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Simon Armitage plans national 'headquarters' for poetry in Leeds [27 Feb 2020|12:01am]

Poet laureate lays out ideas to give the country an official home for the practice, in line with other ‘national art forms’

The art world has the National Gallery; drama has the National Theatre. Now poet laureate Simon Armitage is putting plans in motion for a National Poetry Centre “headquarters” in Leeds.

The National Poetry Centre is intended to be a public space with an extensive poetry collection, several rehearsal and performances spaces, and a cafe, where literary events can be held, writers can exchange ideas, and visiting authors can stay. It is backed by Leeds city council, the University of Leeds and Leeds 2023 – a year-long celebration of arts and culture in the city.

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From climate collapse to generation rent: coming-of-age novels have changed forever [27 Feb 2020|07:00am]

Joe Dunthorne looks at the best books that deal with facing up to adulthood, including Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

In simpler times, you could rely on a coming-of-age novel to be narrated by a teenager whose journey through the phoney adult world would culminate in a bittersweet epiphany as they attain a measure of self-knowledge. But increasingly this kind of narrative doesn’t seem to cover the contemporary experience. Whether it’s that a quarter of people aged 20 to 34 still live with their parents or that a third of millennials expect to rent for their whole life – or the small matter of ongoing climate collapse – there’s a sense that the safe, drab place called “adulthood” doesn’t exist any more.

There is no stable future in which to imagine yourself having tedious dinner parties and tawdry affairs with work colleagues. As a result, the process of coming of age starts to seem like either a luxury or a distraction – which perhaps explains why the protagonists of these brilliant recent novels mostly avoid it altogether.

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Here We Are by Graham Swift review – a tale of magic, love and loss [27 Feb 2020|07:30am]

From the blitz to Brighton’s end-of-the-pier shows, this is a dreamlike story of England’s suburban underbelly

The story unfolds as if we’re watching it through glass. Evie White, widow of the actor Jack Robbins, goes out for lunch on the first anniversary of her husband’s death. Then she returns home, walks into the garden where Jack’s ashes were scattered, and suddenly sees all the cobwebs glittering in the dew around her, before heading back inside and upstairs to sleep. What she remembers in the course of this slight day, though, is a story that spans half a century, an account of the great vanishing act of life, which is as light and brilliant as the cobwebs in the garden.

Fifty years before, Evie was an assistant to magician Ronnie Deane, known on stage as the Great Pablo. She was also engaged to him; Jack was the compere who introduced Pablo and Evie to the crowd on Brighton Pier each evening, before running round to the back of the audience to watch the show. Graham Swift’s new novel is really Ronnie’s story. It follows his evacuation during the blitz from east London to an Oxfordshire house where he was taught magic; his alienation when he returns home and finds that it’s home no longer; his national service and path into performing with Evie and Jack. At the novel’s climax, Swift gives us a description of Ronnie’s act which, because he’s made us wait for it, is as enthralling as anything that will be published this year.

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Kraftwerk by Uwe Schütte review – a band that saw the future [27 Feb 2020|09:00am]

From ‘Autobahn’ to ‘Trans-Europe Express’ … how the electronic pioneers helped shape a new Germany and changed the history of pop

Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter once told a journalist that his group’s 23-minute-long song about car travel “Autobahn” was an attempt to answer the question: “What is the sound of the German Bundesrepublik?” The autobahn system is, Uwe Schütte writes in this engaging critical introduction to the band, a “deeply ambivalent German monument” because it was a pet project of Adolf Hitler.

Schütte sees Kraftwerk’s music as “a contribution to the political, cultural and moral rebuilding of Germany” after the second world war. Their records obliquely approach history, and the process of constructing a future-oriented nation, by focusing on the material aspects of its everyday life: roads, nuclear power, trains, computers. The group enthusiastically embraced Germany’s place in the European project, in songs that addressed the continent’s interconnection (“Trans-Europe Express”) and were often recorded in a number of European languages.

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Small presses loom large on International Booker prize longlist [27 Feb 2020|09:55am]

Nine of 13 nominated titles for this year’s £50,000 award for the best translated fiction come from indie publishers

Some of the smallest publishers in the UK are doing the heaviest lifting seeking out the best translated fiction, with the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize dominated by tiny presses at the expense of their wealthier rivals.

