Fiction
Eastern promises – the rediscovery of Stefan Heym
A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party;… Continue reading
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Write a novel in a month
Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel… Continue reading
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Philip Roth retires
Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he… Continue reading
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Poppy appeal
As Remembrance Sunday draws closer and we pin poppies to our coats, we can also see them adorning the jackets of books. This powerful symbol of remembrance features on the… Continue reading
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Puffing Pamela: Book hype, 18th-century style
There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or… Continue reading
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Writing the Tory Wars
On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write… Continue reading
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Review: The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach
During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be… Continue reading
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Review – Hawthorn and Child, by Keith Ridgeway
‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken… Continue reading
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Cult status: an interview with Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a… Continue reading
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Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors
Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only… Continue reading
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Jobs for the girls
Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO… Continue reading
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Back to the start – Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson
Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one… Continue reading
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To take or not to take a pseudonym
Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in… Continue reading
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Your guide to the Booker Prize
Assorted literary grandees will squeeze into their tuxes this evening to compete for the Booker Prize. Of the debut novelists, one previous winner and a brace of old-timers, who stands the… Continue reading
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Ian McEwan’s novel questions
Brevity does not imply levity. That, at least, is the view of Ian McEwan. The national treasure was speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival over the weekend when he crowned… Continue reading
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The great shroud of the sea rolled on – reading Moby-Dick
mobydickbigread.com is a website. It adapts Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick into an online audiobook. The content is rich: what tech executives might call “trendily interactive”, in that there are Facebook… Continue reading
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Should literature be political?
‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for… Continue reading
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China bans Haruki Murakami’s ’1Q84′: George Orwell would have seen the irony
Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese… Continue reading
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Review – John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk
Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or… Continue reading
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Of snobs, nobs and plebs
The muggles of Tutshill, Gloucestershire, have a bone to pick with J.K. Rowling. Tutshill is where Rowling spent her unhappy teens and apparently it is the model for Pagford, the… Continue reading
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