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ReadySteadyBlog
One of the Guardian Unlimited Books' top 10 literary blogs: "A home-grown treasure ... smart, serious analysis"
Blog entries for 'February 2009'
Friday 27 February 2009
Tonkin on IFFP09
Boyd Tonkin on this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize:
What advice would a seasoned observer of the British book market give to a publisher who, like some demented literary version of Mel Brooks in The Producers, wanted to release a novel that stood absolutely no chance of reaching the bestseller lists? Not a book with some faint glimmer of hope, mind you – but one doomed to hobble in among the stragglers? First, make sure that it's very long, complicated, sometimes eccentric and driven by a quixotic idealism. Second, guarantee that the author – little-known on these shores in any case – is safely dead. And last, make this cast-iron catastrophe a translation. Then retire to a bar and toast your fail-safe flop (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Thursday 26 February 2009
Oldest English words identified
The BBC tells me that "some of the oldest words in the English and other Indo-European languages have been identified":
Reading University researchers say "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the oldest in use and could date back thousands of years.
Using a computer model, the team analysed the rate of change of words and say they can predict which are likely to become extinct.
They believe "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" could become obsolete first (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: language
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Thursday 26 February 2009
Orwell Prize for political blogs
The longlist for the Orwell Prize for political blogs has been announced. The best political blog out there, Lenin's Tomb (whose latest post is a review of Badiou's The Meaning of Sarkozy) is not longlisted.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, politics
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Wednesday 25 February 2009
2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist
Last Monday, Linda Grant, Kate Griffin, Fiona Sampson, Boyd Tonkin and I chose the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist. After hours of discussion, we came down to a list of sixteen:
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Wednesday 25 February 2009
Naomi Klein wins Warwick Prize
Steve (who has just posted an excellent little piece on Littell's The Kindly Ones) and the other judges have finally chosen: Naomi Klein has won the Warwick Prize for The Shock Doctrine.
From the press release:
Naomi Klein was announced last night as the winner of the first £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing.
The unique new prize, run and self-funded by the University of Warwick, stands out as an international cross-disciplinary biennial award open to any genre or form of writing.
Canadian journalist Klein's winning book, The Shock Doctrine, was chosen from a diverse shortlist of six international titles. This year's prize theme of Complexity was interpreted differently by each writer, all experts in their genres, and ranged from music criticism and scientific theory to Spanish fiction.
Naomi Klein said "At a time when the news out of the publishing industry is usually so bleak it's thrilling to be part of a bold new prize supporting writing, especially alongside such an exciting array of other books."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards
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Tuesday 24 February 2009
Bartleby the bag
Yesterday, out drinking booze at Manchester's Cornerhouse, a young woman walked passed me with a Bartleby shoulder bag. OMG! How jealous am I? I want a Bartleby shoulder bag! Where on earth did she get it!?
The bag simply said, as you'd expect, in pretty large font, "I would prefer not to" and, beneath the quote, had the word Bartleby. Very simple. Very cool.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal
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Tuesday 24 February 2009
César Aira's Ghosts
I read César Aira's An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter a couple of years back now, I think, and remember it very warmly. I need to re-read it, for sure, and I'm spurred to do so as orbis quintus reminds me that a new Aira translation is just about to hit the streets:
Ghosts, the just-released-in-translation novel by César Aira, is (like his earlier books How I Became a Nun and An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter) one of the most uniquely, genuinely odd books you’re likely to stumble across. No one (to my knowledge) is doing anything quite like what Aira does in his fiction. Short books that nevertheless derail themselves, meander, drift, and stretch out while all the while remaining fascinating.
