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Emperors of the Deep by William McKeever review – how sharks are misunderstood [25 Jul 2020|08:00am]

The plight of a much maligned predator is investigated in this plea to respect the life in our oceans

America’s fear of sharks began in the summer of 1916. During a 10-day period four people were killed in the sea off New Jersey and one seriously injured. According to the conservationist and film-maker William McKeever, “the events triggered mass hysteria and the first extensive shark hunt in history”. The idea of a “deranged, man-eating great white on the loose” had been planted in the American psyche and it would eventually inspire Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws – which has sold 20m copies – and Steven Spielberg’s famous film.

The fallacy that “sharks as a species are nothing more than bloodthirsty man-eaters, apex predators with no other purpose than to kill” is widely believed. The reality is different. In 2018, there were four deaths attributed to a shark attack. The US, which is the country with the most attacks, had one that year. Ants kill 30 people a year there, and bees 478.

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Why a generation is choosing to be child-free [25 Jul 2020|07:00am]

The biggest contribution anyone can make to the climate crisis is not to have children. So why do we still treat parenthood as the default?

When I think that it won’t hurt too much, I imagine the children I will not have. Would they be more like me or my partner? Would they have inherited my thatch of hair, our terrible eyesight? Mostly, a child is so abstract to me, living with high rent, student debt, no property and no room, that the absence barely registers. But sometimes I suddenly want a daughter with the same staggering intensity my father felt when he first cradled my tiny body in his big hands. I want to feel that reassuring weight, a reminder of the persistence of life.

Then I remember the numbers. If my baby were to be born today, they would be 10 years old when a quarter of the world’s insects could be gone, when 100 million children are expected to be suffering extreme food scarcity. My child would be 23 when 99% of coral reefs are set to experience severe bleaching. They would be 30 – my age now – when 200 million climate refugees will be roaming the world, when half of all species on Earth are predicted to be extinct in the wild. They would be 80 in 2100, when parts of Australia, Africa and the United States could be uninhabitable.

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Manuscript shows how Truman Capote renamed his heroine Holly Golightly [24 Jul 2020|12:50pm]

Until the final typescript of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is set to be auctioned, the author had planned to call her Connie Gustafson

The final typescript for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on which Truman Capote scratched out his original choice for the name of his heroine, Connie Gustafson, and replaced it with Holly Golightly, is set to go up for auction.

The manuscript, which is covered with Capote’s handwritten edits, also shows how the author tempered the sexual content of the story before publication, removing lines such as Holly’s admission that: “Boy, I have hit the hay with some real ghastlies just because I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to have somebody hold me”. Later, Capote cuts an exchange between Holly and her flatmate Mag Wildwood, in which Mag reveals that during sex she pictures a statue of her forefather “Papadaddy Wildwood” in his military uniform.

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'Free speech has never been freer': Pankaj Mishra and Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation [24 Jul 2020|11:00am]

Are we living through a moment of lasting change? Two authors discuss Black Lives Matter, the Harper’s letter and where we go from here

Pankaj Mishra: Black Lives Matter has forced a long overdue re-examination, from the perspectives of history’s long-term losers, of everything, not only entrenched political and economic inequities but also the imbalances of intellectual and artistic life. But there is a very long way to go. Your recent article on Spike Lee’s new film about African-American soldiers in Vietnam [Da 5 Bloods] was instructive in this regard. Here is a celebrated African American film-maker, the cinematic biographer of Malcolm X, succumbing to American cliches about the Vietnamese, and non-white foreigners in general.

I am reminded, too, of a prize-winning writer who recently claimed in a tweet that African Americans were “fighting for democracy abroad”. Contrast this casual euphemising of American violence in multiple countries to Muhammad Ali’s principled refusal to join the assault on Vietnam. Such naive Americanism is striking. In the past African American leaders and artists, from WEB Du Bois to Nina Simone, simply assumed solidarity with peoples elsewhere; they could see that the plights of the long-term victims of slave society and the societies despoiled by racial-ethnic supremacism were inseparably linked. What do you think happened to sunder that connection?

