Recommended Reading

Some interesting articles to pass along....

* Paul Kingsnorth (author of the excellent book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, and one of the movers-and-shakers behind The Dark Mountain Project) discusses Green Man symbolism in Aeon magazine.

* Yuka Igarashi discusses the perils of editing in a charming post on the Granta website. (My own take on editing is here.)

* The BBC reports the discovery of a new story by Hans Christian Andersen. (For more on the life of H.C.A., go here.)

* Two interesting articles on artistic collaboration: one by Maura Kelly in The Atlantic, and one about Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyen (co-screenwriters for Peter Jackson's Tolkien films) in The New York Times.

* A provocative article by Sarah Mesle on boys in YA fiction, in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

* Noah Shachtman discusses the history of Europe's secret societies,  in Wired.

* Sophie Elmherst has published an interesting profile of Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, in The New Statesman.

“I think if I hadn’t become a writer I would just have suppressed that
part of my personality," says Mantel. "I think I would have put it in a box that I
never opened. I’m not sure I would have been happy doing that. Sometimes
people ask, does writing make you happy? But I think that’s beside the
point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you’re
off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. You’re like the person
in the fairy tale The Red Shoes: you’ve just got to dance and
dance, you’re never in equilibrium. I don’t think writing makes you
happy, not that you asked that question, I’m asking myself. I think it
makes for a life that by its very nature has to be unstable, and if it
ever became stable, you’d be finished.”

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I agree with that or not, but it's an interesting comment.