Attempting to summarize Ghosts is futile. It is set in an unfinished luxury apartment building. There are digressions on the symbolism of human self-organization, on hairstyles in Latin America, on class divisions. There are fireworks and curious children. There are ghosts. (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news
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Tuesday 24 February 2009
The Letters of Samuel Beckett
Mr Mitchelmore tell us that:
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940 are exceeding even my high expectations. Above all the gift these letters offer is the chance to follow a young writer as he seeks a way forward, finding glimpses of a path in both writing, music and painting. In July 1937, Beckett responded to Axel Kaun, who worked for Kafka's publisher Rowohlt Verlag and had suggested that he translate a German poet. Beckett declines but doesn't stop there. He complains of finding writing in formal English "more and more difficult, even pointless" (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, samuel beckett
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Wednesday 18 February 2009
IFFP09 longlist -- coming soon
FYI: the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist (of sixteen titles) will be announced next Wednesday! (Following this, the shortlist of six titles will be announced at the end of March, and the winner will be announced mid-April.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: IFFP09
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Wednesday 18 February 2009
Altermodern
The Nicolas Bourriaud curated Tate Triennial, Altermodern, has been generating plenty of discussion – much of it negative. I’m the first to get grumpy with contemporary art, but to my surprise I enjoyed a lot of the Tate’s exhibition. Much of the criticism, such as Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times, Jackie Wullschager in the FT and Waldemar Janusczek in the Sunday Times, has been pitched very much against the artists’ and Bourriaud’s use of theory. In one sense one should be used to this with the mainstream press – they’ve always been scared of intellectuals that go beyond the merely middlebrow. But surely their art critics should be obliged to be at least a little up-to-date with the cutting edge in contemporary thought? Doesn’t that kind of come with the job description?
In this context, the latest issue of Art Monthly (February 09; nothing available to read online, I’m afraid) is to be recommended, with no less than three excellent pieces that amount to a critical engagement with the issues surrounding the Tate’s Altermodern. There’s a wonderful interview with radical artist Francis Alys (not at the Tate, but one who could be indicated as an exemplary practitioner of Bourriaud’s earlier headline concept, Relational Aesthetics); a great piece by Dave Beech on the possibilities for critical art after Postmodernism, where he tackles Bourriaud’s concept of the Altermodern within a historical and theoretical context; and finally Maya and Reuben Fowkes on the relationship between art and theory, where they explore a curator’s relationship to art theory and how it can be used and abused.
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, philosophy
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Wednesday 18 February 2009
Jonathan Littell on Blanchot
Jonathan Littell has written a commentary on a Maurice Blanchot piece that was itself first published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1958 (and later incorporated into L'espace littéraire). Littell's piece was written for the 100th anniversary issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française, published in February 2009. It was translated by Charlotte Mandell and, wonderfully, appears on This Space:
So what is this reading that Maurice Blanchot invites us to enact here, at once light and serious, a "joyful, wild dance," fundamental (founding the work) in its very insouciance? The first thing one could say about it is that it seems to us inseparable from his conception of writing as experience. "The story [le récit] is not the relation of the event, but that event itself," he wrote around the same time (in The Song of the Sirens, reprinted in The Book to Come). Writing does not describe, does not relate, does not signify, it does not represent a thing, existing in the world of men or even only in the world of the imagination; it is neither more nor less than "the test of its own experience" (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: maurice blanchot
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Friday 13 February 2009
Gramsci and The Lord of the Rings
Next Thursday, 19th February, 7.00-8.30pm, at the Institut Français, 17 Queensberry Place, South Kensington, SW7, London, Rupert Read of the University of East Anglia is giving a talk winningly entitled: Gramsci and ‘The Lord of the Rings’: Optimism and Pessimism at a Time of Crisis. The event, organised by the Forum For European Philosophy, is free and open to all without registration.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, philosophy
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Friday 13 February 2009
New look for The Book Depository
The Book Depository website has a a lovely new look and feel: go see...
Lots of new features -- like pre-release orders, excellent advanced and deep search, browse category landing pages, carousels, tabs etc. -- so, hopefully, you'll like it!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: the book depository
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Wednesday 11 February 2009
Mitchelmore on Thomas Bernhard
Stephen Mitchelmore on Thomas Bernhard -- my then completely empty house:
Today, the 11th day of this dark month, marks twenty years since the death of Thomas Bernhard. As I wrote in an essay to mark the tenth anniversary, the promise of an early demise from TB was necessary to his work. "Death is close to me now and so is winter" he wrote in his twenties. February is also his birth month.
