Joanna Briscoe: How my novel was brought to life

Monday, 2 June 2008

Imagine a world in which your thoughts can be read. And misread. And made prettier, darker or more unsavoury. This alarming place is inhabited by strangers loudly broadcasting desires and fears and neurotic little complexes you once believed were yours alone – life material transformed into fiction during innumerable hours of solitary labour in a landslide of a study, but somehow still privately imagined until now. There's a Tannoy on the side of your head and it's booming out your fantasies. That's what it feels like watching one's novel being turned into a film.

Book extract: The First Verse, By Barry McCrea

Sunday, 1 June 2008

We turned left on to South Anne Street and into Kehoe's, a dark, old-fashioned pub with wood and cream furnishings. John pushed his way confidently through the crowd, and I squeezed after him. Immaculate Conception Christmas shoppers having their après-ski, as well as the usual Friday night groups of pinters already half geared up for the Christmas binge. We caught an enclosed snug just as it was being vacated, and John claimed it by throwing his coat across on to the bench.

Behold, a happy poet

Friday, 30 May 2008

"Sometimes", said the poet Sheena Pugh in a poem which was, for a while, plastered all over the London Underground, "things don't go, after all,/ from bad to worse." Sometimes, she adds, "green thrives", "crops don't fail", "a man aims high" and "all goes well". And sometimes, she didn't add, a poet can be happy. Yes, even a poet who has won the hearts and, more rarely, the wallets of hundreds of thousands of readers around the world for poems that chronicle, with heart-stopping honesty and the kind of clear-eyed precision that can have you blushing with recognition, the infinite varieties of human loneliness and misery.

Katy Guest: A Week in Books

Friday, 30 May 2008

As May ticks over into June, three things are predictable in the literary calendar. There will be apocalyptic downpours at the Hay Festival. Someone will say that the Orange Prize isn't fair on men. Then someone will say no, it probably isn't, but never mind, because it encourages people to read.

Book of a Lifetime: Selected Stories, by Robert Walser

Friday, 30 May 2008

"We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much." These lines, at the end of the single-page story "A Little Walk" (in which it appears, at first sight, that nothing happens) epitomise the work of the Swiss novelist Robert Walser. Having voluntarily entered a lunatic asylum in the late 1920s, he wrote nothing more for the last 20-odd years of his life. When asked by a friend if he was working on anything in the asylum, he famously replied: "I am not here to write, but to be mad." It is a stunning, and tragic, claim.

Cover Stories: green anniversary; reading maps; Spanish quartet; Mullin's diaries

Friday, 30 May 2008

In 1988, the height of Yuppie consumerism, the idea of a publishing house devoted to environmental issues was whacky indeed. Now, as Earthscan "part of the DNA of intelligent environmentalism" according to Professor Bill Adams of Cambridge celebrates its 20th anniversary, the company seems almost mainstream, its agenda totally in accord with political, business and personal agendas. Bloomsbury was happy to publish the latest opus from Al Gore, but it was Earthscan that released his first environmental outing, Earth in the Balance, Earthscan that published Jonathon Porritt's Capitalism: As If the World Matters and Chris Goodall's How to Live a Low-Carbon Life. Publishing chief execs may worry about swapping the Jag for a Lexus and turning down the thermostat, but Earthscan has always practised what it preached. And with 900 titles in the backlist, the company remains the ultimate green resource and continues to set the agenda. Happy birthday.

Mills & Boon - a literary love affair

Thursday, 29 May 2008

When Arrows from the Dark rolled hot off the press in 1909, a publishing phenomenon was born. Sophie Cole's novel marked the birth of Mills & Boon, and started a tradition that has seen the publishing house become a byword for mass-market romantic fiction. Now a collection of books and their evocative cover art has been brought together for the Mills & Boon Centenary Exhibition.

If I could bring an author back to life...

Thursday, 29 May 2008

The Big Question: What's behind the rise in literary festivals, and what's their purpose?

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

James Frey's happy ending

Monday, 26 May 2008

Should James Frey, the American writer who was first endorsed and then publicly disowned by Oprah Winfrey for faking his bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, turn his topsy-turvy life story into a Hollywood film, its latest chapter would be the heart-warming, if deeply ironic, happy ending.