Prufrock's Page

Banville's Future

2008-01-20T09:40:00.000+05:30

Cast your mind forward to 2050. In a biographical dictionary you read: 'Banville, John: Irish author of numerous novels, all of which are entirely forgotten. Chiefly remembered for a scurrilous review of Lord McEwan of Islington's masterpiece, Saturday. Some of his novels, which Banville had written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, are still in print.'

Why One Hasn't Written A Novel

2008-01-20T09:30:00.000+05:30

John Updike's goal is 1,000 words a day. Richard Ford awakes at six so he can begin as soon as possible. Philip Roth follows Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Wolfe in preferring to stand for hours on end. Oh, the discipline and routine needed to be a writer.

Loosen Up, LitMags

2008-01-18T11:20:00.000+05:30

Editor Dan Crowe talks of the present and future of literary magazines, using Granta as a case in point: "With the deaths of George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, and Barbara Epstein, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, and the change of ownership at Granta, this is a critical time not just for Granta but also for the future of the literary journal as an art form. It is no longer enough for a literary magazine to publish 'good writing', or even 'new writing'. We've got the internet now. When Plimpton founded the Paris Review it was an act of rebellion; similarly for Bill Buford when he relaunched Granta in the 1970s. They wanted to shake things up a bit. With the new owner in place, it is time for another shake-up. Granta must loosen up; it must rock and roll. It must not only seek to publish good writing, but it must seek to become original again - original and broad-minded in the ways it communicates with its readers."

Amis Again

2008-01-17T11:43:00.000+05:30

Apologies for going on about Martin Amis' new book yet again, but here's another review by David Aaronovitch that's more sympathetic, more considered, and, as such, definitely worth reading: "Through Qutb and others Amis came to the realisation, chronicled in The Second Plane, that Islamism itself was a problem, since what it loathed about the West was, as Amis puts it, not our active seductiveness, but our passive attraction. 'We should understand,' he writes, 'that Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it.' Amis connects this existential envy to the political failure of Islam and attributes this in turn to the suppression of women in many Muslim countries."

Great, But Can We Have Banville Back, Please?

2008-01-16T11:30:00.001+05:30

The New York Times Sunday magazine begins to serialise Benjamin Black's new novel, The Lemur.

More Elmore

2008-01-16T11:22:00.000+05:30

After Stephen King, it's Elmore Leonard's turn to tell you about what makes writing stand out, with his Ten Rules of Good Writing. Rule # 10: "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." Simple, no?

Wodehouse, The Realist

2008-01-14T13:27:00.000+05:30

David Twiston-Davies reviews A Wodehouse Handbook: The World and Words of P. G. Wodehouse by N.P.T. Murphy: "The great myth about P.G. Wodehouse, until he died at 93 in 1975, was that his characters had only the vaguest connection with reality. They were solely the fruit of one man's fantasies, nurtured over decades while living abroad, it was claimed. 'Wodehousean' has come to imply a world of idle Etonians little touched by the Fall of Man, while 'Bertie Woosterish' is an insult employed by the Left against anyone it wants to tar as an ally of the House of Lords. Colonel Norman Murphy started investigating the matter more than a generation ago, and these two stout volumes contain some of the most dedicated sleuthing in the history of literary detective work. " This ought to be fun to read. Of course, chances that it'll be available at any library or bookstore around here are marginal. You'd have to visit one of the world's 10 best bookshops. (What, none from India? What an insult to our national pride. Quick, let's start a protest.)

BritLit

2008-01-14T13:08:00.000+05:30

Reviews of Martin Amis' views on a post-9/11 world, The Second Plane, are being written, and all of them will, inevitably, mention Terry Eagleton. Such as this one (forgive the long extract, but something like this will be at the heart of all discussions of the book): "One of the arguments that runs through this book is that barbarism is all but indistinguishable from religion and that the opposite of religious belief is not atheism, but independence of mind. The highest expression of independent minds in western enlightened culture is, to Amis, its literary fiction ('reason at play'). His personal struggle against the 'dependent mind' of Islam is thus fought on the level of playful language.

"For all the verbal thrill of much of this engagement - more than enough to make it essential reading even for Terry Eagleton - there is an undeniable hubris at the heart of it. In equating human value to literary value Amis finds a way not only to place himself on the frontline of the struggle against the forces of darkness, he also comes close to dismissing half the world as morally inferior and psychologically backward without visiting any of it or hearing from any of its citizens."

This, it would appear, is another one of those cases of the reviewer putting words in the author's mouth. Nuance be damned.

Meanwhile, Ian McEwan answers questions after the successful film adaptation of his Atonement. He tells you why he favours 'realism' over 'modernism' and airs his views on blogs: "I don't read the blogs much. I don't like the tone-the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don't like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can't be held accountable, when they don't have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn't belong in the world of book reviewing."

Move Over, Berners-Lee

2008-01-07T11:21:00.001+05:30

"...a growing number of contemporary commentators — whether literature professors or cultural critics like Umberto Eco — have concluded that Borges uniquely, bizarrely, prefigured the World Wide Web."

Teaching Skill, Not Talent

2008-01-07T10:49:00.000+05:30

"...when it comes to teaching creative writing, good intentions are nothing but paving material for the route to dull-prose hell." Nathan Whitlock adds to the debate over whether creative writing classes are a good thing, in his review of Penguin Canada's Writer's Gym, yet another one of those books aimed at Those Who Want To Write. (Those of you who are suckers for such books may find this recent report interesting: How do you organize and structure the narrative path of the work you wish to write?)