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Emma Donoghue: 'Wooster’s sweetly foolish flippancy is just the tonic for Covid-19 times' [24 Jul 2020|09:00am]

The bestselling author on the influence of Jeanette Winterson and Emily Dickinson, and giving up on Elena Ferrante

The book I am currently reading
James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time is an absolute dazzler of a story about folk highborn and low about to encounter the Black Death: linguistically daring and full of heart.

The book that changed my life
Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems. My mother used to quote Dickinson, and when I got around to reading her poems they blew my mind. They seemed to give me permission to be odd, to follow my curiosity wherever it led, and also to be queer.

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Children’s books roundup – the best new picture books and novels [24 Jul 2020|08:00am]

A Dickensian orphanage, a rip-roaring secret agent caper, hunting for monsters and the best new YA novels

Homeschool may be out for the summer, but there’s new reading aplenty. For nine-plus, Victoria Jamieson, award-winning author-illustrator of Roller Girl, teams up with Omar Mohammed to tell his story in the powerful graphic novel When Stars Are Scattered (Faber). Omar and his disabled brother Hassan grew up in the Kenyan refugee camp Dadaab before being resettled in the US: young readers are plunged into the hunger, boredom and desperation of children growing up in limbo, as well as the hope that enables them to survive.

Sophie Kirtley’s debut The Wild Way Home (Bloomsbury) echoes Skellig and Stig of the Dump, with a bold, readable charm entirely its own. Charlie longs to be a big brother, but when his baby sibling is born with a heart defect, he runs away into the forest, where he finds the strange, fierce Harby, a Stone Age boy, floating in the river. Will Charlie and Harby ever break free of the wood? Full of peril, sadness and wild joy, it’s a timeslip adventure with a difference.

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The Crown in Crisis by Alexander Larman review – abdication, assassination and the Nazis [24 Jul 2020|06:30am]

A new account of the difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with contemporary resonances and speculation about an attempt to kill Edward VIII

It says something about how close the abdication of 1936 has come to slipping from living memory that Alexander Larman feels obliged to plant broad reminders early on. Remember that natty cove played by Alex Jennings and Derek Jacobi in the first three series of The Crown? That’s our leading man, the Prince of Wales, AKA Edward VIII, AKA the Duke of Windsor. Recall Andrea Riseborough being all brittle and American and fiercely-eyebrowed in W.E., that royal flop written and directed by Madonna in 2011? That’s Wallis Simpson, AKA the Duchess of Windsor. Larman doesn’t mention Edward & Mrs Simpson, the Bafta and Emmy-winning TV series of 1978, in which Edward Fox played the spoilt king to the manner born. But there again, people who watched that are old enough to remember for themselves the way that, 40 years ago, you knew not to mention the abdication in front of your grandparents for fear of being sent out of the room.

Edward & Mrs Simpson was based on Frances Donaldson’s explosive book Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication, written two years after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972. Donaldson’s great achievement was to show the story from the inside and in real time, by drawing on the private papers of Edward’s equerry “Fruity” Metcalfe and his wife, Baba. Donaldson was sufficiently detached from the court to be able to call out the chilly, costive atmosphere in which Edward grew up. She showed how a bleak childhood (George V remote and shouty, Queen Mary glacial and simmering) gave rise to a forlorn boy-man, who chased acceptance in all the wrong places, including fast women and fascist politics.

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Brandon Sanderson: 'After a dozen rejected novels, you think maybe this isn’t for you' [23 Jul 2020|03:26pm]

The fantasy author has an army of devoted fans and a record-making Kickstarter - but before the bestsellers, he spent a decade being told to be ‘more like George RR Martin’

Watching the numbers tick up on Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter is a remarkable way to pass the time. The fantasy author initially set out to raise $250,000 (£198,500) to release a 10th anniversary, leather-bound edition of his doorstopper novel, The Way of Kings. In less than 10 minutes, it became the most-funded publishing project of all time when it topped $1m. With 15 days still to go, he’s raised more than $5.6m. All this for a book that was just one of 13 Sanderson wrote before he’d even landed a publishing deal.

