The Guardian's Blog, page 92
November 28, 2014
Science fiction writers must battle video games with words
The genre’s capacity to summon new worlds is threatened by immersive media. Writers need to sharpen their prose, says Damien Walter
The megastructure is one of science fiction’s most enjoyable guilty pleasures. There is no other genre of literature that takes quite such glee in describing buildings, whether made by the hand of man or alien. Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama is little more than a guided tour of the titular spacecraft through the eyes of its human explorers. Only in science fiction can an entire novel be dedicated, in immense descriptive detail, to conveying the spectacle of an imaginary structure to the reader.
SFs most famous megastructure is the ringworld, a stripe of artificially-constructed land encircling a star, first envisioned by author Larry Niven in his 1970 novel Ringworld. The idea made Niven one of the most famous SF authors of his day, at a time when the novel was still the most powerful way of casting the full spectacle of sci-fi into the imaginations of the audience. Movies and television reached a far larger audience, but too often fell short of the spectacle sci-fi readers created for themselves.
Continue reading...
Love letters to libraries: the Etherington Brothers
The siblings who created Monkey Nuts join us in a celebration of libraries with an exclusive comic strip. Enter the wacky world of Robin and Lorenzo Etherington and discover their tribute to Arundel library
Inspired? Share your tribute to your favouriteOur celebration of libraries, librarians and free access to culture for Book Week Scotland Continue reading...
November 27, 2014
Small world: Impac prize’s version of global literature is distinctly parochial
News: JK Rowling’s alter ego makes Impac 2015 prize longlist
The 2015 International Impac Dublin literary award’s 142-book longlist, announced this week, looks to be world-spanning, with 49 novels in translation from 16 different languages, nominated by libraries in 114 cities and 39 countries. But a closer look at the longlist for the €100,000 prize turns up a number of questions. Where are the books from African and Indian languages? Nothing in Arabic? Or Japanese?
The prize gathers its longlist from libraries around the world. But as MA Orthofer notes over at The Literary Saloon, the prize “has as many nominators (one) from Liechtenstein as it does from all Africa”. There were no Arab libraries nominating titles for the 2015 prize, nor any from Japan, and there is only one from South America. The blogger at Travelling in the Homeland writes that the single nominating library from India doesn’t fit the prize’s “public” criterion, as it’s a privately run, members-only cultural centre. All three of its nominations were written in English.
Continue reading...
Love letters to libraries: Jacqueline Wilson
The former Children’s Laureate writes a love letter to Kingston Library, where she discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder and Virginia Woolf
Children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson, author of classics including Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather, joins AL Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith and Chris Riddell today in our Book Week Scotland series in which writers celebrate their favourite library by writing a love letter to it. Wilson chose to celebrate libraries and librarians by writing this letter to Kingston Library, where she has spent countless hours since she was younger than most of the characters in her books. If you also want to share your appreciation for a library, you can do it here.
Dear Kingston Library,
Well, you and I are old friends! In fact we go back more than sixty years. My Mum asked if I could join the children’s library early (there was a joining age of seven then in those long ago days) because I loved reading so much and I’d read my own handful of children’s books at least five times.
I remember your magical children’s section so vividly. I wish it was still in the main part of the library, but the computers have taken over. I can close my eyes and visualise those shelves now. How I enjoyed wandering around, browsing in one corner and then another until I knew all the books from Louisa May Alcott to Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’d take out my selection so happily every visit. I remember the thrill I felt when I discovered a new Mary Poppins book or an unknown Noel Streatfeild family story.
I remember your magical children’s section so vividly. I can close my eyes and visualise those shelves now.
I was given special permission to join the adult library when I was twelve. I felt so proud! In those days books stayed on the shelves for years, so if I found an author I enjoyed I could read their entire backlist. I remember all those enjoyable Mazo de la Roche titles in a long pink line, and those much harder yellow Ivy Compton Burnetts. I even had a stab at reading Virginia Woolf, loving the beginning of The Waves where the characters are children – but giving up when the story became increasingly baffling.
The first thing I did when I was seventeen and went to work in Dundee was to join their beautiful Carnegie library opposite the DC Thompson offices. I went there whenever I felt homesick because the sight and smell of books was always so soothing.
I don’t visit you very often nowadays because I’ve gradually acquired my own library of some 20,000 books – but my house is only five minutes away from your warm red building, so I smile at you almost every day.
Let us hope you stay a working library for ever!
Continue reading...
November 26, 2014
Reading the Guardian first book award longlist: rewards and revelations
We started with Fiona McFarlane’s tiger on the coast of New South Wales and we finished eight weeks later in the company of the volatile “young skins” of Glanbeigh, having travelled to Colin Barrett’s fictional west of Ireland town via the new China with Evan Osnos, and from Kabul to London via Oxford, New York and Islamabad with Zia Haider Rahman. On the way we followed Gruff Rhys as he traced his farmhand ancestor’s search for a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans and we spent time with Marion Coutts, sharing her pain, frustration and love as her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, experienced the debilitating effects of a brain tumour.