2008, Booked

2008-01-07T10:47:00.000+05:30

"The aura of a book I have yet to read, with its promise of rapture, surprise and edification, might be even more powerful than the aura of a book I have read, enjoyed and duly forgotten." A book editor's honest new year resolutions.

'Where's Malcolm Lowry? I Hear You Cry. Graham Swift? Zadie Smith? Byatt But No Drabble?'

2008-01-05T15:21:00.000+05:30

Erica Wagner anticipates criticism and debate in introducing The Times' list of the Greatest British Writers Since 1945. (No Peter Ackroyd, no P.D. James, no William Trevor -- but you'll find J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkein.)

Taking His Time

2008-01-05T15:14:00.000+05:30

He's written just two books in the last 15 years, once entertained notions of becoming a Trappist monk and returned to the US recently after years in Berlin. The Telegraph profiles the incomparable Jeffrey Eugenides: "...I think the only thing I've ever had on my side, more than a flashing ability or a talent or anything like that, was a determination not to quit. Tenaciousness is what got me to publish a couple of books, I think."

Audacious Highwire Act

2008-01-05T15:11:00.000+05:30

"...the most fundamental character trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity. More than even the sestina, short stories are the highwire act of literature, the man keeping all those pretty plates up and spinning on skinny sticks."

- An extract from Richard Ford's introduction to The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. (What still rankles is that there isn't a single story by Malamud in the volume.)

New Voices

2008-01-04T11:29:00.000+05:30

An earlier report on debutant authors in The Guardian, that one overlooked, is fascinating in that it makes those rarefied creatures come across as so...regular. Nick Harkaway (The Gone Away World), son of John Le Carre, says anxiously, "Can you make me look cool? In family photographs, I'm always standing at the edge looking like the country cousin." Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) reveals, "My son would try to read bits over my shoulder while I was writing the book. I think he got bored because it took me two years. He would say, 'Are you still writing that mangoes book?' " Joe Dunthorne (Submarine) says, "Saying I'm a writer is one of the most uncomfortable things. You can't help but feel you are showing off." And, in a confession sure to gladden the hearts of Mumbai's commuters with literary aspirations, Lucie Whitehouse (The House at Midnight) says that her novel was written over six years, mainly on the train to work. Come on now, all of you who're reading this: you can do it, too.

Plus Ca Change...

2008-01-04T11:22:00.000+05:30

Those in the book business look back on 2007 as yet another year of uncertainty and possible decline, mediated by hyped new titles and technology, finds Scott Timberg: "...it's hard to reconcile the unease people feel about the business with the excitement they feel about the books themselves."

Striking Novelists

2008-01-04T11:20:00.000+05:30

The Hollywood screenwriters' protest shows no signs of abating. And now, literary lions are taking a leaf from their book: " 'I want more than two free copies of the literary journal where I have been published," said a woman who would only give the name 'Virginia Woolf.' As she spoke she clutched copies of the literary journals White Chocolate and the University of Southern Kansas-North Campus Review. 'I would also like to demand fifteen cents per page.' 'It's just pennies,' said Leo Tolstoy. 'But it adds up.' " Read all about it.

100 Grantas

2007-12-30T12:40:00.000+05:30

How did a "tiny Cambridge journal rise to conquer the literary world"? On the occasion of Granta's 100th issue, Simon Garfield tells us.

More Than Cricket

2007-12-29T10:10:00.000+05:30

Shortly after being elected, Kevin Rudd announced two new $100,000 prizes for Australian writing: a Prime Minister's Literary Prize for fiction and one for nonfiction.Jane Gleeson-White applauds, and calls for a revitalisation of Oz literature: "...far from enshrining the language of competition, economic rationalism and sport that has ruled the national narrative of the past 11 years, our literature tells very different stories. It tells us that we are a nation of many voices. It speaks for the marginalised and the dispossessed and addresses a vast range of subjects, from the political to the personal, from the nature of our social fabric to our place in the world."

Endings

2007-12-29T09:57:00.000+05:30

Not just Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley and Norman Mailer, but also Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Potter and...the hardback. Sarah Crown looks at literary losses of 2007. (But there's a lot to look forward to in 2008, including work from Bernhard Schlink, Zoe Heller, Hanif Kureishi and -- hey, he's back -- Manil Suri.)

A Tampered Destiny

2007-12-29T09:55:00.000+05:30

"Our father told us on a harmattan morning. Outside the dining room window, the wind was cold and dry, the whistling pine was swaying, a cock was chasing a squawking hen, the red dust was rising and our mother’s spirit was dancing in its whirls. My brother Chuma and I, lips smeared with Vaseline, were playing scrabble at the dining table and listening to Celestine Ukwu on the stereo. " A new short story by Chimamanda Adichie. (Read it quick, the online version is available only till January 10.)

The Tour's Over

2007-12-25T13:49:00.000+05:30

Websites. Videos. Podcasts. What a relief for self-effacing authors that there's now an alternative to facing the book-buying public.

Which Authors Said The Following In 2007?

2007-12-24T12:46:00.000+05:30

“When people pick up a book they may want something happy that will cheer them up. In that case they shouldn’t really pick up my book. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.”

"Well, I’ve never thought about this before, but now that you ask it occurs to me I don’t have much interest in whether my books work or not.”

