Archive | July, 2011

Booker longlist

26 July 2011 · Literary events · Comments { 8 }

Here are the 13 longlisted books for this year’s Man Booker Prize: Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House) Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber) Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books) Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta) Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail – Profile) Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard [...]

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Apocalypse

25 July 2011 · Thinking · Comments { 8 }

I like it when fiction writers have something to say about the world. I mean the real world, beyond the world of books. Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, wrote an excellent article in the Boston Review recently about natural disasters, focusing particularly on the earthquake in Haiti. It’s rare [...]

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Train in a tunnel

The ingredients of fiction

20 July 2011 · The writing process · Comments { 12 }

Writing fiction is not really about making stuff up. It’s more about making sense of what you already have stored somewhere in your memory or subconscious, dusting it off, ordering it and making it intelligible to the rest of the world. The hope is that the things you write about will also resonate with other [...]

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Homage to Catalonia

“Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell

18 July 2011 · Reading · Comments { 8 }

Homage to Catalonia is many books in one. It is a piece of journalism – Orwell initially went to Spain in the 1930s to report on the Spanish Civil War. It is also a war memoir, because Orwell was immediately convinced that enlisting in the fight against fascism rather than merely writing about it was [...]

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The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Giveaway: “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy

11 July 2011 · Reading · Comments { 4 }

I picked up a free copy of this in New Beacon Books – there was a stack of them left over from World Book Night earlier this year. It says inside the back cover that I’m supposed to pass it on to someone else to read and enjoy, so if you’d like a copy, please [...]

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Brenton Brown cover

And the winner is…

6 July 2011 · Literary events · Comments { 1 }

I had an interesting experience tonight at the launch of Alex Wheatle’s new book Brenton Brown at Brixton Library. There was a speech by the author, a Q&A, then an excellent reading by the actress Adjoa Andoh, and then a raffle for two CDs of Alex’s music and a copy of the book. And for [...]

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“Too Loud a Solitude” by Bohumil Hrabal

4 July 2011 · Reading · Comments { 9 }

The narrator of this book is an idiot. His boss despises him, others laugh at him. He drinks beer all day, and works in a cellar compacting wastepaper. He has been compacting wastepaper in the same cellar with the same hydraulic press for 35 years, and has picked out classics of world literature from the [...]

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