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Stephen King and Peter Straub join dark forces – archive, 7 February 1985 [07 Feb 2020|05:00am]

7 February 1985: The Talisman’s combination of fantasy and horror, with a kid hero, meant it has a special appeal for the youth market

So successful have Stephen King and Peter Straub been as literary collaborators that they are planning a sequel to their vast fantasy, The Talisman, which was one of the biggest American bestsellers of the past year. Not only have well over a million hardcover copies been distributed at $18.95 each without benefit of book clubs, but Hollywood’s wunderkind, Steven Spielberg, has bought the film rights after long, extremely tough negotiations. And the paperback edition is still to come.

Play and movie collaborations are hard enough, but novels written in tandem seem impossible – a dream that seldom comes true – so the King-Straub venture didn’t arouse much interest at first. They seemed such an unlikely pair of literary collaborators – rather like matching Edgar Allen Poe with Henry James.

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Poet laureate Simon Armitage launches 'ambient post-rock' band [07 Feb 2020|07:01am]

LYR sets Armitage’s spoken vocals to music from Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson. A debut album is due in spring

Most modern poets laureate have released recordings of their work, but none hitherto has put out an album billed as providing “ambient post-rock passages, jazz flourishes and atonal experimentalism”. But that’s the latest direction for the current incumbent, Simon Armitage.

Armitage and his band LYR, which includes musician Richard Walters and producer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson, have signed to “post-classical” label Mercury KX, with their first single, Never Good With Horses, out on Friday, and their debut album Call in the Crash Team to follow in the spring.

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Grown Ups by Marian Keyes review – comic, convincing and true [07 Feb 2020|07:30am]

The warmth and empathy of Keyes’s writing shine through this tale of family secrets revealed

Grown Ups starts at the end. A large and happy family is gathered at a birthday party: brothers Johnny, Ed and Liam, their wives Jessie, Cara and Nell, and various children from marriages present and past are enjoying an elaborate meal – some of them more so than thers. It’s a straightforward and lightly comic scene, each character playing their immutable role within the family. Jessie is bossy and in control; Ed unobservant and a little dull; Cara chaotic and rather rude; Johnny a bit of a sexist … But Cara, it turns out, is suffering from concussion. And, over an impressively catered palate cleanser of vodka and lemon sorbet, she starts spilling secrets that threaten to blow the Casey family apart.

Chapter two skips back to “six months earlier” and another gathering of the Caseys, with each subsequent chapter then leading us closer and closer to Sorbetgate and filling in the gaps to show how they got to be where they are. Of course, each character is nothing like the role in which they are straitjacketed by the family. Jessie is the successful owner of a chain of specialist food shops, but her personal spending is out of control. She insists on paying for everyone to get together because she has always been secretly convinced that nobody really likes her. She threw herself into work the day her first husband died, leaving her widowed at 34 with two young children. Her first husband, who was Johnny’s best friend.

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Inventory by Darran Anderson review – a childhood in Derry [07 Feb 2020|09:00am]

A troubled Northern Ireland upbringing is sensitively recounted in objects – floppy disk, cassette, toy soldier

Belfast and Derry, Northern Ireland’s largest cities, are separated by the Glenshane Pass, a mountain road devoid of human habitation other than the self-described highest pub in Ireland. But for Darran Anderson, life growing up in a working-class Catholic area of Derry in the early 1980s was not very different from the childhood I experienced in a working class Protestant area of Belfast a few years earlier. True, the graffiti he saw – IRA, INLA – invoked different saviours from the graffiti I saw – UVF, UDA – but both sets of artists were equally committed to the uncovering of “touts” (police informers).

For Anderson, a writer on architecture whose last book Imaginary Cities was a compendium of real and invented urban space, Derry felt isolating, and his fascination with the “impossibly enigmatic” names of east European football teams and the territories of the shipping forecast meant the flatness of Fivemiletown and Strabane wouldn’t hold him long.

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Jojo Moyes: ‘I frequently don’t finish books. I feel it’s mean to name them, though’ [07 Feb 2020|09:58am]

The novelist on her love of telling stories, early reading trauma and laughing out loud mid-air

The book I’m currently reading
Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers. It’s a coming of age story set among a group of artists and poets, including Leonard Cohen, on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. She is so good at mentally indelible imagery.

The book that changed my life
The Faber Book of Reportage, edited by John Carey. It inspired my first career in journalism, and left me with a passion for telling stories, especially of those who are seemingly on the sidelines.

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Figuring by Maria Popova review – distillation of a lifetime's reading [07 Feb 2020|10:00am]

The woman behind the Brain Pickings website traces the connections between scientists, artists and writers in a highly original survey of life, love and creativity

“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.” Maria Popova is best known for her insightful and eclectic website Brain Pickings, an exploration of what she reads and “a record of my own becoming as a person”. Her first book is also a highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation. It interweaves the “invisible connections” between pioneering scientists, artists and writers – many of them gay women – to create a richly patterned tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her approach subverts the idea that lives “unfold in sensical narratives”. Popova’s unique act of “figuring” in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures. Her aim is to answer questions that “raze to the bone of life”, including the most profound of all: “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”

Popova writes beautifully, translating abstractions into sensuous, evocative subjects, turning history and science into symphonic prose poetry. She begins with Johannes Kepler, “perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived”, a man who would “quarry the marble out of which classical physics would be sculpted”. From Kepler, who dared to imagine space travel in the 17th century, Popova journeys on to another “soaring mind”, Maria Mitchell, who observed an eclipse in 1831 aged 12 and became America’s first professional woman astronomer. Next comes Margaret Fuller, whose 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century “lit the Promethean fire of possibility for women”, followed by the sculptor Harriet Hosmer and poet Emily Dickinson.

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Charles Dickens 'treasure trove' goes to London museum [07 Feb 2020|11:00am]

Note to butler on how to serve gin punch is among letters acquired from US collector

Charles Dickens was precise with instructions for his dinner party: no champagne and as little wine as possible for guests before the food and definitely only he and his magazine editor friend to be given gin punch during the meal.

“Basically don’t get them too trolleyed beforehand,” said Cindy Sughrue, explaining Dickens’s detailed note to his butler. He was also worried that some guests would not be up to spirits. “Dickens made his own gin punch, he loved it and and it could be quite strong.”

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House of horror: the poisonous power of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' [07 Feb 2020|12:00pm]

It has inspired TV, stage, film – and now two new art shows. Kathryn Hughes strips back the layers of this classic tale to understand its enduring appeal

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman created feminist fireworks the moment it appeared in the January 1892 edition of the New England Magazine. The short story takes the form of a secret diary written by a young married woman who is suffering from a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency”. Actually, the diagnosis has been made by her husband, who also happens to be “a physician of high standing”. In line with fashionable medical practice, “John” has prescribed a radical rest cure that involves separating the narrator from her small baby and confining her to the top-floor nursery of a rented country house: “I … am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.”

Gilman was writing out of her own agonising experience: five years earlier, and felled by postnatal depression following the birth of her daughter, she had been sent for treatment to America’s leading expert in women’s mental health, Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. His punishing regime for depressed middle-class female patients involved strict bed rest with no reading, writing, painting and, if it could be managed, thinking. His theory was grounded in the pervasive belief that if modern girls stopped wanting things – education, the vote but, above all, “work” – they would become happy, which is to say docile, again. Mitchell instructed Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible “and never to touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live”. Gilman wrote later of her treatment, which felt more like a prison sentence, “I … came perilously close to losing my mind.”

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