(On the tense Booker banquet) “Would Kafka have put up with this? Would Henry James?”

“Oh, Christ. You can’t go on getting excited every year about this. I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one.”

Answers.

Literary Festivities

2007-12-23T18:03:00.000+05:30

So where are Gore Vidal, Karen Roberts, Vikram Seth, Alexander McCall Smith, Shyam Selvadurai, William Dalrymple, Shobhaa De and Carl Muller, among many others, going to congregate this January? In Galle, that's where.

Prophet Or Poseur?

2007-12-23T18:00:00.000+05:30

One supposes it had to happen. After years of universal rapture over his literary achievements comes this question about Orhan Pamuk: "...this 'caught between East and West' business - how much more literary mileage does he plan to get out of it?"

The Tingle Test

2007-12-21T10:32:00.000+05:30

“We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.”

- From Nabokov's Lectures on LIterature, quoted in an appreciative essay by Steven Kellman

Deja Vu All Over Again

2007-12-21T10:28:00.000+05:30

This is from a letter written by Salman Rushdie to Taslima Nasrin way back in 1994. It's time to read it again:

"Taslima, I know that there must be a storm inside you now. One minute you will feel weak and helpless, another strong and defiant. Now you will feel betrayed and alone, and now you will have the sense of standing for many who are standing silently with you. Perhaps in your darkest moments you will feel you did something wrong - that those demanding your death may have a point. This of all your goblins you must exorcise first. You have done nothing wrong. The wrong is committed by others against you. You have done nothing wrong, and I am sure that one day soon you will be free."

Come Back Malamud, All Is Forgiven

2007-12-20T10:33:00.001+05:30

Even Richard Ford left him out of The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. Unfair. The time is ripe for a Malamud revival, and Joyce Carol Oates seems to agree: "Given the relative narrowness of Malamud’s subject matter, the more subdued range of his writerly voice, and an aesthetic puritanism temperamentally at odds with the flamboyant self-displays of Bellow (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift) and Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint, etc), it seems inevitable, if unfortunate, that he should come to seem, in time, the least impressive of the four." (The fourth being Isaac Bashevis Singer.)

Turning The Ephemeral Solid

2007-12-20T10:25:00.000+05:30

The role of a critic? "You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings," was Edmund Wilson's motto. A brief overview of the man and his work.

Somehow, One Missed That

2007-12-19T11:08:00.000+05:30

"Professor Wendell, in an essay on the Salem Witches, lays down the hypothesis that all the phenomena of suggestion and hypnotism, of clairvoyance and mediumship, which science uses now to explain what was miraculous to our ancestors, may very plausibly be considered rudimentary vestiges of powers of perception and communication which belonged to what was man before he stood upright on his hind legs and knew how to use his tongue for speech. Such a doctrine finds much illumination in the Jungle Books."

- From a June 1898 review of Kipling's The Jungle Books in The Atlantic

Holiday Reading

2007-12-19T10:56:00.000+05:30

All you wanted to know (and more) about the relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish. A Birkerts-like lament on the decline of reading. Fiction by (among others) Junot Diaz, Raymond Carver and Jhumpa Lahiri (this last not available online yet, alas). A stirring, informed piece on Led Zeppelin's return. James Wood on J.M. Coetzee. A history of American snapshots by John Updike. Poetry by Grace Paley. Reviews by Anthony Lane. Goodness, that's quite an issue.

Creative Writing In The British Classroom

2007-12-18T12:21:00.000+05:30

From The Education Guardian, a thoughtful and well-considered piece on whether to take that creative writing class or not. Two comments stand out: the first, from Oxford's Clare Morgan: "...the romantic notion of the single artist struggling ... in a garret has been eroded", replaced by "the increasing acceptability of the notion of writing as a craft, the skills of which one can develop through apprenticeship". And the second, by Jon Elsom, a part-time student at Birkbeck: "Committing the time and ... money to study an MA gives me the structure, motivation and discipline I need to be able to tell my job to get back in its box when I need to."

The Centre Holds

2007-12-18T10:59:00.000+05:30

Next year marks the 5oth publication anniversary of a novel by a Nigerian that is heralded as "an inspiration for writers and readers not only on the African continent but throughout the world". International events in about 15 countries are planned to commemorate the event -- including India. Get ready for the fanfare by reading -- or re-reading -- it at once.

Day Of The Jackal

2007-12-15T16:26:00.000+05:30

Literary agent Andrew Wylie speaks on his business, his rewards and on whether the future belongs to the e-book (it doesn't): "It's a very odd, very small business, that no one should get into unless they have no other occupation that they want to be involved in. I love it, but it's tough—you have to work two or three times harder than you do at other jobs to succeed...The reward is aesthetic. I respond to interesting writing and provocative thinking more passionately and deeply than I do to painting or film or music. That's just where my interests lie. At its best, it's completely satisfying to me, and everything else is gravy." That gravy, at present, seems very rich indeed.

What You'll Be Reading In 2008

2007-12-14T12:43:00.000+05:30

Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Viktor Pelevin and Peter Carey, among others, says The New Statesman. (Please, let's not have more talk about Sebastian Faulks doing an Ian Fleming. It's not going to be a good book.)

