Blue Murder at the Pink Parrot by Ruth Ramsden
14 Aug 2012 23:47:57
Between the South Downs and the seafront, England's southeast has spawned some sterling alternative crime fiction of late, via imprints like Eastbourne's Soul Bay and Brighton's Pulp Press. Now add to that Ruth Ramsden, whose debut encapsulates the full gamut of Sussex weirdness, invoking the Hammer legend Charles Gray in the opening paragraph and finishing with the sort of Fifth of November night that opponents of the region's Bonfire Societies warn you about. Inadvertent private eye JJ is an a... Read Full Story
Ian Buruma A Japanese Mirror
14 Aug 2012 23:44:54
Sex is not sinful in Japanese culture, Buruma writes, but female desire is perceived as a destructive force. Japan's relentlessly sexist culture is epitomised by the artificial beauty of the doll-woman, the geisha. However, Buruma also discovers an intense mother love among Japanese men, who visit rukojos in red-light districts to be babied. And oddly for such a patriarchal society, the father is popularly mocked as dame oyaji (stupid dad) – the ideal father, it seems, is dead. First published i... Read Full Story
Sarah Jackson became the wiiner of Guardian awards
14 Aug 2012 00:48:45
A passionate reader response to Sarah Jackson's "powerful and violent" debut poetry collection Pelt has helped to bag the title the 10th place on the Guardian first book award longlist.
This is the second year the Guardian has opened the final slot on the longlist up to public nominations; last year, reader praise led to the discovery of Juan Pablo Villalobos's novel Down the Rabbit Hole, which went on to make the shortlist. This year, 11 titles including Eowyn Ivey's Russian fairy tale-inspire... Read Full Story
What will be in Norman Ollestad novel
14 Aug 2012 00:36:38
Sean Penn is in talks to direct an adaptation of the survival memoir Crazy for the Storm, according to the Hollywood Reporter. It's familiar territory for the actor and film-maker, whose last stint behind the cameras was the well-received Into the Wild, the story of a young man who isolates himself in the Alaskan wilderness.
Crazy for the Storm will be based on the book by Norman Ollestad, who in 1979 was the only survivor of a plane crash that claimed the life of his father, the pilot and his ... Read Full Story
The World's Two Smallest Humans by Julia Copus
14 Aug 2012 00:32:33
Reading Julia Copus's remarkable collection – her third – makes one think about the risks involved in writing personal poetry. "Write about what you know" is not fail-safe advice because intimate poetry, unless of the highest quality, often comes across as paradoxically anonymous. Or worse, as many of the collections that come my way reveal, it can be as unsavoury and depressing as rummaging through dresses in a secondhand clothes shop. The wonder of Copus's poems is that although they could har... Read Full Story
Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
12 Aug 2012 02:54:14
I began this book reluctantly – I was deep into Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, which is pretty much the exact opposite – but by the end I wanted to hand out copies to all those poor folks I see squirming their way through the squalid prose-dungeons of Fifty Shades. I wanted to launch a new British magazine especially for long-form journalism. I wanted to go out and round up a good few of the nation's so-called columnists and shame them into admitting that the weekly crap-farragoes that the... Read Full Story
Agatha Christie - the best detective writer!
12 Aug 2012 02:52:48
Westminster council this week granted planning permission for a statue, designed by sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies, to be erected. It will be placed in the heart of Covent Garden, between Great Newport Street and Cranbourn Street. The location, in the middle of London's theatreland, was chosen to represent Christie's contribution to the stage: the novelist was the first female playwright to have three plays performing in the West End simultaneously, and her murder-mystery The Mousetrap is the world... Read Full Story
est seller book - be the millionaire!
12 Aug 2012 02:51:36
Forbes, which calculates its annual compilation by using official figures and talking to book industry experts, found that Patterson earned $94m last year – a period which saw him publish 14 new titles and make more than double the amount of the second-placed King. Nine of the top 15 slots on the list were taken by male authors, including King (who earned $39m thanks to the release of his doorstopper novel about the assassination of JFK, 11/22/63), legal thriller writer John Grisham ($26m), Wimp... Read Full Story
The Everyday Dancer by Deborah Bull
09 Aug 2012 08:41:34
If dance is a language, then the life of a dancer can seem like a mysterious code. A round of rituals big and small – class, rehearsals, the compulsive checking of noticeboards and schedules – it's also underpinned by physical and emotional intensities that outsiders can struggle to understand. With this elegant book, Deborah Bull offers a guide to the dancer's life, drawing on her career at the Royal Ballet to create an hour-by-hour timetable of costume fittings and calls, even answering the et... Read Full Story
News about Kindle ebook
09 Aug 2012 08:40:02
Amazon.co.uk has said that sales of its Kindle ebooks are now outstripping its sales of printed books.
Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said t... Read Full Story
Stefan Zweig's memorial will be in London in english version
09 Aug 2012 08:38:17
Despite numbering fans from England manager Roy Hodgson to the celebrated authors William Boyd and Antony Beevor, the application to commemorate Stefan Zweig with a blue plaque on the London house in which he lived for five years has been rejected by English Heritage.
Zweig, an Austrian Jew who committed suicide in Brazil 1942, has undergone a resurgence of interest recently, with publisher Pushkin Press revealing that his sales more than doubled in June after Hodgson admitted to being a fan. H... Read Full Story
Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh
07 Aug 2012 01:24:18
Raja Shehadeh is an angry man. He is angry about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the illegal settlements that dot his beloved Palestinian landscape and the roads that divide the people of this territory. And he is angry about the failure of Israel's allies and donors to prevent the discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs that he encounters in his life as an activist and a lawyer.Shehadeh is also a contemplative man, a walker who meditates, tends his garden and writes about... Read Full Story
