The Blog

Last year, my review of Charles Lambert‘s debut novel Little Monsters included a hypothetical conversation with the author over a plate of pasta. A few months later, we had exactly that. The conversation resulted in a lengthy and (I hope) very interesting interview, in which we discussed the strange political situation in Rome, and Lambert also went into great detail about his new novel, Any Human Face.

In a sense, then, I’ve scuppered myself, because it’s difficult for me to write a review that would be half as interesting as Lambert was that day. So if you’re interested in finding out more about the background to Any Human Face, I’d suggest that you start with the Charles Lambert interview. (more…)

Telegram, the literary fiction imprint from Middle-East non-fiction specialists Saqi books, is an imprint that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. Their list looks interesting, and their titles—All My Friends are Superheroes, Metropole, etc—seem to get quite a bit of attention.

I first heard of them last year on Twitter (where I am @thefictiondesk, and they are @Saqibooks), at a time when they were justifiably pleased with themselves for having won the 2009 Diversity in Literature Award, and by the beginning of 2010, I even managed to have one of their catalogues in hand—I got all the way to page 3 before finding something I wanted to read. (more…)

I’ve written about Bitter Lemon Press before, when I reviewed Saskia Noort’s Back to the Coast. They’re a solid niche press, publishing crime fiction, most of it translated, in paperback editions.

Involuntary Witness, which they’ve just republished with a new cover (see left) is the debut novel from one of their lead authors, the Italian one-time anti-mafia prosecutor Gianrico Carofiglio.

The protagonist, in this novel and its sequels, is Guido Guerrieri, a defence lawyer who lives and works in Bari, a coastal town in the Italian region of Puglia (the area usually referred to as “the heel of the boot”). At the beginning of the novel, we find Guido in a bad state: still reeling from the end of his marriage, which has left him unable to concentrate at work and suffering from claustrophobia. When you add the development of a flirtation between Guido and his upstairs neighbour Margherita; and his latest case, involving an African streetseller accused of child murder, you get a pretty good idea of the formula that Carofiglio is working with. (more…)

Here’s a question: What happens to eBook collections when the user dies? I’ve asked this a couple of times over on Twitter, but nobody seems to know.

Avid readers (or bibliophiles, or bibliomaniacs) can accumulate quite a collection of books over a lifetime. They’re sometimes dealt with separately in a will, sometimes fought over by descendants, and sometimes sold off as a job lot before the earth has settled on the grave. (more…)

I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to bother with doorstep novels, and when Roberto Bolaño’s much-lauded 2666 was published in English a year or so ago – all nine hundred pages of it – I decided that I didn’t have the time or the will to read it. Still, I was curious to see what kind of a writer lay behind the hype of 2666, and the recent UK publication of Nazi Literature in the Americas, one of Bolaño’s earlier, shorter works, has given me the chance. (more…)

The start of this year saw the publication of the UK edition of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas, and The Fiction Desk is giving away a free copy in a competition in this month’s email newsletter.

A (fictional) survey of right-wing authors of the last hundred years – and some time into the future – Nazi Literature in the Americas is an unusual and entertaining read from the author of the massively successful 2666. Picador have put together a lovely hardback edition for the UK publication (see left).

Look out for a full review here on The Fiction Desk later this week. In the meantime, if you’d like a chance to win, just sign up for the monthly newsletter before Friday. You can do this in the box on the left of this post.

The newsletter covers new fiction, publishers, and other interesting bookish things. You can unsubscribe at any time, and we don’t sell or do anything else with your email address.

I’ve always had a problem with over-the-top book design. From “interesting” binding styles to “witty” notes on the copyright page, whenever I see postmodern trickery on a book, I begin to worry that it’s trying to make up for a lack of anything more substantial. A generation of media studies students have demonstrated that postmodernism is art for the untalented, creativity for the uncreative.

I’ll probably never love McSweeney’s.

However, there are times – rare though they may be – when an eccentricity of design is simply the extension of a genuine creative process, rather than a substitute for it. If I was talking about architecture or technology, I’d say something about the form following the function and then we could all talk about Apple (or we could have, until they introduced those eye-burning glossy screens). This is a website about books, though, so I must be talking about A. C. Tillyer’s An A-Z of Possible Worlds, the latest publication from the relatively new Roast Books. (more…)

On Tuesday, Legend Press will launch a new online bookshop dedicated to independent publishers.