Type Right

2007-12-14T12:31:00.000+05:30

One is of a generation that still recalls using typewriters in the office -- as well as occasionally writing reviews late at night at home on a decrepit, black Olivetti with sticky keys. Now, of course, they're museum pieces. Well, not quite, says Paul Schweitzer, owner of Gramercy Typewriter Co in New York City: “The younger generation says, ‘Who needs typewriters?' It’s not true; there are people who still like hitting the keys.” For example, according to the report, John Irving uses an IBM Selectric. John Updike favours a 1940s Olivetti and Joan Didion writes with a Royal KMM. Maybe one should have hung on to that Olivetti.

Black Is Back

2007-12-14T12:28:00.000+05:30

John Banville, writing as crime thriller author Benjamin Black, gets another set of excellent reviews for his second outing, called The Silver Swan. Here's one: "Black ensures that the familiar satisfactions of unravelling a mystery plot lead us to a very unsatisfying fact: that despicable crimes stem as easily from the most humdrum emotions of ordinary people as from the machinations of the power-hungry."

WTF Is What Comes To Mind

2007-12-13T10:59:00.000+05:30

Merriam-Webster has announced that an expression popular with people that play online computer games was voted its word of the year for 2007. The word -- if you can call it that -- is "w00t" (yes, spelt with two 0s). The lexicographers' hunt for publicity has finally gone too far.

Orange Goes Bananas

2007-12-12T11:23:00.000+05:30

The five judges for the prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction have been announced. Among them are pop singer Lily Allen and BBC broadcaster Kirsty Lang. One is sure these ladies are excellent in their respective fields...but why pick them to judge a literary prize? Perhaps Clapton's autobiography will win it this year. Oh wait, that wasn't fiction, was it? And oh, wait again, he's not a woman, is he?

Next: A Ban On Book Fairs?

2007-12-12T11:19:00.000+05:30

The works of exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, living in India, have proved to be the hottest item in the Patna Book Fair. All her books were sold by the fifth day on Tuesday.

Flying Low

2007-12-12T11:15:00.000+05:30

You know this whole year-end 'best-of' round-up shindig has gone too far when even websites such as Cheapflights.co.uk get into the act -- they've just released their "best winter reads", a list that ranges from Ken Follett to Rohinton Mistry. Time to fly.

The Return Of Fonebone

2007-12-10T11:06:00.000+05:30

Anyone remember Mad magazine's crazy sage, Don Martin? (One recalls in particular his endless, loopy variations on the frog prince story.) The Washington Post's Michael Dirda is a fan: "His jowly, cross-eyed characters stare at us from the page with an utterly sublime imbecility, unaware of their smug silliness, confident that they are in control, the captains of their destiny and the masters of any situation, no matter how complex or improbable."

The Enchantress Of Florence...

2007-12-07T22:25:00.000+05:30

...is the title of Rushdie's new book, set in the court of Emperor Akbar and in Florence. Let's hope it continues the return to form that was displayed in Shalimar the Clown. It's to be published on April 3, 2008. (Via.)

Obviously, The Man Has Never Worked In A Company

2007-12-07T22:15:00.000+05:30

“When you sit down to write something, it should mean something. This is a day of your life that you’re never going to get back. This is a day you should be doing something well. This is something that should be the culmination of a lot thinking you’ve already been doing... I don’t think you should write anything knowing you’re going to throw it away.”

- Richard Ford

Now We Know Where That Beatles Reference Came From

2007-12-07T11:14:00.000+05:30

As it turns out, the famously curmudgeonly, pop-music-hating, child-abhorring Philip Larkin spent some time with a fellow-poet's family in 1964, playing with their children when they were listening to the stereo and even writing a Beatles-type song for them: "Don't like your song/ It gets me down./ It's much too long,/ It makes me frown./ Can't think why this God-awful noise/ Makes daughters miss their dates with boys." The mind boggles.

Neuroscience And The Novel

2007-12-06T12:23:00.000+05:30

A.S. Byatt has an extremely thought-provoking essay -- in more ways than one -- in the TLS about how changes in the presentation of human nature over the ages have affected the novel. From characters with immortal souls to love being the only thing that matters to the life as the expression of the libido and the selfish gene, all of this has been grist to the mill of novelists. Now, of course, we stand at the frontiers of a new comprehension of the mind. As Byatt writes, "Neuroscience, and the study of the activity of the brain, is beginning to bring its own illumination to our understanding of how art works, and what it is. I have come to see the delight in making connections – of which metaphor-making is one of the most intense – as perhaps the fundamental reason for art and its pleasures."

In just a slightly different context, one can think of at least two other novelists who have been inspired by scientific studies of how consciousness works: David Lodge, in his Thinks... (also see his essay, Consciousness and the Novel) and Richard Powers, with his Galatea 2.2 as well as the more recent The Echo Maker.

Myers' Manifesto

2007-12-06T11:26:00.000+05:30

One can't help but admire B.R. Myers' independent, if utterly audacious viewpoint -- even if one wonders whether he's taking his agenda too far. Consider his review of Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. Now, this is a novel that has been lauded by critics all over, being mentioned in more than one "best of the year" list (Here's what The Washington Post said, for example: "To write a fat novel about the Vietnam War nearly 35 years after it ended is an act of literary bravado. To do so as brilliantly as Denis Johnson has in Tree of Smoke is positively a miracle").

But Myers isn't impressed. He tears the prose and the subject to bits, with ample quotations from the book to prove his point. Fair enough: the man's entitled to dislike the book, and he's given reasons aplenty for doing so. But he doesn't stop there. He also takes petulant issue with the critics who've reviewed it favourably, finding it "difficult to believe" that they like the novel. And he positively froths at the mouth when he writes: "...once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there."