What remains to be said about Thomas Bernhard? Sometimes, in the ten years since that indulgent essay meant to promote a writer who then demanded promotion, I have sensed a damaging influence; not only in the seductive, liberating style but also in the excess, the exaggeration of which he was so exaggeratedly proud. Yet then I read his story In Rome (translated Kenneth J. Northcott), in which Bernhard remembers Ingeborg Bachmann, and these regrets fall away, replaced by gratitude. (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: thomas bernhard
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Wednesday 11 February 2009
Planet Cioran
I've been thinking about "French philosopher and mystic E. M. Cioran" (French?!) -- the website Planet Cioran is pretty useful:
Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937). (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors
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Wednesday 11 February 2009
People of the Screen
A better-than-it-might-be piece by Christine Rosen on the death of the book (again!) and the rise of “digital literacy” (via a tweet from Harvard_Press):
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology? (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news
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Tuesday 10 February 2009
Verhaeghen at JBW2009
As part of Jewish Book week, on Sunday March 1st at 2pm "Paul Verhaeghen and Boyd Tonkin discuss moral choices, writing history and translating one's own work into English." Verhaeghen, as you'll recall, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize last year with "his extraordinary novel Omega Minor, an exploration of the world of Nazis and Neo-Nazis alike, the destructive logics of The Holocaust and the Bomb, truths that kill and lies that keep alive, passionate love and devouring lust. "
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, events, IFFP09
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Tuesday 10 February 2009
TRE Prime
Dan Green's The Reading Experience blog has "just recently passed its fifth anniversary, and to mark this occurence [Dan has] created a new site, called TRE Prime":
TRE Prime... features past posts from The Reading Experience, selected and arranged in order from the earliest posts I'd like to highlight to the most recent. If you access the site, you will find that these posts appear both unsorted on the main page and arranged into categories (links provided on the right), each containing a thread of posts related to that subject.
This site might be called a "best of" blog, although I really see it as an opportunity to identify the main subjects and concerns The Reading Experience has explored and to show how these concerns have been developed, restated, and modified over the course of the blog's existence. Each of the categories could to some extent be taken as separate chapters in a larger cybertext that isThe Reading Experience, at least in this circumscribed and idealized form.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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Monday 09 February 2009
Culture and its study: Zero Books
A friend of mine argues that the collapse of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline in the UK was because of its own omnipresence. It seems that every broadsheet supplement you pick up now has an article speculating on fandom, consumption, people at play, etc... But, sadly, they’re not written by anyone of the calibre of Raymond Williams.
Mind body spirit publisher O books have a courageous new imprint Zero Books. Novelist Tariq Goddard (author of Homage to a Firing Squad, Dynamo and The Morning Rides Behind Us) has been busy commissioning some excellent, unsung authors to write short books on contemporary culture: educated, informed by – but not in awe of – theory, and genuinely provocative. The first is Wire writer David Stubbs on Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen which I’ll be fascinated to read as I’m sceptical of the middle classes newfound love of contemporary art (my own tastes tend to be the reverse: hate Rothko, love Aufgehoben) and suspect it has more to do with a pleasant afternoon in a white space. Elitist, moi? I digress...
The second is by Owen Hatherley, whose blog sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy is approaching legendary status. Simon Reynolds says the following about his Militant Modernism:
With svelte prose, agile wit, and alarming erudition, Owen Hatherley pries open the prematurely closed case of early 20th Century modernism. This slim and shapely, ideas-packed and intensely-felt book is neither a misty-eyed memorial nor a dour inquest, but a verging-on-erotic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rediscovering the enchantment of demystification and the sexiness of severity, Hatherley harks forward to modernism's utopian spirit: critical, radically democratic, dedicated to the conscious transformation of everyday life, determined to build a better world.
They’re both out on the 24th April.
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: music, philosophy
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Monday 09 February 2009
Marcel Aymé
Via the increasingly useful Alma Books Bloggerel:
Marcel Aymé, virtually unknown in the English-speaking world these days, is also to some extent not appreciated at his just value in France, where – although some of his short stories and children’s writing are considered undisputed classics – the rest of his considerable body of fiction and drama is now essentially ignored. He was born in rural Burgundy in 1902, spending his childhood there before moving to Paris to become a journalist. His first novel Brûlebois was published in 1927 to critical acclaim, and his follow-up, La Table aux crevés, won the prestigious Prix Renaudot two years later, but it was with 1933’s La Jument verte that his fame became widespread...
Aymé’s 1941 novel La Belle Image (which has recently been published for the first time in English, as Beautiful Image, by Pushkin Press [beautifully translated by our good friend Sophie Lewis]) uses a similar technique: its protagonist, a successful married businessman, suddenly finds out that his appearance has been transformed into that of darkly handsome stranger. This leads him to observe his friends and family as an outsider and, among other things, to seduce his own wife – revelatory experiences which lead him to question his former life of comfort and elevated social standing (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere
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Friday 06 February 2009
Beckett book news
It’s Becketting down with books! As you’ll know The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Volume 1, 1929–1940) have just landed, and now we have more exciting news...