Most writers have novels that never see the light of day. But 13? That’s serious dedication. The books were written over a decade while Sanderson was working as a night clerk at a hotel – a job chosen specifically because as long as he stayed awake, his bosses didn’t mind if he wrote between midnight and 5am. But publishers kept telling him that his epic fantasies were too long, that he should try being darker or “more like George RR Martin” (it was the late 90s, and A Song of Ice and Fire was topping bestseller charts). His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”.

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The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams review – big ideas in a minor key [23 Jul 2020|08:00am]

Further adventures in love and language from the author of Attrib., as two lexicographers a century apart juggle meaning and made-up words

Eley Williams won prizes and delighted readers with Attrib. and Other Stories (2017), a collection in which dazzled celebrations of love were inseparable from a head-over-heels courtship of language. The letters of the alphabet were stroked and tickled into life; the epigraph was Samuel Johnson’s wistful dictionary entry for Trolmydames: “Of this word I know not the meaning.” In fact trolmydames is the ballgame ninepins, but in the evolving games of her own writing Williams prefers to keep conclusive definitions on hold. Now her first novel offers further adventures in love and language, taking us deep into the world of lexicography and asking: can a dictionary lie? Would the addition of a little fiction to an authoritative work of reference be a desecration or the making of it?

There are two alternating and converging stories. Peter Winceworth is working on the “S” section of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in 1899. Ignored, taken for granted, suddenly but unrequitedly in love, he is a consciously unheroic figure quietly resigned to his lot – except for a small kindling of rebellion that emboldens him to insert new words of his own devising. Mallory is an intern at Swansby’s a century later, tasked with rooting out aberrant entries that seem to have crept in. She imagines the person who might have made up these words; he imagines the reader who will one day find them.

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Murder on the Middle Passage by Nicholas Rogers review – slavery and the British empire [23 Jul 2020|06:30am]

An atrocity unpunished ... forget the triumphant tales of abolition – the brutal death of a teenage slave girl reveals important truths of Britain’s imperial history

You are trapped in a net cast by a white man reeking of rum and smoke, and then dragged miles to the coast. You are processed, bound into chains, and led to vast wooden ships. You are packed into the hold and spend months on the ocean. You have little to eat, little to drink, little air to breathe. All around you there is coughing and fever. On deck, they make you dance to keep your muscles taut, to preserve your price at the market. If you resist, they will beat you; if you die, they will throw you overboard.

In time, you see land. You are paraded on the dockside, prodded and inspected. They feel your arms; they look at your teeth. One man says “Yes”. You are loaded on to a cart and driven over rough land along dirt tracks until you arrive at a house and fields. You suffer searing pain as a burning iron pushes into your skin. You are taken to a shed and thrown to the floor. You collapse and sleep, but the sun rises and then you work. You have not done this work before, but if you do it badly, they will whip you. If you complain, they will whip you again. If you refuse to work, or you fight back, they will kill you in front of the others. So, you work.

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Murder on the Middle Passage by Nicholas Rogers review – the trial of Captain Kimber [23 Jul 2020|06:30am]

An atrocity unpunished ... forget the triumphant tales of abolition – the brutal death of a teenage slave girl reveals important truths of Britain’s imperial history

You are trapped in a net cast by a white man reeking of rum and smoke, and then dragged miles to the coast. You are processed, bound into chains, and led to vast wooden ships. You are packed into the hold and spend months on the ocean. You have little to eat, little to drink, little air to breathe. All around you there is coughing and fever. On deck, they make you dance to keep your muscles taut, to preserve your price at the market. If you resist, they will beat you; if you die, they will throw you overboard.

In time, you see land. You are paraded on the dockside, prodded and inspected. They feel your arms; they look at your teeth. One man says “Yes”. You are loaded on to a cart and driven over rough land along dirt tracks until you arrive at a house and fields. You suffer searing pain as a burning iron pushes into your skin. You are taken to a shed and thrown to the floor. You collapse and sleep, but the sun rises and then you work. You have not done this work before, but if you do it badly, they will whip you. If you complain, they will whip you again. If you refuse to work, or you fight back, they will kill you in front of the others. So, you work.