Good heavens. And people thought his A Reader's Manifesto went too far.

The Worst Of Times

2007-12-06T11:18:00.000+05:30

As a struggling writer, do you find yourself writing in short, simple sentences using relatively few characters, featuring melodramatic plots heavy on violence, sex and tear-jerking sentiment? Don't worry: you'll sell millions in Japan.

Another Literary Light Turned Off

2007-12-05T11:11:00.000+05:30

Critic, essayist and author Elizabeth Hardwick died yesterday. She was 91. From a 1979 interview: "...I call myself a feminist in that I believe there are cultural, social and economic boundaries set for women which are immoral and unnecessary and which should be resisted publicly and privately." Says Joyce Carol Oates: "She was a brilliant essayist, absolutely. She was a kind of genius in that difficult form, in which the personal and the critical, or cultural, were melded together in brilliant prose."

The GAN? It's Gone

2007-12-04T15:36:00.000+05:30

There was a time when British novelists looked over their shoulders to find their American counterparts trumping them in every way, be it in style, ambition or theme. (Martin Amis, for one, has always been open about his admiration for Saul Bellow.) The Great American Novel always seemed to be around the corner, whether that corner was in Manhattan or in the Deep South. But now, says John Walsh, with the passing of Norman Mailer and the senescence of his contemporaries, it's time to sing a sad elegy for that mythical beast. Yet, as Walsh doesn't point out, though the novel may be in less grandoise hands in the States, the short story continues to thrive -- as a look at The New Granta Book of The American Short Story edited by Richard Ford will reveal. Ironically, it's perhaps this emphasis on short fiction in American writing programs that leads short story writers to come up with novels that, though competent and well-judged, are less than great. (Now, a moment's silence to recall the words of Nadine Gordimer, who claimed that the short story was the form for our age, "where contact is more like the flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness. Short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the only thing one can be sure of - the present moment.")

Fidel, We Hardly Knew Ye

2007-12-04T14:11:00.000+05:30

Two conversations one had on the telephone this morning; the first, with Crossword, the second, with Danai.

1.

"Hello, do you have the Fidel Castro autobiography?"
"Who?"
"Fidel Castro."
"How do you spell that....F-A-D..."
"F-I-D-E-L".
"Oh. No, we don't have it."

2.

"Hello, do you have the Fidel Castro autobiography?"
"Could you spell that...K-A-S-"
"C-A-S-T-R-O"
"No, no record of it here."

Superrb

2007-11-02T16:32:00.000+05:30

Breaking a self-imposed silence to write about how delighted one is that the New York Review of Books is re-releasing Govindas Vishnoodas Desani's classic All About H. Hatterr, with an introduction by Anthony Burgess in which he writes: "It is the language that makes the book... It is not pure English; it is like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Kipling, gloriously impure." (One's own dog-eared copy, the Penguin Modern Classics edition, acquired from the footpath in Mumbai at a time when they actually sold books on footpaths in that city, is kicking about in some unopened carton, more's the pity.) This informative site will tell you all about the author, and here's the University of Texas at Austin's memorial resolution.

Think You Know John?

2007-10-23T18:01:00.000+05:30

Where was Updike born? What did he do in college? What did he want to be before he became a writer? How many times has he appeared on the cover of Time magazine? Take the John Updike test.

The King Of Cricklewood Is No More

2007-10-22T15:14:00.000+05:30

Sad news: Alan Coren, former Punch editor and one of the masters of the humourous essay, died last week. Here are appreciations by former associates and fellow satirists Michael Bywater and Miles Kington.

Carver Uncut

2007-10-22T14:59:00.000+05:30

Opinions were divided last week over Tess Gallagher's decision to reissue, in original form, the stories of her late husband Raymond Carver before Gordon Lish "edited" them to come up with that signature minimalist style.

What's less well-known, however, is that Lish used his blue pencil on the titles of Carver's stories, too. This blog has unearthed five such examples: remember, you read it here first.

Carver's title: Will You Please Be Quiet Please, Otherwise I Think I’ll Have To Go One More Time To The Neighbourhood Pub To Get Myself A Bourbon (Or Three)
The Lish version: Will You Please Be Quiet Please

Carver's title: Raindrops On Roses And Whiskers On Kittens Are Some Examples Of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
The Lish version: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Carver's title: Clatskanie, Oregon (Is Where I’m Calling From)
The Lish version: Where I’m Calling From

Carver's title: It’s A Good Thing We’re Not in New Orleans, Tess, Otherwise There’d Be So Much Water So Close To Home
The Lish version: So Much Water So Close To Home

Carver's title: You Can’t Bring That Elephant Into this House, What Do You Think It Is, A Cathedral?
The Lish version: Cathedral

It Adds Up

2007-10-19T23:00:00.000+05:30

In all the fuss over the "surprise" Booker win, one of the longlisted books seems to have been unfairly forgotten: Nikita Lalwani's Gifted. Here's an interview: "I was interested in the idea of standing out. There are quite a lot of of maths students in the Asian diaspora, and I think that's because math is not culturally specific. It's something like doing card tricks. But if you're gifted and doing accelerated learning, you're always in the spotlight. And while you're accelerated in that area, you're absolutely behind when it comes to emotional growth."

Then And Now

2007-10-18T11:57:00.000+05:30

"(People) are less comfortable with novels. They don't have a backward frame of reference that would enable them to appreciate things like irony and allusions. It's sad." - John Updike.

