fiction
carole.woddis
Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong has reached phenomenon status: number 13 on a recent BBC Big Read competition, part of the school curriculum along with World War One poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, three million copies sold worldwide. Its lyrical, descriptive writing, dense and subtle in detail, consistently moves people to tears.It tells of a young 20-year-old Englishman, Stephen, who, finding himself in Amiens in 1910, falls passionately in love with Isabelle, the wife of his host, before being pulled into the horrors of the war and the Battle of the Somme. Somehow he survives Read more ...
rachel.wagstaff
I remember walking into the Hawthorn Ridge cemetery, seeing a grave of a 20-year-old boy who died on 1 July, 1916, and knowing for the first time why Sebastian Faulks needed to write Birdsong, and why I desperately wanted it to live and breathe and be brought back to the public consciousness again.I first approached Sebastian four-and-a-half years ago. I got his email and asked him if he’d be interested in discussing it as a possibility. Sebastian sent a very gracious email back saying pretty much "Thanks, but no thanks" because he thought Working Title owned the theatrical rights. But he Read more ...
theartsdesk
They say women past a certain age can’t get work in broadcasting. In more enlightened times, Mavis Nicholson was the first woman to interview on daytime television. She had given up a career in advertising, married, and had children by the time she started presenting in 1972. She was talent-spotted by Jeremy Isaacs on the dinner-party circuit, where her penchant for asking searching questions was deemed ideal for the new dawn of daytime. By 1997, when she last worked in television, she had interviewed David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams, Morecambe and Wise, Liberace Read more ...
theartsdesk
Could Peter Carey possibly become the first author to win the Booker three times? Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) both previously won him the most prestigious and hotly contended literary gong this side of the Atlantic (and south of Stockholm). The judges, led by Andrew Motion, have whittled the long list of 13 down to the final half-dozen, and Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is among them.In order to win he will have to impress the panel more than the five other contenders. Here is the full list:
Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next up in our summer reading series is dramatist Patrick Marber whose shrewd, sometimes excoriating, but always riveting observations of the human condition in plays such as Closer always manage to pull off that rare trick of appealing to critics and audiences alike.Born in 1964, Marber spent several years being a stand-up comic and has said that it was writing collaboratively on shows such as Radio 4’s On The Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You - and the latter's extremely successful television spin-off – alongside Armando Ianucci and Steve Coogan, that gave him the confidence to write plays. Read more ...
laura.thomas
The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.Lampedusa’s novel Read more ...
howard.male
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.This first in the series begins with the only known audio recording of Virginia Woolf. Across Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If there was an opposite to the limitless “ever after” of fairytales, the relentlessly nullifying "nevermore" of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven would come pretty close. A deformed, sickly smiling "musical fable for adults", the ominously named Nevermore is Canadian theatre company Catalyst’s grim(m) take on the life of that greatest of storytellers, Poe himself. Had Little Red Riding Hood decided to meet the Wolf at an S&M club for a spot of burlesque (and had Nick Cave been on hand to write some songs about the encounter), Nevermore would be the result.More hauntingly macabre than any of his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s an odd enough statistic that only four of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays have been made into films. Odder still that, of those, three are the work of Alain Resnais, the grand old man of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it was a curious moment when the director of Last Year in Marienbad got into bed with the author of Bedroom Farce. The last of those films, Coeurs, was no more than a mildly engaging romantic roundelay, but it was freighted with Anglo-Saxon certainties. Things like plot, meaning, a vague interest in the needs of the audience. Not far shy of 90, Resnais has for the first time adapted a Read more ...
howard.male
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Not woefully miscast - physically he fits the bill – but Simon Pegg’s comic sidekick is more cuddly koala than dead-eyed grizzly, as Amis’s morally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Martin Amis always had his own idea of who should play John Self, the anti-heroic slob narrator of Money. "The only regret I have in the whole book-to-film department,” he told me, “is that Gary Oldman never played John Self. We had a meeting with Gary and he was so unbelievably good, and so instinctively got the character and made me laugh so violently when he did it, that I thought that was a great shame.” Oldman was even prepared to go the extra mile. “He said, 'I'm going to give up smoking and take up drinking and put on the weight.'" That version never happened. But Money has finally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of the golden generation of British novelists now within hailing distance of old age, Julian Barnes is much the most inscrutable. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan – you know where you are with them, and have done for years. But the unifying theme of Barnes’s work? The through line? If there is such a thing, it’s an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the contents of his own navel.The one time I met Auberon Waugh, founder of The Literary Review, he was arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years’ time. This would have been about 20 years ago Read more ...