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Mary Trump on her Uncle Donald: ‘I used to feel compassion for him. That became impossible’ [22 Jul 2020|09:36am]

She is a psychologist who used to deny being related to Donald – now she has written an explosive bestseller about him. She discusses his racism, incompetence, cruelty and why he never laughs

Dinner in the Trump household was a hierarchical affair. Fred Trump, the patriarch, sat at the head of the table, with son Donald on his right and daughter Maryanne on his left. Other family members took their places in descending order of assigned importance.

But one Thanksgiving, the eldest son, Fred Jr, found himself relegated to the junior end of the table with his daughter Mary. “During the course of the meal, my grandmother choked,” Mary Trump recalls. “My dad had been a volunteer ambulance driver in the late 60s and early 70s so he knew the Heimlich manoeuvre and he very gently manoeuvred her into the kitchen and gave her the Heimlich, and that basically saved her from choking.

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Eliza Clark: 'I'm from Newcastle and working class. To publishers, I'm diverse' [22 Jul 2020|01:30pm]

The author of Boy Parts is keen to stress that she is not underprivileged – and nor is she anything like her sadistic young antiheroine

The dedication in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts sets the tone for the tale that follows: “For my mother and father. Please don’t read this.” The novel, a debut by the 26-year-old from Newcastle, will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.

Irina, a beautiful twentysomething, picks up mediocre-looking men in places such as Tesco and photographs them in compromising positions. When the mother of one young model – “I’d scouted him on the bus and suspected he may have been in sixth form” – tracks her down at her bar job, Irina leaves to focus on her photography, which she’s been invited to show at an exhibition of contemporary fetish art in London. But digging through her archive throws up repressed memories, and so begins a spiral of self-destruction and violence towards her young male muses during their shoots – “Another dig at his mangled nipple elicits a high-pitched, piggy squeal” – that leaves the reader queasy.

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Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh in talks to co-write TV drama [22 Jul 2020|02:41pm]

American Psycho and Trainspotting authors set to collaborate for the first time on show about a manipulative American tabloid

Bret Easton Ellis dreamed up the depraved excesses of serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Irvine Welsh is the author who brought us the questionable morals of characters including Sick Boy and Begbie in Trainspotting. Now the pair are set to collaborate for the first time, co-creating a television drama about an American tabloid publication.

Burning Wheel Productions is in final talks with the two authors about a series that will follow a “rambunctious cavalcade of pranksters, conmen and rapscallions – in other words, journalists – being brought together from across the globe to change not only the landscape but the power of the press forever from scandalous rumour to political puppetry”, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

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Eliza Clark: 'I'm from Newcastle and working class. To publishers, I'm diverse' [22 Jul 2020|01:30pm]

The author of Boy Parts is keen to stress that she is not underprivileged – and nor is she anything like her sadistic young antiheroine

The dedication in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts sets the tone for the tale that follows: “For my mother and father. Please don’t read this.” The novel, a debut by the 26-year-old from Newcastle, will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.

Irina, a beautiful twentysomething, picks up mediocre-looking men in places such as Tesco and photographs them in compromising positions. When the mother of one young model – “I’d scouted him on the bus and suspected he may have been in sixth form” – tracks her down at her bar job, Irina leaves to focus on her photography, which she’s been invited to show at an exhibition of contemporary fetish art in London. But digging through her archive throws up repressed memories, and so begins a spiral of self-destruction and violence towards her young male muses during their shoots – “Another dig at his mangled nipple elicits a high-pitched, piggy squeal” – that leaves the reader queasy.

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x + y by Eugenia Cheng review – an end to the gender wars? [22 Jul 2020|11:00am]

A bold and optimistic theory of gender and cooperation, based on the insights of maths

Eugenia Cheng is on a mission to change the world for the better, using maths. Her first book, How to Bake Pi, used recipes to teach readers how to think mathematically. The Art of Logic, published in 2018, was about using the principles of mathematical logic to have more productive arguments. x + y is an even more ambitious project, the aim of which is to end the gender wars and create equality by building “a whole new theory of people”.