"[Conditions for literary fiction] have deteriorated. There's just no doubt about it .... The status of literature was much higher when I began writing. There were a number of serious critics that was much greater than now. The number of serious readers was much greater than now. The number of distractions was much fewer than now." - Philip Roth

Quoting the above, The Star's Philip Marchand worries about the future of literary fiction.

Accusing Authors

2007-10-17T12:20:00.000+05:30

There's a question that's driving Ann Patchett crazy: "Why are you so nice?"

Fans Who Write

2007-10-17T12:11:00.000+05:30

One has so far stayed away from what's called fan fiction, preferring to read those who create characters and settings for themselves. And though some published authors wouldn't like to acknowledge their fan fiction writing past, this report has it that "even as the publishing world addresses the genre's legal issues, some of its executives say they are open-minded about discovering talent on popular fan fiction websites such as livejournal.com, fanfiction.net, or fictionalley.org." Gird your loins for many, many more episodes of Star Trek or even Dr Who.

Oh, Those Irish Writers...

2007-10-17T12:07:00.000+05:30

Anne Enright, 45, has been awarded the Man Booker prize for what the judges called a "powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book", The Gathering.

Nobel Ways

2007-10-15T15:53:00.000+05:30

"Dear members of the Academy, let's admit it, this time you've overdone it. I mean, come on, first you give the prize to a black man, then to a Jewish writer. Now you give it to a clown. What gives?"

- Dario Fo, to the members of the Nobel Academy. Quoted by John Sutherland in his piece on acceptance speeches of Nobel Literature Prizewinners.

The Disturbances Of Grace

2007-10-15T15:51:00.000+05:30

"In the little every-day disturbances of individual human beings can be found the great dislocations of the history of humankind": S. Sankar's appreciation of Grace Paley

Two Cultures

2007-10-15T15:48:00.000+05:30

"There's a sort of similarity in the way Hindus and Jews behave. They both belong to social religions - they are eating a lot, meeting a lot, being very hospitable, but as far as religious belief is concerned - they are not similar. But among a certain class of the two peoples, religion is not a crucial thing, and the community is much more important. So you can find atheistic Hindus and atheistic Jews, who are basically still Hindus and still Jews. I first noticed that when I was in Israel and had a Sabbath meal. The good-byes - from the time you say good-bye to the time you actually walk out the door - took about 45 minutes! I thought this is like being in Delhi."

- Ha'aretz interviews Vikram Seth

Chaudhuri's Cultural Space

2007-10-12T16:36:00.000+05:30

"The free speech argument will only take you so far. You need to extend the argument to the autonomy of cultural space. If we look at India's erotic sculptures and say 'This is us', as if it were a constant lineage, we would be ignoring the disruptions...We cannot say that that the 13th-century tradition is still continuing. In India, if we draw too neat a line, as if we are automatic inheritors of that past, it would be wrong. By doing it we end up with versions of nationalism, some of which are unpleasant."

- Salil Tripathi profiles the gentlemanly, scholarly Amit Chaudhuri

Ladbrokes Is Wrong, Again

2007-10-11T16:32:00.000+05:30

It's Doris Lessing, "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Okay, we can all go back to reading Exit Ghost now.

(An earlier Salon.com interview with Ms Lessing is to be found here. And here's why she shocked a proofreader earlier this year.)

Another Shortlist

2007-10-11T11:50:00.000+05:30

While you await the names of the winners of the Literature Nobel and the Booker, here's another shortlist to remind you of all the catching up you've to do when it comes to books: the finalists of the National Book Awards.

Writers Read

2007-10-08T14:37:00.000+05:30

For David Remick, it's Middlemarch; for David Leavitt, it's On the Natural History of Destruction. Find out what writers are reading.

Big City Blues

2007-10-08T14:23:00.000+05:30

"My objective was to see if, away from the energy-wasting, ego-eroding literary hustle of New York City, I could make my modest way as a freelance writer. It turned out, one year at a time, I could...[New England is a place] where a man can breathe and a writer can write."

- John Updike, in an essay that's to be found in his new collection of pieces.

Gentlemen, Place Your Bets

2007-10-07T16:30:00.000+05:30

Will it be Claudio Magris (5/1), Amoz Oz (10/1), Cormac McCarthy (50/1) or maybe Salman Rushdie (100/1) who will give the acceptance speech in Stockholm?

What Rushdie Is Reading

2007-10-05T11:21:00.000+05:30

"A bunch of short stories. I’ve agreed to edit next year’s Best American Short Stories anthology. It’s a thankless task, I know. Everyone always hates what you choose, except the guys you choose, who think, Obviously." (Link.)

An Open Letter To Burma

2007-10-05T11:16:00.000+05:30

"As citizens of the world, as artists valuing free expression, as people of Asian heritage, we write in support of the courageous Buddhist monks and nuns, and other people from all religions and walks of life in Burma, as they continue to seek peaceful change and national reconciliation...We demand an immediate end to the violence against protesters and a release of all political prisoners."

- From an open letter to Burma signed by, among others, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh and Le Ly Hayslip.

Book Review Headline Of The Year

2007-10-04T17:59:00.000+05:30

Phallus doesn't live here anymore.

(Brendan Bernhard's Salon review of Philip Roth's Exit Ghost.)

