What a lot of new books there are about the queen. I count 24 biographies, photograph collections and retrospectives all produced to mark the Diamond Jubilee. There is only so much to say about Her Majesty before writers begin to repeat each other. Either that or a biographer is left to record the inane and
Much ado about Jonathan Franzen’s appearance at the Hay Festival in Cartegna, where he sounded-off against eBooks, technology and corporate capitalism. The Guardian reports that Franzen said: ‘Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time
I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman
A cold wind is blowing from the Middle East. It may have been caused by the re-emergence of Gaddafi loyalists in Libya, or the continued bloodshed in Syria, or the Rushdie mania at the Jaipur Literary Festival. But whatever the source, many Westerners are having second thoughts about the Arab Spring, and their scepticism is
It is Holocaust Memorial Day. Fictionalising the Holocaust has become something of a fashion in recent years — The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes in the orginal French) to name but three. The first two have been adapted for film, the third has not. Its author, Jonathan Littell, has refused
Last November, Rajni George reported on how Indian authors were becoming increasingly commercialised. Literary festivals, book signings, TV appearances and society parties — these are the staples of writers at the heart of India’s publishing boom. Rajni worried that writers might be exploited or distracted in their glamorous new surroundings. Popular British writers have travelled
It’s Burns Night. A literary blog has to mark the occasion. There was no consoling scotch to hand, so here’s Robert Burns’ ‘Address to a Haggis’ with a translation below for the uninitiated. A good evening to all, especially if you can’t stand Burns’s doggerel. Fair is your honest happy face Great chieftain of the pudding race Above
Here is Costa Award winner Andrew Miller discussing his victory and talking about his book, Pure.
Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons. But Belton
… Pure, by Andrew Miller. Miller’s novel was not even longlisted by the Booker Prize panel, so perhaps this is another example of the Costas righting literary wrongs: a tradition for which it is growing famous. Miller saw off tough competition from the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and from Matthew Hollis’s atypical and brilliant
Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor’s honour at St. Stephen’s Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate
It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt
Salman Rushdie has withdrawn from the Jaipur Literary Festival. His statement makes for sobering reading. Will this ever end? For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such
Earlier this week, Steven McGregor wrote a touching memorial to Gilbert Adair, the late novelist and critic. Adair self-deprecatingly described himself as ‘one of the great unread writers’, but two of his books were made into films. He adapted The Holy Innocents with the director Bernado Bertolucci; the ensuing film was called The Dreamers, and
Publishers’ eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come
Did you survive without Wikipedia yesterday? English Wikipedia, and perhaps as many as 7,000 other websites, was blacked out for 24 hours in protest at the passage of two internet piracy bills through the US Congress. Simple souls merely dusted off their battered encyclopaedia, but the technically astute lifted the blackout with a host of
The Guardian reports on a fascinating story from across the Atlantic, where an imprint of Penguin USA has reprinted Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. The book is a based on a copy of the Gospels kept by the third President of the United States between 1803 and 1820, from which he expunged those passages which he could
John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone has won this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, the most controversial in years. Nominees Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew from the prize on discovering that it was to be sponsored by a hedge fund, Aurum. Oswald’s objection was that “poetry should be challenging such institutions”, although she appeared to make
A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining. On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom
Sir Salman Rushdie has been in the news this week, after his proposed appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival elicited criticism from what the Guardian described as an ‘influential conservative Indian Muslim cleric’, called Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani. A little over a year ago, Rushdie appeared on American TV (above) and said that the world