers share them, and give French book recommendations
Interview with a Bookstore from Literary Hub is part of the Guardian Books NetworkScroll down for the staff recommendations shelf
Albertine is a foundation that opened in September in 2014, hosted by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York. The store was opened to help promote French culture in New York, especially the literary arts. But also to make books more easily available to Francophone people in New York, especially since the store that had been in Rockefeller Center closed several years ago. The store has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times and all over the French media.
What is your favorite section of the store?
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Continue reading...May 6, 2016
Fanzines: the purest explosion of British punk
A British Library exhibition confirms that the fan-produced publications were one of the most creative responses to the anarchic music scene of the mid-70s
Among the artefacts to be displayed at Punk 1976-1978, a free exhibition opening this week at the British Library, are 14 fanzines. Titles such as Ripped & Torn, 48 Thrills and London’s Burning were produced by young men and women on a budget of nothing, the products of an intense but brief moment. Quintessentially ephemeral, they nevertheless speak to us four decades on.
Related: Happy Birthday Punk: the British Library celebrates 40 years of anarchy and innovation
Continue reading...Have the Locus awards been hit with 'myopic sexism'?
An all-male shortlist for YA fiction has left the Locus awards mired in controversy – but prejudice is an unavoidable part of any literary prize
Literature has always been a tribal world, and the internet has only made that worse. The romance readers on one forum, the crime buffs on another. The LitFicers trade snark in their favourite webzines, while the MFA grads are so hipster they communicate exclusively via Ello. It’s all reinforced by the feudal architecture of social media, where the good graces and retweets of your genre’s overlords can make or break. When two great literary tribes go to war, the screams of reputations dying can be heard from Facebook to Instagram, and nothing sparks conflict between writers like book awards.
The tribes of sci-fi, constituted from the related clans of SF, fantasy and horror, have one of the most extensive and complex awards seasons of all genres. The Locus awards for science fiction shorlists this year provided the rare sight of an all-male YA fiction shortlist this week. The Republic of Young Adult Authors was not amused and fired off a warning volley of outraged tweets in protest. YA is a genre with a great strength in women writers and a massive readership among young women. Did this all-male shortlist indicate, as claimed by YA author Gwen Katz, a “myopic sexism” from Locus award voters?
I’m pleased people voted for me, but I don’t think it’s ever a good thing when someone’s on the same shortlist twice.
Continue reading...Poster poems: politics
As bruising electoral battles rage on around us, it’s a good time to remember that poets can raise their voices for public causes, too. Please add your voice below
In the US, the electorate braces itself for what may be the nastiest and most bizarre presidential election in living memory. The Brexit referendum in the UK has taken on the characteristics of high (or low) farce. Meanwhile, here in Ireland, a centrist party that won less than a third of the total seats in the March general election is trying to cobble together some kind of minority government with the tacit support of another centrist party that refuses to enter coalition as junior partners. If there was ever a time for a politics-themed Poster poems, this is it.
Matters political of one sort or another have exercised the minds of poets in various ways down the ages. At times, the poems they produced have been pithy and epigrammatic, like EE Cummings’s A Politician – possibly the most succinct political put-down in the history of the art – or Langston Hughes’s prophecy of change in Black Workers.
Related: What's poetry's role in protest politics?
Related: Political poetry with Luke Wright and Hollie McNish – books podcast
Continue reading...Free Comic Book Day 2016: where to go in the UK
The annual bonanza of graphic giveaways is on Saturday 7 May. Here are some of the best stores to visit to get freebies and meet some artists
Gosh! Comics London
(1 Berwick Street, Soho W1F 0DR)
Big day planned at Gosh! on Saturday: there will be a kids workshop between 11am-2pm, where kids can sit with artists or do some window painting. That’s followed at 3-4pm by a signing session with cartoonists from the world’s best newspaper (ahem): the Guardian’s very own Tom Gauld, Simone Lia, Kent Able and Stephen Collins. There will also be a signing session with artists and writers from Image Comics (5-6pm) and a launch party for new titles from Avery Hill Publishers (until 9pm). Yikes, what a day!
The Rochester Free Comic Book Day festival
(Hosted by Jetpack Comics, various locations around Rochester city centre)
To make collecting your FCBD comics more fun, Jetpack has put them in several locations around the city for people to ferret out. Jetpack is so organised. Seriously, it even made a map.
Related: The comics and graphic novels to look forward to in 2016 – part one
Related: The comics and graphic novels to look forward to in 2016 – part two
Continue reading...May 5, 2016
Food in books: the sole with white sauce in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own
Kate Young returns to Virginia Woolf for an evocative piece of food writing, rich in detail
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe.
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
Continue reading...Food in books: sole with white sauce from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Kate Young returns to Virginia Woolf for an evocative piece of food writing, rich in detail
By Kate Young for The Little Library Café, part of the Guardian Books Network
It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe.
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
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