Death Sucks

2007-10-04T07:59:00.000+05:30

Poor Theophile Marzials. Every now and again someone comes up with the bright idea of asking critics for their opinions on his poem, Death. The conclusion? "The worst poem ever." (Earlier post here.)

Claire In Canada

2007-10-04T07:52:00.000+05:30

Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) is quite clearly a U.S.-born and resident author. So what's she doing in the newly minted Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories?

A Nine-Year Chat With Roth

2007-10-03T12:47:00.000+05:30

While there's plenty of Roth coverage out there nowadays, here's something a little more detailed: a conversation with French novelist Marc Weitzmann that started in 1998 and "continued for the next nine years".

You Can Say That Again

2007-10-03T12:15:00.000+05:30

"Shashi Tharoor is a reliable ad man for what's starting to be called Brand India," is how Swati Pandey opens her review of his new book, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone. (It seems to be an expanded version of the pieces that appear in The Sunday Times of India.)

Rushdie And The Overdog

2007-10-03T12:09:00.000+05:30

Salman Rushdie spoke at Vanderbilt recently, reminding the audience of the role of literature: "However unimportant literature may seem, in the end it is literature that writes the history of our lives...It becomes more important than ever for art to become that space where human intimacy is preserved. The writer's role is not to answer the questions of the world but to frame the issues in interesting ways." Later, at dinner, he revealed that he was a Yankees fan: "I like the overdog".

Horrors

2007-10-01T11:07:00.000+05:30

The American short story is alive, says Stephen King. However, is it well? "Sorry, no, can’t say so. Current condition stable, but apt to deteriorate in the years ahead."

Amis On Writing

2007-09-30T15:04:00.001+05:30

So Manchester University made headlines by appointing Martin Amis as their first Professor of Creative Writing. But what does the author himself think of writing courses? “My opinion of writing would go down if you could teach it, it’s something that comes naturally” he said, at a recent event at the university's Centre for New Writing. Inspiring.

Hatchet Jobs

2007-09-30T14:59:00.000+05:30

Tibor Fischer did it to Martin Amis, Dale Peck did it to Rick Moody, Michiko Kakutani has done it to many, and now, William Dalrymple does it to Sir Vidia. (Also see.)

(The Nobel Prize-winner, meanwhile, wants all university English departments closed down. “Fiction has done its work,” he recently said to James Naughtie.)

Paper, Not Celluloid

2007-09-30T14:56:00.000+05:30

"I am not interested in having inferior versions!"

- Lindsey Davis, on whether we'll be seeing film adaptations of her 'historical comic detective'series, set in the first century AD of the Roman Empire and featuring the delightful Marcus Didius Falco

Publishing Figures

2007-09-28T13:01:00.000+05:30

"...life isn't easy for Indian authors in English. Thanks to the flourishing English media, six-figure (rupee; ie more than $2,500) monthly salaries are on tap in TV journalism, and five-figure salaries in the print media. But the average English-language book deal could be worth $1,500, and is usually less for non-fiction books. "

The Asia Times investigates the world of Indian writing and publishing.

Malamud, Teacher

2007-09-28T12:58:00.000+05:30

"In this closely written biography, Philip Davis emphasises those human concerns central in Malamud, whose name means teacher: his 'was the ability to create – in place of abstract thought – that anterior mass of dense and confused human feeling, which thoughts themselves came out of'."

- Christopher Hawtree reviews a new Malamud biography. The above, by the way, is practically the only part of the review that mentions the book; the rest is a potted life of the writer.)

Naipaul's Views

2007-09-26T15:24:00.000+05:30

"He spoke at incredible length, in the most lugubrious terms, about the English intellectual life - of course it is dead (fool). Everything is repetitive. There is nothing new in the world and any attempt to experiment is in itself a sign of failure. And intellectual energy never dwelled in literature in the first place, but more in travel books."

- Zoe Williams takes exception to Naipaul's comments on the Today show.

James Wood's New Yorker Debut...

2007-09-25T11:01:00.001+05:30

...is a review of Robert Alter’s new translation of The Book of Psalms. No doubt many will find it riveting.

And Here One Is Struggling To Do Just One Thing Well

2007-09-25T10:56:00.000+05:30

The American writer and film-maker Miranda July can add the world's richest short story prize to her collection of film festival accolades after winning the 2007 Frank O'Connor award this weekend.

Seth On Ice

2007-09-25T10:37:00.000+05:30

“People need to know about what is being lost, and I think it is an inspired idea to get sculptors or writers or photographers or other artists to come on what is largely a scientific expedition," says Vikram Seth, currently on board a schooner on its way to Greenland as part of the Cape Farewell Voyage of the High Arctic. He's accompanied by a host of artists from Britain, Canada, Australia, the US and Japan, and you can follow the progress of the expedition here.

The RothFest Begins

2007-09-24T17:27:00.000+05:30

"I like to introduce something new about two thirds of the way through a book. Not just tying the threads together, but something brand new. It's a challenge. You just go out there and do it."

- From a brief interview and long profile by Newsweek's David Gates.

Update: And, for those of you who need one, here's a Roth primer from The Times by Stephen Amidon.

Solved, The Mystery Of P.C.Goon

2007-09-24T17:19:00.000+05:30

Remember the bumbling policeman in Enid Blyton's stories of Fatty, Larry, Daisy, Pip and Bets, not forgetting Buster the dog? Turns out Ms Blyton was giving vent to "a strain of cleverly disguised domestic spite", says assiduous biographer Duncan McClaren.