As you may remember Faber acquired the Calder’s Samuel Beckett backlist when John Calder sold up and this May Faber begins publishing a whole heap of new editions – eighteen at the last count.
Each book (it says here) comes with a new introduction by an acclaimed Beckett scholar and the text has been thoroughly revised and edited. The publication will be accompanied by celebrations of Beckett’s work and no doubt a massive media onslaught. The list and schedule (which I suspect might change) so far is:
21st May 2009
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Watt
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Endgame
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Happy Days
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Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays
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Malone Dies
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Murphy
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All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen
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Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/ Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still
August 2009
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Molloy
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More Pricks Than Kicks
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The Unnameable
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How It Is
January 2010
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Waiting for Godot
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First Love/The Expelled/The Calmative/The End
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Mercier and Camier
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Selected Poems, 1929-1989
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Texts for Nothing/Fizzles
April 2010
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: samuel beckett
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Thursday 05 February 2009
Derek Attridge on the literary critic's task
Via Continental Philosophy, a provocative article from World Picture Journal by Derek Attridge and Henry Staten: Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation:
As you know, I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task which rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading. That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today, including techniques of formal analysis, ideology critique, allusion hunting, genetic tracing, historical contextualization, and biographical research. The result of this rich set of critical resources is that any literary work, whether or not it is a significant achievement in the history of literature, and whether or not it evokes a strong response in the critic, can be accorded a lengthy commentary claiming importance for it. What is worse, the most basic norms of careful reading are sometimes ignored in the rush to say what is ingenious or different (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: literary criticism
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Wednesday 04 February 2009
Shakespeare’s First Folio Recovered
As reported in the Guardian (via The Book Trib):
... a 51-year-old man has been arrested in England for stealing a rare first folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, printed in 1623. The “priceless” book (only 200-300 survive) disappeared from Durham University over a decade ago in December 1998. It resurfaced when the suspect, “claiming to be an international businessman who had acquired the volume in Cuba... showed the folio to staff at a library in Washington, DC and asked them to verify it was genuine.”
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news
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Tuesday 03 February 2009
Roubaud, del Paso, Céline
Dates for your diary: coming in April, from the matchless Dalkey Archive Press, The Loop by Jacques Roubaud ("seventeen years after the publication of the first volume of Jacques Roubaud's epic and moving The Great Fire of London"); also, Fernando del Paso's News from the Empire ("one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Mexican literature"); and coming in May, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Normance ("the last of Céline's novels to be translated into English.")
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news
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Monday 02 February 2009
Spurious on Bolaño's 2666
Spurious writes about thinking about writing about Bolaño's 2666:
I look at my notes, wondering what I was thinking. Slog, says one. Wonders on every page, says another. Whimsically mad, says another. Keeping the wheels turning. Logorrhea - no doubt spelt wrong, and didn't I mean graphomania? But who knows what I meant. And then, literary splendour, with a dash to V. What could V mean? Ah yes, the fifth part of the book. And literary splendour, which must have been double edged. Splendour, to be sure, incidents and panoramas, wonders and splendours, all that: but of a literary kind. It was all too terribly literary: was that what I meant?
But then I enjoyed V, part five, I have to admit that. Part IV, The Part About the Crimes, was terribly boring. It must explain the word slog, and perhaps the misspelt and misused logorrhea. Admit it, you liked part five. Another note: V madness of narrative. And another V: narrative rush, anxious - where's it going?, almost too fast, almost outracing the narration. And then, so much happens anything could happen (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere
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Monday 02 February 2009
Arzee the Dwarf
Chandrahas Choudhury, esteemed blogger at The Middle Stage, has just put up some excerpts from his novel Arzee the Dwarf on his site. Arzee comes out in India in May.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors
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Serendipoetry
Canticle
Sometimes when you walk down to the red gate
hearing the scrape-music of your shoes across gravel,
a yellow moon will lift over the hill;
you swing the gate shut and lean on the topmost bar
as if something has been accomplished in the world;
a night wind mistles through the poplar leaves
and all the noise of the universe stills
to an oboe hum, the given note of a perfect
music; there is a vast sky wholly dedicated
to the stars and you know, with certainty,
that all the dead are out, up there, in one
holiday flotilla, and that they celebrate
the fact of a red gate and a yellow moon
that tunes their instruments with you to the symphony.
-- John F. Deane
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