Books features
juliette.seibold
One Friday afternoon this spring, a friend led me to a low, dusty room in an education institute in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A few dozen men sat in neat rows. Most were young and wearing leather jackets, a few were older and in tweed jackets or suits. One wore a turban and chapan, a warm winter padded coat. All were keen writers who together are thriving members of a literary circle, a solace of imagination, creativity and wonder far from the fighting and the headlines of Afghanistan's bitter war.First, a young man opened the meeting with a Quranic chant. Then the first author Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Everybody knows One Thousand and One Nights, even if they don’t know they do. Ever been to the panto to see Aladdin? Watched Sinbad the Sailor on stage, or Sheherazade at the opera or ballet, or perhaps watched one the many film versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Yes to any of those and you’re a fan of possibly one of the greatest series of stories ever told.Richard E Grant, a rather pleasing actor and a thoroughly nice chap, presented this documentary because, he said, he wanted to know why the book he loved as a child still has such a hold on our imagination. Of course any idiot could answer Read more ...
David Nice
Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy's. He is indeed - as Professor Anthony Briggs, the other star of this two-part documentary, states - the God of the novel. As a man, he was troubled to his dying day, and eventually a trouble to the state. Yet while "what is life for?" is not a phrase I like to hear fall from Alan Yentob's lips, I can't fault this beautifully filmed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unlike Sue Perkins, I’ve never sat on the Booker Prize judging panel. So I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of wading through 130-plus contemporary “literary” novels, of supremely variable quality, in a supremely short space of time (it’s approximately a novel a day, I’ve heard, given the allocated time). But still, I was left somewhat puzzled by the Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, because Perkins – who was a Booker Prize judge in 2009 and is yet to recover from the experience – comes to a conclusion I found slightly odd.She concluded that the contemporary literary novel is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.Joffe’s film has little hope of acquiring the mythic status of the 1947 John Boulting version, as he’s doubtless well aware. But Joffe’s line is that he didn’t set out to remake the Boulting film, but to shoot a new interpretation of Greene’s book. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A European Literature Brainstorming meeting is being held on 25 January in London involving publishers, editors and critics from the UK books industry who took part in the EU trip to Brussels I reported on earlier this month, to take forward the ideas and needs that were generated. The idea is to get more people in different countries able to read other nations' best books.Booksellers, publishers, poets, critics, festival directors, literary editors and librarians were among the group who want to discuss generating more liaison between them and other European countries’ books industries. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The specialist book supplier Dance Books is finally closing up, due to the ill health of its longtime proprietor. David Leonard’s little shop long embellished Cecil Court, one of the alleys of literature off Charing Cross Road, London, until 10 years ago he moved out to a former bakery in Hampshire focusing on publishing Dance Now, the last serious dance magazine of ideas, and mail order books retail.Though Dance Now closed two years ago, the company has continued and says it will continue to publish and distribute specialist dance volumes, which currently range from creative insights into Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This year the Eurozone is going to be the big political subject; fragmentation the looming concern. Culturally too, one would think that Europe, with 23 official languages, and another 60 minority languages spoken, is too much of a warren to be able to find any possible unanimity. But two ambitious projects are afoot in Brussels: to enable the translating of major literature across languages, and to join up all the museums, galleries and centres of knowledge in one great cultural cornucopia. And before you mutter that this is as exciting as sprouts, think for a moment of the implications - an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won’t last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age.” The last of several times I interviewed the British crime writer Michael Dibdin (1947-2007) was four years before his death. It was a freezing February morning in Bologna, where he was researching the 10th and (it turned out) penultimate book in the Aurelio Zen series. The interview was at 9am. In the fug of a crowded bar, Dibdin soaked up several espressi and a warming tot of grappa.Having concluded our Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
One question posed by Neil Postman in his Amusing Ourselves To Death is who got it right - Orwell or Huxley? Basically, will we be more damaged by what we love or what we hate? With X Factor and the Royal Wedding the modern Bread and Circuses, it's a question worth raising. Illustration by Steve McMillen.