Cheng begins by addressing why it is unhelpful to associate characteristics with gender, and explains why “leaning in” and “positive discrimination” both fail to fix inequality. She proposes a solution based on her specialist subject of category theory, which is more interested “in describing things by the role they play in a context, rather than by their intrinsic characteristics”. Mathematically, she says, “if we have two things that are not equal, we could make them equal by making the lesser one greater or by making the greater one less ... However, there is a completely different way we could do it, which is by evaluating the two things on a new dimension entirely.” Cheng insists that proper maths, the fun kind, is not about being right, but is a way of thinking differently, and that includes exploring ideas that are impossible according to existing rules. It’s a way of seeing this exhausting debate from a completely new angle.

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Four-year-old lands book deal for his 'astonishing' poetry [22 Jul 2020|11:17am]

Nadim Shamma-Sourgen’s words, evoking a ‘whole world full of hugs’, were spotted by the writer Kate Clanchy and will be published next summer

Keats’s first book of poetry was published when he was 21; Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing Frankenstein. But both of their youthful achievements are dwarfed by the newest star in the UK’s poetry firmament: four-year-old Nadim Shamma-Sourgen, who has just landed a book deal.

Nadim’s poems range from Coming Home (“Take our gloves off / Take our shoes off / Put them where they’re supposed to go. / You take off your brave feeling / Because there’s nothing / to be scared of in the house”), to Love (“Everyone has love / Even baddies”).

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Author loses spot in Top 10 after buying 400 copies of his own book [22 Jul 2020|11:24am]

Mark Dawson’s purchase pushed his thriller The Cleaner up the Sunday Times chart, but the sales monitor Nielsen has now revised its figures

Author Mark Dawson has lost his Top 10 position in the Sunday Times bestseller charts for his thriller The Cleaner after revealing that he bought 400 copies himself to get a higher position.

Related: An author bought his own book to get higher on bestseller lists. Is that fair?

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Top 10 books about adventures | Philip Marsden [22 Jul 2020|09:00am]

From mapping the Siberian wilderness to walking penniless across Europe, the best adventures are unsought, but lived intensely

Adventure is not something you seek – you can trek out into open country and wait for it to happen but you can’t plan it. That’s the point. Its original meaning, from Middle English, was “that which happens without design; chance, hap, luck”. It is the very randomness of it, the pervasive tickle of fear that something is about to go wrong, that is the greatest discomfort of true adventure, and its greatest reward. There is a part of us that is hard-wired for such uncertainty, and the alertness it brings elevates us, makes us alive.

Related: The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden review – a voyage of the imagination

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Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C Slaght review – an extraordinary quest [22 Jul 2020|06:30am]

Drinking ethanol and saving the world ... an old-school, tautly strung adventure in pursuit of the largest species of owl

Jonathan Slaght has the best author photograph I’ve ever seen. Pale, bearded, dressed in black, he gazes at the camera with forbidding intensity. Behind him are snowy woods and running water. Arms crossed, hands deep in a pair of unwieldy leather gauntlets, he holds against his chest a huge owl. Its feathers are shaggy and wet, and from its mouth protrudes the tail end of a silver fish. There’s something puppet-like about this creature, like a living Jim Henson creation, but it also resembles a beast pulled straight from the pages of a medieval bestiary – which is fitting, because Owls of the Eastern Ice reads like a modern-day grail quest: a tale of one man’s travels through a daunting landscape of snow and ice and radioactive rivers, searching for an animal that seems all ghost.

A confession: I’ve never understood why so many people are obsessed with owls. I once cared for a rescued barn owl, and while it was a beautiful creature, possessing a cat-like hauteur and strangely human face, it was about as rewarding to interact with as a porcelain statuette. But I’m happy to report that this book has changed me. I have become an ardent fan of the largest living species of owl, the Blakiston’s fish owl. Huge, elusive and endangered denizens of the deep forests of Japan, China and the Russian far east, these marvellously odd birds wade through icy water to catch fish, sing in low, hooted duets, possess a thick layer of insulating fat, a wingspan that can top six and a half feet, and have been venerated as gods by the Ainu of Hokkaido.

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