My Dad sent me an interesting article from New Scientist magazine recently called “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. It’s based on a book of the same name by James W. Pennebaker. Now the article was fascinating (I’ll get to it in a minute), but I just wanted to put in a quick plea first.
Please, [...]
So he won his Booker after all, the man who’s been shortlisted three times but never won before, and who once famously referred to the prize as “posh bingo”.
To be honest I’m a bit sick of the Booker by now – there seems to have been more publicity about it than usual, [...]
I was interested to see today that a new Literature Prize is being established, possibly from next year, with the intention to rival the Man Booker Prize. I wasn’t aware of the controversy about the Booker apparently prioritising readability over artistic achievement. The two shortlisted books I’ve read so far have certainly had [...]
I’ve lamented the decline of independent bookshops on this site in the past, so was pleased to see a Guardian special section on independent bookshops last weekend. It’s available online – I was particularly interested in the listing of all the independent bookshops in London, but there are also similar articles for the other [...]
You often hear people talking about supporting independent bookshops as if they’re some charity case. I don’t agree with this – they have real advantages. One of them really hit me recently when I was buying a book for my nephew’s birthday. Time was short, and I was worried about being able to buy it, [...]
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 – [...]
I had a message today from the mother of Luke Bitmead, the Legend Press novelist who died tragically young. 13th May is his birthday, and she would like to encourage people to visit his site in the days leading up to the 13th, in the hope of getting more than 13,000 visitors overall. Please check [...]
Moving from journalism into fiction writing, it sometimes feels as if I have gone from one dying industry straight to another. All I read about my profession is doom and gloom, and I sometimes wonder whether I’ve chosen a career that will be obsolete by the time I’ve established yourself in it. It’s the [...]
As a follow-up to my recent post about the threatened cuts to the Public Lending Right, I was happy to get an email this afternoon from the Society of Authors telling me about a petition they’ve organised with other groups to defend PLR from cuts. I’ve signed the petition and would urge other [...]
Following on from my last post, I was amazed to hear that bookshop behemoth Barnes & Noble is now up for sale. If even they can’t make money, how do the smaller guys stand a chance? Or maybe, as the bookshop owners argued, they offer a different service and cater to a different market [...]
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