The £50,000 award, which is split evenly between writer and translator, is for the finest translated fiction from around the world, with previous winners including Korean bestseller Han Kang and Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Settings for the 13 novels up for this year’s prize range from Iran – in Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl fleeing her home after the 1979 revolution – to South Africa, in Willem Anker’s Red Dog, described by judges as “a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project”.

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A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it [27 Feb 2020|10:00am]

There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money

  • Two in five: our new series about the disappearance of the US middle class

Let’s start with me: I’m not sure how or if I’d still be a writer without the help of other people’s money. I have zero undergrad debt. Of my three years of grad school, two of them were funded through a teaching fellowship; my parents helped pay for the first. The last two years my stipend barely covered the childcare I needed to travel uptown three days a week to teach and go to class and my husband’s job is what kept us afloat.

I got connections from that program. I got my agent through the recommendation of a professor. Nearly every year since I graduated from that program, I have been employed by them. The thing I’m most sure I had though, that was a direct result of my extraordinary privilege, is the blindness with which I bounded toward this profession, the not knowing, because I had never felt, until I was a grownup, the very real and bone-deep fear of not knowing how you’ll live from month to month.

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Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen review – dark, deep-fried laughs [27 Feb 2020|12:00pm]
A young woman working in a Northern Irish chip shop is the heroine of this hilarious exploration of the legacy of the Troubles

Dubbed “Milkman meets Derry Girls”, Michelle Gallen’s debut novel explores the legacy of the Troubles in a divided border town, and, like Anna Burns’s book and the sitcom, offers a young female perspective on a life overshadowed by violence, laced with black humour amid the ruins. Milkman, from which Big Girl, Small Town’s epigraph is taken, was extremely funny, something many critics failed to convey in all those column inches bemoaning its apparent difficulty, and so is this novel. Written far more conventionally but similarly immersive, it has been set up to have broad commercial appeal.

It’s hard to write a funny novel, and as a reader even harder to find one, so to say that this book made me laugh out loud several times is no small thing. Our heroine, Majella, works in the local chip shop, A Salt and Battered! It isn’t Aghybogey’s only chipper, but for Majella it might as well be: “Majella had never been inside The Cod Father in her life … and had also never knowingly tasted a Proddie chip.” From behind the counter Majella dispassionately observes her fellow citizens as they drunkenly lurch in from the pub to devour their sausage suppers, the routine barely changing from one day to the next. There’s no romanticism. Marty the chef, Gallen writes, “knew everyone in the town. He knew who was fucking who, who had fucked who and who wanted to fuck who. He knew who was drinking, smoking, swallowing or injecting what, and he often knew where and when. He always had an opinion on the why.”

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Tears at bedtime: are children's books on environment causing climate anxiety? [27 Feb 2020|01:34pm]

Greta Thunberg effect behind sales boom in books on everything from plastic waste to endangered wildlife

I’m reading one of a small forest’s-worth of beautiful new picture books about the environment with my eight-year-old twins. The Sea, by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jill Calder, takes us into mangrove swamps and kelp forests and coral reefs. We learn about goblin sharks and vampire squids and a poisonous creature called a nudibranch. Then we reach the final chapter on ocean plastics. When we learn that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, Esme bursts into inconsolable tears.

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Tears at bedtime: are children's books on environment causing climate anxiety? [27 Feb 2020|01:34pm]

Greta Thunberg-effect behind sales boom in books on everything from plastic waste to endangered wildlife

I’m reading one of a small forest’s-worth of beautiful new picture books about the environment with my eight-year-old twins. The Sea, by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jill Calder, takes us into mangrove swamps and kelp forests and coral reefs. We learn about goblin sharks and vampire squids and a poisonous creature called a nudibranch. Then we reach the final chapter on ocean plastics. When we learn that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, Esme bursts into inconsolable tears.

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Waterstones defends minimum wage in year of record profits [27 Feb 2020|04:16pm]

Bookselling chain’s chief executive James Daunt says he fears ‘going bust’ and that paying entry-level staff more would betray ‘basic principle’ the business runs on

Waterstones chief executive James Daunt has hit back at campaigners who continue to call on the bookselling chain to pay all staff a living wage, saying that increasing wages for entry-level staff would be “to betray the basic principle by which we’ve been running the business”.

On Wednesday, the retailer announced booksellers’ pay would be increased in April by 6.2% across the board, almost a year after a petition signed by 9,300 writers and booksellers called on the chain to pay an hourly wage of £9, or £10.55 in Greater London. This is the amount the Living Wage Foundation (LWF) calculates is enough to live on across the UK.

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