The Blog

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…)

A few months ago, I wrote several posts reviewing publishers’ websites. Essentially, the same problems arose again and again: the inability to target a specific market, poor search engine optimisation, a lack of attention to the user experience, a lack of original content.

I didn’t run the series for long because the repetitiveness made it boring to write, and I’m sure it wasn’t any more fun to read. However, I looked at many more sites than I wrote about, and I came to some general conclusions that may be worth sharing. (more…)

When exactly did horror fiction become unacceptable? Is there a year, perhaps, a specific date after which anything supernatural becomes the exclusive possession of the recluse, something to occupy spotty teenage boys until they discover spotty teenage girls?

I think we’re all agreed that Frankenstein and Dracula are allowed on any bookshelf. Likewise, nobody would bat an eye if they spotted the spine of an M.R. James or the ghost stories of Charles Dickens; these snuck into the mainstream through a door that somebody left open at Christmas. H.P. Lovecraft is permissible for the sake of nostalgia, and Poe, well, he wrote poems and stories set in France, so he must be okay. Shirley Jackson’s a woman, so what she writes can’t really count as horror, and anyway, she’s a Penguin classic. Horror novels aren’t published by Penguin Classics: they’re printed by suspicious-sounding paperback imprints you’ve never heard of, they’re written by people with names like Hank Buckweather; they have titles like The Rats from the Pits of the Blood Demon and covers that feature skulls with a serpent coiling out of one eye socket and a scorpion scuttling out of the other. There will also certainly be blood… (more…)

Another year, another Booker. After last year’s fun but not particularly informative blog roundup, I thought I’d take another crack at looking at what bloggers have said so far about the Booker longlist. (For my own part, I own about five of these, but have read none of them. Yet.)

Here goes… (more…)

I’ve been working with books, and blogging about them, for a few years now, and reading them for a little longer. There’s something that I’m finding increasingly troubling: the majority of the books I purchase to read, or receive for review, shouldn’t have been published. (more…)

I’ve written in the past about the strengths and weaknesses of using the present tense in fiction. At times it can be very effective, but it’s a snappy, percussive tense, ill-suited to more ponderous prose. Ian MacKenzie‘s use of the present in City of Strangers is symptomatic of an overall discord, a clash in a novel that doesn’t seem sure whether it’s a fast psychological thriller or a Saul Bellow-style portrait of a man in his city.

The story follows a week in the life of Paul Metzger, a failing writer, still smarting from a recent divorce and a long-term breakdown in his relationship with his brother. His father, an infamous Nazi sympathiser in his youth, is dying in hospital, while Paul walks the streets of New York. When he rescues a foreign boy from a street beating, he finds himself the target of one of the assailants, who begins following him around the city. (more…)

Sum is a collection of forty vignettes describing possible afterlives, written by neuroscientist David Eagleman and collected in a compact and attractive edition by Canongate. The stories, an average of 2-3 pages each, are mostly presented in the second person, describing “your” death with irony, wit and occasional poignancy.

In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures. They look vaguely human, but they are smaller and more brutish. They are singularly unitelligent. They knit their brows when they try to follow what you are saying. It will help if you speak slowly, and it sometimes helps to draw pictures. At some point their eyes will glaze over and they will nod as though they understand you, but they will have lost the thread of the conversation entirely.

from ‘Spirals’

(more…)

New from Picador, Talk of the Town is the first novel from poet Jacob Polley. It’s a coming-of-age tale set in Carlisle during the summer of 1986, and narrated in vernacular by schoolboy Chris Hearsey. His friend Arthur, never the most stable of kids, has gone missing, and Chris sets out to try and find him:

There’s nee mugshot, but I’ve got one already, me own movin clip of Arthur reachin down ter give us a hand up off the deck, the sun comin out from behind his head, dazzlin away his face. I whip the paper shut and shove it back under me bed, further back than the empty mug, behind the shoebox. I get ter me feet, wipin the sweat off me palms on me jeans. There’s nowt else fer it. I reckon I have ter gan and see Gill Ross, cus it’s her who might know where Arthur is, cus of what fat Booby said yesterday on the Arches.