The project, entitled IndieBooks, will be selling a range of just fifty titles from a variety of independent presses. Each month, the twenty-five lowest selling titles will be replaced with new titles, while the other half are carried over to the next month—in effect, creating a situation where half the stock is editorially selected, and the other half determined by sales figures. (more…)

Charles Lambert’s first collection of short stories, The Scent of Cinnamon, contains a story called ‘All Gone’. A collection of unsettled, occasionally disturbing impressions of a displaced upbringing, it feels a little like notes for a potential memoir. I’d happily read a book’s worth of that writing, I tell him.

‘Thank you,’ he laughs, ‘but I’m not sure I’d want to write any more of it.’

Well, never mind. With three novels in the works, he probably has enough writing to be getting on with.

We’re having lunch in Sardi Due, a seafood restaurant in Garbatella, Rome. Nearby is the university where Charles Lambert teaches English, one card from the deck with which Anglophones in Italy pay their way. (He also works as an editor for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, and has previously taught political science at the American University of Rome).

It’s the combination of Lambert’s expatriate experience and the fish-out-of-water upbringing described in ‘All Gone’ that together led to his debut novel. Little Monsters contrasts the protagonist Carol’s experiences as a child, growing up with an unloving aunt after a family tragedy, with her later life as an adult, when she’s living in Italy and helping at a centre for asylum seekers. There she tries to connect to another lost child.

Among other things, Little Monsters is about the reconciliation of the past and the present, power and helplessness, and the way we define ourselves in concert with, or opposition to, the people who surround us. (more…)

So here it is, then. The biggest and most controversial publication event in literature since the reissue of A Moveable Feast four months ago.

That last disturbance in the force was caused by Seán Hemingway, retooling a book that was already a posthumous retool of a manuscript left by his grandfather. The Original of Laura is a generation closer: here is Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, presenting his father’s unfinished manuscript, which he has the sense to do verbatim—in facsimile, no less.

Having left the text itself alone, Dmitri Nabokov contributes an introduction, in which he discusses the history of the manuscript (written during his father’s final years, when his health was failing). It’s a strange introduction, drawing parallels that aren’t quite parallels: he points out that Nabokov had tried to destroy drafts before, including a draft of Lolita, but then, those weren’t published as drafts. (more…)

This summer saw the publication of The Seven Lives of John Murray, Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of that great independent publishing house. It’s a terrific read all round – of which more below – but something particular that struck me was its description of a publishing model common during the late 18th century, when the first John Murray arrived in London and started his business.

Most likely, you’d start by opening a bookshop. With this as your base, you’d then begin to acquire copyrights and print books, either by yourself or with other publishers, each taking a percentage share in the project. You’d sell these through your own shop, and at a discount to other shops – meanwhile buying their books to sell yourself. The result was that the industry across London functioned as a kind of loose cooperative, with shops selling their own books and each other’s. (more…)

Petrograd:

…standing suddenly alone and exposed in an open space, he watched a horseman gallop up, point a pistol in his face, and demand, ‘For or against the people?’

‘I am English,’ replied Ransome, helplessly.

‘Long live the English!’ shouted the horseman, and galloped away.

I’ve always thought that the Swallows and Amazons books of Arthur Ransome, with their multiple layers of imaginative reality and potent sense of independence, are particularly fine training material for readers. And I’ve assumed – as one does, about the things one likes – that his appeal was more or less universal, but his books do seem to have a peculiarly British appeal: they’re not available in Italy, for example, and even the more literary, nautically minded Americans I’ve mentioned him to haven’t heard of him.

Perhaps this primarily British appeal explains the title of Roland Chambers’ new biography of Arthur Ransome, The Last Englishman. It’s a bit of an off-the-peg title, catchy but not particularly fitting, evoking an anachronistic quixotism that might have been more appropriate for Russell Miller’s Conan Doyle biography. (more…)

You might have noticed the recent appearance of a little box in the sidebar headed “Newsletter”. Perhaps you’ve already typed in your email address to sign up, or perhaps you’ve just ignored it, thinking ugh, spam!

I hope you’ve done the first one; you’d have been quite wrong to do the second. You see, our first newsletter comes out next month. It’s a quick roundup of the month on The Fiction Desk, revisiting a couple of things you might have missed. There are extra odds and ends and mini-reviews, all in a neat little monthly “mark it unread and read it later” package. (more…)

It can be interesting to watch the subtleties of marketing change between different editions of the same book. From covers to titles to apparent target audience, dramatic changes take place as books move across oceans. David Vann‘s Legend of a Suicide is a good example: in the US, it’s a collection of short stories built around a central novella; in its UK edition, published by Penguin, it’s a novel. Neither description is inaccurate. (more…)

I don’t want to cover Twitter too much on this site, but having written a brief introduction to Twitter for authors, I wanted to take a quick look at an aspect of Twittering that affects publishers.

