Topicfire Book News

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change

2013-05-22T22:16:11+00:00

On a damp, chill, blustery August afternoon in Whitby a few years ago I overheard a disgruntled holidaymaker declaiming – to his family, to anyone who would listen, to the wind – that ‘global warming is a load of codswallop.’ One of his children, a boy of around ten, was...

Rosemary Hill: ‘Black Eyes and Lemonade’

2013-05-22T22:16:10+00:00

Pooja Bhatia: What Happened to Haiti

2013-05-22T22:16:09+00:00

In January 2010, Jonathan Katz was working in Haiti for the Associated Press, the only American news organisation with a permanent bureau there. Other foreign journalists lived there, and a few more flew in for elections and catastrophes, but for the most part Haiti coverage had become a casualty of...

Mike Jay: Memorylessness

2013-05-22T22:16:08+00:00

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach...

John Lanchester: Google Glass

2013-05-22T22:16:06+00:00

Emily Witt: Claire Messud’s Spinster

2013-05-22T22:16:05+00:00

The narrator of The Woman Upstairs is Nora Eldridge, and from the start she describes herself as something of a non-entity. ‘I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blonde nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain.’ She’s 42 and ‘neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call...

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray

2013-05-22T22:16:03+00:00

The Great Gatsby meets Baz Luhrmann

2013-05-22T17:23:59+00:00

This might be the best attempt yet to film Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Which is not to say this is a good filmWriting about Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby in relation to F Scott Fitzgerald's prose, is like trying to describe a gorilla playing with a Fabergé egg. There it is, this great hairy,...

Scars

2013-05-22T03:00:45+00:00

by Pramiti Sapru Scars; they seem so beautiful at times. I’ve got many, deep and shallow. They aren’t self-inflicted, well consciously they aren’t. They cover my arms, my legs, even my fingers are painted with them. To others it might seem like a cry for help or a careless attitude...

Which five authors are in running for the 2013 Nobel prize?

2013-05-21T08:18:25+00:00

A tweet from the Swedish Academy has unleashed a flood of speculation about the five writers they are considering - could it be Don Delillo's year, or perhaps it's Murakami's turnThere's been a flurry of gossip over the Nobel prize for literature, thanks to GalleyCat and the Literary Saloon, who...

Blog changes

2013-05-20T12:47:09+00:00

As you noticed, the blog changed its visual. Suphi did a great job, but there are probably a lot of things that we missed. So please list your comments/suggestions/etc. below Love Paulo

Notes on PEN's annotated first edition auction

2013-05-20T12:22:04+00:00

This week's sale of acclaimed first editions signed by their authors, which I've helped organise, invites a few questions – which I've set out to answer hereMy bookselling colleagues wonder if I have gone walkabout, my business colleague Peter Grogan shrugs his shoulders, my bank manager phones solicitously. How am...

George Orwell's critique of internet English

2013-05-20T11:18:46+00:00

The concerns of Orwells's 1946 essay remain notably relevant to the changes in written language wrought by the digital ageSome while ago, with reference to Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English language", I addressed the language of the internet, an issue that stubbornly refuses to go away. Perhaps now,...

Poem of the week: Sonnet 30 by Robert Sidney

2013-05-20T10:18:02+00:00

A lover's lament to personified 'Absence', the melancholy here is contained by a remarkably elegant rhetorical techniqueThis week's poem comes from a collection of sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and epigrams by the newly-rediscovered Elizabethan poet, Robert Sidney. It's untitled, but numbered "Sonnet 30", and begins, aptly for a re-emergent poet,...

Our magic moment

2013-05-20T03:16:33+00:00

Every day, God gives us the sun – and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived the moment, that it doesn’t exist – that today is the same as yesterday and...

Having fun today

2013-05-19T23:30:57+00:00

Sylvia Day Whets Our Appetite for "Entwined with You"--and More Crossfire

2013-05-18T23:25:00+00:00

After naming Sylvia Day’s Bared to You a 2012 Best Book of the Year in Romance and devouring Reflected in You, we've been anxiously awaiting the release of the third book in Day's scorching Crossfire series, Entwined with You. To whet our appetites and make waiting for the book's arrival...

Reader reviews roundup

2013-05-17T17:29:44+00:00

Concrete fiction from Stephen Marche and a Martian adventure with Ken Kalfus are among this week's books under reviewThis week's reviews included a new discovery for me. He is Stephen Marche, whose Love and the Mess We're In is intriguingly reviewed by Robert Nathan. He opens:Love and the Mess We're...

How do you write about life when it's lived on computers?

2013-05-17T11:20:11+00:00

Fiction writers face a challenge in depicting the ubiquitous 21st-century experience of virtual existenceWe live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we represent this on the page? In his 2004 novel Eastern Standard Tribe, science fiction author Cory Doctorow explored...

Is this the end of fiction's genre wars?

2013-05-17T08:17:23+00:00

Has the question of genre in fiction become 'a flimsy irrelevence' or will the mores of the book trade maintain the distinctions?This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says "let...

By the river Piedra I sat down and wept

2013-05-17T00:18:07+00:00

One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is...

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading today?

2013-05-16T18:26:59+00:00

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewingOne conversation in last week's thread was particularly pleasing to the books team: it was about the relative merits of Mohammed Hanif's The Case of Exploding Mangoes (which was longlisted for the Guardian...

Bestselling writers know that image counts

2013-05-16T17:16:32+00:00

Robert Langdon, Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander – you can picture them instantly. Visually memorable characters are making a welcome comeback to crime and thriller novelsThe Harris Tweed jacket of Dan�Brown's protagonist Robert Langdon has understandably been mentioned in most reviews of Inferno, with critics noting how often Brown refers to...

When horror stopped being supernatural

2013-05-16T11:19:33+00:00

How afraid should we be for scary reading now that fiction's monsters are being reinvented as worldly threats?It's a cliché to say that Author W does for Subject X what Author Y did for Subject Z. But it was one I found unavoidable when I turned the final page of...

BWB Remembers The Books Of Our Childhood (2 of 3)

2013-05-15T22:44:26+00:00

Children’s Book Week continues, and here’s part 2 of our the books we remember loving in our own younger years. What were yours? Let us know in the comments.direct lender payday loans � (image courtesy of Goodreads) Nuttybub & Nittersing by May Gibbs, published in 1923. I loved reading and being read to....