Why Arundhati Roy Hasn't Written Another Novel

2007-09-21T13:52:00.000+05:30

"I found the [Man Booker] shortlist very strange and very surprising. I haven't read any of them apart from Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and that was more of a novella than a novel. Perhaps the books they picked are actually very good so I'm trying to look on the bright side. Still, I think it's a big problem when they give the prize to a first-time novelist because it's such a prestigious prize to give away. Just look at Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things - she hasn't written anything since she won the prize; it finished her."

- Mariella Frostrup, former Booker judge and BBC radio presenter.

Why One Bemoans The Lack Of A Proper Library In These Parts

2007-09-21T12:50:00.000+05:30

In his review of Lewis Dabney's life of Edmund Wilson, Pankaj Mishra wrote: "With his vivid sense of the past, his active participation in the present, and his quest for a new order, Wilson not only managed, in the first half of his life, to create one of the most wide-ranging and clear-eyed records of this great American transformation—what makes many of his books likely to endure, and to be valued as both personal and social history." Now, Wilson's essays and reviews from the 1920s to the 1940s have been collected in two handsome volumes, leading Colin Wilson to rave, too: "He was a modern-day Theseus in the world of letters, the man who would lead you out of the labyrinth of what, exactly, to read next: not merely for your edification, but for the general good of your soul."

Two Bills

2007-09-21T12:46:00.000+05:30

It's funny in parts, it's comprehensive, but, says Tom Payne of Bill Bryson's latest work, Shakespeare: The World as a Stage, "I'm afraid that there is almost nothing – barely a mote, let alone a scrap – that gives much insight into Bryson's feelings about Shakespeare. It's probably fair to say that he's a fan; he does concede that his subject is a genius. Damn right – and?"

The Christie Mystery And The Doyle Paradox

2007-09-21T11:48:00.000+05:30

The Telegraph reviews well-received biographies of two of the most popular writers of detective fiction. In the "affectionate, admiring, perceptive and absolutely convincing" Agatha Christie: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson, the writer's famous disappearing act -- when she left her car beside a dangerous quarry and checked into a hotel in Harrogate using the name of the girl her husband was having an affair with -- is cleared up thus: "Agatha was in a fragile state, her mother having recently died and her husband being blatantly unfaithful. She wanted to frighten him into changing his behaviour." And in the "impeccably researched" Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett, the biographer dwells on the writer's contradictions: "On one hand, he financed the proto-Fascist British Brothers League which, in the paranoid years before the First World War, lobbied to keep German Jews out of the East End. Yet he also fought fiercely on behalf of George Edalji, a Parsee Indian living in Staffordshire..." And again: "'Becoming a spiritualist so soon after creating the quintessentially rational Sherlock Holmes: that is the central paradox of Arthur's life."

Not So Secret Agents

2007-09-21T11:28:00.000+05:30

"[T]he usually sedate, dignified, slow-moving world of books is in uproar, transfixed by one of the bitterest and most gripping feuds to have affected the literary world," says The Times' Stefanie Marsh breathlessly. It all started when Pat Kavanagh, venerable literary agent with Britain’s oldest literary agency, Peters Fraser & Dunlop -- who also happens to be Julian Barnes' wife -- resigned after negotiations for an attempted £4 million buy-out by the firm’s agents failed. Soon many othes followed suit, threatening the firm's future -- given that authors usually follow their agents. Moreover, with 's new managing director Caroline Michel's flair for PR, asks Ms Marsh in a rather unexpected segue, are "we on the brink of a literary future in which Tom Stoppard presents cookery programmes and Richard Harris appears in a new series of Rome, dressed for the part in a toga?"

Enter Roth

2007-09-20T07:58:00.000+05:30

Expect reams of newsprint to be devoted to Philip Roth and his new Exit Ghost very soon. These will range from the devoted to the contemptuous (did someone say Kakutani?) to the what's-all-the-fuss-about-anyway? Here, for a start, is Adam Kirsch: "Even if the prose...is a little wan, and the observations of contemporary life a little cranky (Mr. Roth has discovered the cell phone, and he is not pleased), this ruthless honesty makes it a vital book, and a worthy conclusion to the Zuckerman series."

Barnard Bar None

2007-09-20T07:54:00.000+05:30

Zora Neale Hurston. Jhumpa Lahiri. Anna Quindlen. Edwidge Danticat. Erica Jong.Tama Janowitz. They've all studied at Barnard. How does the college turn young women into accomplished writers?

Great Scott

2007-09-18T16:56:00.000+05:30

"A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me. Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip."

- The Guardian reproduces an interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald that originally appeared in the New York Post of 25 September 1936.

Amis Admonished

2007-09-18T16:52:00.000+05:30

"...if there's one thing worse than a rushed and superficial novel responding to 9/11, it's an over-ponderous polemic by a verbose novelist." Alex Stein tears into Martin Amis, dwelling on the issue of style versus substance.

Novelatory

2007-09-18T07:10:00.000+05:30

"What contemporary readers don't seem to like are short stories that don't connect to each other. Why?" asks Julian Gough, worrying about the future form of the novel.

A Joke About A Joke

2007-09-16T09:32:00.000+05:30

"They're books about stories, books about books and writing, especially something like The Well of Lost Plots, which is all about the writing process. In some ways, they're a feedback loop on themselves. I make a joke about something and then make a joke about the joke."

- Jasper Fforde on his novels