As Twitter becomes an increasingly powerful tool for book publicists – although the jury is out as to how powerful it might get – established Twitter accounts themselves are going to become increasingly valuable commodities. A well managed Twitter account could have the ear of thousands of potential customers, journalists, bloggers, and other useful contacts. These kinds of accounts often represent a considerable investment of time and energy, and have a significant value. (Anybody want to guess what @stephenfry‘s account is worth? The man can probably knock a smaller website offline just by mentioning it.) (more…)

More and more authors, from unpublished novices to international heavyweights, are getting involved with Twitter. If you’re planning to join them, here are some tips for good author tweeting:

Setting up your account

• Be yourself, not your book. In the short term, it may seem like a good idea to set up your Twitter account as the title of your book, but it’s probably better to use your own name instead. There are two reasons for this:
  1. People are more likely to respond to a person than a book – it feels less like advertising, and it’s more natural to build a relationship with a person.
  2. Think long term. If you do get followers for this book, what happens when your next one comes out? Do you change the account details, confusing people, or open a new Twitter account for the new book, and start again from scratch? Tweet as yourself, and your account can grow with you through your whole career.

  (You can still promote your latest book as part of your identity – in your profile image, as the background image on your feed, with a mention in your bio line.)

• Provide a bio, url, and profile photo. Before you tweet your first tweet, take a moment to compose a good line to go in your bio, just to let people know who you are. It may not seem like much, but a single sentence can change you from an anonymous twitterer into an actual, live person worth connecting too. The profile photo is important too, as it helps establish your identity. Finally, don’t forget to add a link to your blog or Website.
• Don’t follow anybody until you’ve made a few tweets. When you follow somebody, they’ll get an email. They’ll probably then come and have a look at your feed to see who this new follower is. If there’s nothing there, they’ll go away and forget all about you. If you’ve posted a few interesting tweets, they’re more likely to follow you back, or at least take note.

(more…)

A while back, I wrote a piece on The Fiction Desk about the kinds of books that I thought made ideal fodder for book blogs. Something that struck me then, and has become more important to me since, is the length of books.

While there’s no point in talking about some kind of ideal length for fiction (Q. How long should a book be? A. Exactly as long as it takes), I do wonder whether novellas hold a certain appeal specifically for book bloggers. (more…)

Many of the books that have crossed my desk lately have involved some kind of attempt to combine didactic fact with fiction: not just historical fiction, but books with a real desire to offload information onto the reader. Maybe “edutainment” based on real-life events or people makes for easy marketing, or maybe authors just aren’t active enough, and must find the truth of their adventures in history books rather than their own lives. War on the Margins, Libby Cone’s debut novel about the Jewish experience of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, takes its own approach to the challenge. It’s successful in some ways but less so in others. (more…)

Penelope Fletcher Le Masson comes from “an island off an island off Vancouver”. She seems to have been born with a dedication to selling books: before her twentieth birthday, she’d persuaded her father to refit an old henhouse as a moveable bookstore, a brightly painted gyspy caravan which she stocked with second-hand books and set up near the only other store on the island. “But don’t write that, will you?” she asks, blushing. I hope she lets me: she may be shy about her youthful entrepreneurship, but there’s still a bookstore on the Hornby Island site today (though the henhouse is gone), and in Paris, half a planet away, she now runs one of the nicest bookshops I’ve ever visited. (more…)

Do we have a canon of contemporary European literature? It’s hard to imagine so, because no two European countries can draw on exactly the same sources. The view of the canon from France might include a Spanish novel that has been translated into French but not English. The Germans might be all over a Danish novel that the rest of us will never see. I might put the best of Zoran Zivkovic’s work forwards for inclusion, but this would make no sense to readers in Italy, who have yet to receive any of it in Italian.

Even where the potential for translation grants has been thoroughly exhausted, our national views of European literature are separated by cultural differences; different things matter to different races. This means that any nation’s view is refracted through not one but two separate prisms, angling certain rays into oblivion and focussing others more sharply. For a writer to claim a place in any European canon, there needs to be enough universality in his themes to angle his light directly. (more…)