The brain and its workings returned several times: Henry Marsh showed us what it was like to operate on its “soft white substance … moving through thought itself” while Matthew Thomas in his novel We Are Not Ourselves presented us with a closely observed study of what happens when Marsh’s “jelly” falls victim to dementia. We learnt new ways of interpreting architecture from Tom Wilkinson’s Bricks and Mortals, and encountered brilliant new approaches to the short story in May-Lan Tan’s Things To Make and Break, which made it to the longlist as the Guardian readers’ choice.
Continue reading...
What to read over Thanksgiving
It’s the time of year when you might want to disappear into a book – and especially one about families even more dysfunctional than your own
Thanksgiving is a holiday of hidden meanings. It pretends to be about mutual respect, specifically that between the settlers and the indigenous people of North America. But of course you can only sincerely celebrate that if you ignore the way the former subsequently killed off large swaths of the latter. Similarly, the sweet experience of family togetherness promised by the holiday is a lie, for most people. Get stuck in a room with your family and, well, even family love is a battlefield.
I have, therefore, books to recommend both as psychic preparation and coping mechanism for the holiday. These books are mostly about families, unconventional ones. To read them is to feel the satisfying superiority of one who knows that things could always be worse.
Continue reading...
Jörg Fauser’s crazed, leaping, unmoored voyage
Embedded in German counter-culture, Fauser’s picaresque life and work tell of dashed dreams and degeneracy with an energy to equal the Beats, says Niall Griffiths
What do we know about Jörg Fauser? Outside Germany, not a great deal: he was born in 1944 and became a drifter at a young age through Britain, Ireland, Spain and Turkey, where he also became a junkie. He wrote poetry, novels, edited a small-press magazine, wrote a biography of Marlon Brando, kicked heroin and turned to booze.
He wrote lyrics for, and performed in, various bands. His reputation as an important figure in the German counter-culture survived even his commercial success as a detective novelist. His nomination for the Ingeborg Bachmann prize aroused the ire of some leading literary notables, who publicly denounced him, not long before he was run over and killed by a truck in 1987 on the autobahn outside Munich, at the age of 43 (there is an online rumour that this was an assassination: Fauser was, at the time of his death, researching the links between the drug trade and high-ranking politicians). He is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the Beats and, especially, compared to Charles Bukowski.
Continue reading...
Love letters to libraries: Chris Riddell
From his first adventures in reading, to the librarians who inspired him, follow illustrator Chris Riddell’s graphic journey through life-changing books - exclusively for the Guardian
November 25, 2014
Little Women’s unfortunate brothers
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, loosely based on her own family, tells the story of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as they grow up looking for adventure, love and their place in the world. The first print run sold out in days and it’s been hailed as a children’s classic ever since. But what about her later books featuring the same sisters?
After Little Women (originally published separately as two volumes, Little Women and Good Wives, in 1868 and 1869) Alcott published two more books, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Little Men is set in the school Jo March establishes with her husband, Professor Bhaer, and follows the lives of the 12 boys they teach. The third and final book, Jo’s Boys, rejoins the school when all the boys have reached adulthood and Jo has now become a successful author. Little Men holds the key to many fans’ lack of interest in Alcott’s subsequent output. For a lot of readers, Little Men was a betrayal of the feminist ideology that made Little Women so popular. Alcott never married, and she knew that readers of Little Women would not be interested in a single, childless, middle-aged woman. She had originally hoped to leave Jo unmarried, happily pursuing her career as a writer, much like her creator, but after the original Little Women ended with the marriage of Meg Alcott was inundated with letters from fans, clamouring for Jo to be married to Laurie.
Continue reading...
Live webchat with Orwell biographer DJ Taylor
More about this month’s Reading group
If this month’s Reading group investigation of Nineteen Eighty-four has proved one thing, it’s that George Orwell is still of burning interest. Opinions may vary about his quality as a novelist, but there’s little doubt of the importance of what he said. He still matters - and there is still a great deal to say about him. So it’s a great pleasure to announce that on Friday 28 November at 1pm we’ll be running a Q&A with one of the foremost authorities on Orwell’s life and work.
DJ Taylor is a novelist, biographer and journalist. He recently told the Guardian that it wasn’t his original intention to fill all these roles. “’Never be a novelist and a critic,’ I was told. ‘Never be a novelist and a biographer.’ It’s actually very good advice and 30 years ago I indeed set out with every intention of just being a novelist. But then I got diverted … ’”
Continue reading...
The Guardian's Blog
- The Guardian's profile
- 9 followers