I shut me bedroom door softly affter us.

(more…)

Once I’d decided to start reading a little more crime fiction, it could only be a matter of time before I encountered crime publishers Bitter Lemon Press. Their current lead title, and perhaps the best place to start, is Back to the Coast, a thriller by Dutch author Saskia Noort. (more…)

While I was examining PS Publishing’s website a few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to their flagship quarterly publication, Postscripts. A keen reader of horror as a teenager, I’m pretty out of touch with what’s happening in the genre today, and their magazine seemed like a good way to take a refresher course. Frankly, after some rather dry days under the general fiction sun, I also needed a bit of fun. As a result, it was a slow couple of weeks waiting for my first issue to arrive. (more…)

Far North is my first encounter with Marcel Theroux (son of Paul, brother of Louis), and the author’s fourth novel. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic near future / alternative present / alternative recent past (doesn’t say; probably doesn’t matter), among a series of deserted towns that form a kind of new Wild East, where an increasingly desperate American population has colonised parts of Russia before all but dying out among snow, ice, and social collapse.

Far North is narrated by Makepeace, a peacekeeper who still does her rounds in one of these frozen, deserted towns. (Her gender is kept hidden for a few chapters, before being revealed in an Amis-like flourish, surprising but not interesting.) The first third or so of the book consists of brief, disjointed encounters with a variety of pleasant, unpleasant, and deeply unpleasant people, and concludes with her imprisonment in a labour camp. Working in the camp, she begins to hear rumours of “The Zone”, a contaminated area still full of the riches of mankind’s past… (more…)

A conversation this morning with RobAroundBooks on Twitter reminded me of a forgotten but much-loved imprint, Rebel Inc. Classics. I was surprised that people hadn’t heard of them, but looking around, it does seem that they’ve been pretty effectively erased from the publishing landscape. With some of their titles fetching (or at least, asking) high prices on eBay, they probably aren’t even that easy to find in the secondhand shops anymore. (more…)

A while ago I was staying at Il Loggiato in Bagno Vignoni in Siena. It’s a lovely little place in a tiny (two dozen buildings?) spa town on the side of a hill. The accommodation was great, and the two sisters who run it put a lot of work into making a friendly, informal atmosphere; there’s a tray of fresh cakes and wine in the lounge for the guests to help themselves, and there was also a little stack of free books. Naturally, I helped myself liberally to all three, but here I’ll concern myself with the books. (more…)

In Rhyming Life and Death, the latest novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, an unnamed author walks the streets of Tel Aviv, killing time before he’s due to appear at a talk on his work in a nearby cultural centre. He dreads the coming series of questions—Why do you write? What do you think of other writers? Do you write with a pen or a computer?—all of which he’s heard before, and all of which he will answer tonight just as evasively, as vaguely, as he always has done. Sitting in a cafe, he attempts to distract himself from the upcoming event by creating a back story for the waitress who serves him. Her name is Ricky, he decides, and he goes on to imagine the story of her first love affair. (more…)

Now in their fifth year, UK-based Snowbooks describe themselves as a “feisty, award-winning independent book publisher”. Their list includes a range of general and genre fiction, along with sports, martial arts, and craft books. They’re a tech-savvy bunch, even providing these services to other publishers with their Snowangels project, so it should be interesting to see what they’ve done with their own online presence.

First impressions

The first thing that hits you about the Snowbooks design is how open it is: there’s plenty of white space here, and everything has room to breathe. (more…)

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dedicating odd hours to not reading Brothers, the new novel by Chinese author Yu Hua.

It started a few months ago, round about the time that we had all that fuss about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That book was getting a lot of coverage, and I was thinking of getting hold of a copy and reviewing it myself, but it was an awfully big book, and it was being very ably reviewed elsewhere. Still, I liked the idea of grappling with a big, translated monster, and so I was intrigued when I heard about the imminent arrival of Yu Hua’s Brothers. (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (more…)