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Book sales hit record highs in 2019, but publishers ‘now need help’ [21 Jul 2020|11:01pm]

Figures for last year show sales of £6.3bn, up 20% on 2015, but the Publishers Association says sector needs government support to weather coronavirus

Book sales in the UK hit record levels in 2019, driven by a surge in audiobook and nonfiction titles, according to new figures released as publishers warn of the huge impact that the coronavirus pandemic has had on the industry.

Book sales rose to £6.3bn in 2019, up 4% on 2018, when sales fell for the first time in five years, and 20% on 2015. According to the latest figures from the Publishers Association (PA), overall print sales were up 3% to £3.5bn in 2019 and digital sales were up 4% to £2.8bn, driven by a 39% increase in audiobook downloads. Digital formats accounted for 44% of the market in 2019, up from 40% in 2015.

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Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson to redraw London tube map with women's names [21 Jul 2020|02:11pm]

Suggestions sought for public history project inspired by similar map of New York led by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Londoners Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson are spearheading a project to reimagine the city’s iconic tube map, by renaming all 270 stops after the women and non-binary people who have shaped the history of each pocket of the capital.

Eddo-Lodge, author of the bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, and the actor and activist Watson, were inspired by a similar project in the book Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which featured a New York City subway map with all the stations renamed after great women. Both Solnit and Schapiro are working with Eddo-Lodge and Watson to help create the City of Women London.

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How White Teeth transcends its many flaws [21 Jul 2020|12:40pm]

Zadie Smith is the first to cringe at her story’s excesses – but her novel’s vigour and invention leave readers rightly undeterred

Famously, Zadie Smith sold White Teeth for £250,000 on the back of an 80-page-extract. She once told the story on the BBC’s World Book Club:

“I’d written what was meant to be a short story – which was kind of the first two chapters. I got a letter from this publisher who’d read a short story of mine in an Oxbridge collection of short fiction … He said have you got anything longer and I sent him what I had of this long story and that was that … And the scary thing was then being told I had to finish it and write this novel.”

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Wendy, Master of Art review – witty graphic novel unleashes hipster hell [21 Jul 2020|08:00am]

Time for Lacanian sculpture and the semiotics of string in this third outing for Walter Scott’s winningly messy heroine

Walter Scott’s titular character, Wendy, a chaotic arts graduate whose millennial ideals are kept in check by a self-destructive streak many women will recognise, first appeared in book form in Wendy, in 2014. A sequel, Wendy’s Revenge, followed two years later, and now here’s a third in the sequence: Wendy, Master of Art, in which our heroine signs up for a visual arts MFA at the University of Hell, a small, distinctly out-of-the-way town in Ontario, Canada. Needless to say, things don’t always go entirely well for Wendy in Hell, and not only because the place has only four restaurants. If art-speak makes no sense at the best of times – one of her fellow students plans to ponder feminist photo practices “through allegories of kombucha fermentation” in her end-of-year thesis – when you’re hungover, it might as well be a foreign language.

While some of the other characters in Wendy, Master of Art, will be familiar to fans – her cynical gay friend, Screamo; her passive-aggressive sometime collaborator, Winona – in Hell, she encounters a whole new crowd of pseuds, wannabes and has-beens. Among their number are Cliff Masterson, her superannuated tutor (“you might remember me from my last solo exhibition, in 1998”); Yunji, a sculptor who’s interested in the “semiotics of pissing and really long string”; and Maya, an art-world star who has already caught the attention of Hans-Ulrich Obrist (if you don’t know who HUO is, this book may not be for you). However, flawed as they are, she still finds it hard to keep up with them – and not only because she will keep going out and getting hammered. What is this art thing about, really? “I was, um, reading Lacan,” she tells Masterson, when he visits her studio. “I took one of his books and embedded it in resin… which is a reference to fossilised theory… and then I stuck it in a table… to represent the institution.” Nice try, but Cliff is unimpressed. Why is she making objects? Has she even read Lacan?

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How does a young writer pay the rent? [21 Jul 2020|06:00am]

Affordable education and a buoyant economy help – but being a vagabond artist is still precarious. Could the Covid-19 pandemic create a moment of opportunity for writing?

There is a fact about me I’ve been known to trot out in smart company for the purposes of gaining the upper hand: I won a place at Oxford to do my DPhil and couldn’t go because you needed to have £30,000 in your bank account before they let you in. I didn’t have it and my family didn’t have it and that was that.

I went to King’s College London instead, had a splendid time, won a scholarship that let me quit my job and lived in wilful penury so I could succeed. Not regretting this for a moment, I turned to the job market but found myself working as a clerk for minimum wage because there was not, it seemed, an academic job to be had, and if I wanted to climb the ladder I needed to build on my PhD by doing casual teaching, editing, conference hosting, publishing and other things I couldn’t do with a 40-hour week and no money. My peers with “generous” (or, as we say around here, rich) parents could, but it looked as if I was facing into a future of seven-tenant house-shares and frontier antidepressants.

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Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L Trump review – a scathing takedown of Uncle Donald [21 Jul 2020|06:00am]

This blistering memoir by the president’s niece reveals the twisted dynamic of America’s ‘malignantly dysfunctional’ first family

Like America, Trump claims to be unique, exceptional, a shining self-creation. This book by his estranged niece demolishes that myth. Mary Trump’s ruthless memoir blames their family for creating him: she sees it as her patriotic mission to “take Donald down”, and she does so by showing how derivative and dependent the ultimate self-made man has always been. Trump was bankrolled at first by an indulgent father, who paid him to be an idle show-off and proudly collected grubby tabloid reports on his antics; nowadays he is propped up by tougher, cannier men such as Vladimir Putin and Senator Mitch McConnell, for whom he is an easily manipulated stooge.

Sleaze and graft, we here discover, are Trump’s genetic heritage. His grandfather slunk out of Germany to avoid military service and made a fortune from brothels in Canada. His father was a landlord who passed himself off as a property developer to rake in government subsidies for schemes that were never built. His mother, born to penury in Scotland, remained so meanly thrifty that every week she dressed up in her fur stole and drove her pink Cadillac around the New York suburbs to collect small change from the coin-operated laundry rooms in buildings the family owned; her piggy banks were empty tin cans that once contained lard. She remained emotionally absent, preoccupied by her ailments, while her husband viewed their male offspring as mere off-prints of himself, begotten to ensure that the family kept a grip on its spoils.

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Josephine Cox, bestselling novelist of family sagas, dies at 82 [20 Jul 2020|05:27pm]

The author of more than 60 books, which sold more than 20m copies over three decades, died on Friday

Josephine Cox, the proflic author who grew up in poverty in Blackburn and went on to sell millions of copies of her family dramas, has died at the age of 82.

Her publisher HarperCollins said today that Cox died “peacefully” on Friday. The author of more than 60 books, written over a career which spanned more than three decades, Cox sold more than 20m copies of her family sagas, which combined romance and tragedy to dramatic, bestselling effect.

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An author bought his own book to get higher on bestseller lists. Is that fair? [20 Jul 2020|03:59pm]

Author Mark Dawson has attracted criticism after bulk buying his own book gave him a high chart position. But that isn’t breaking any rules

For any author, being able to describe yourself as a bona fide bestseller is key to conferring your career with a certain gravitas – and will often bring you even more sales. In the UK, while most book charts are tallied by Nielsen BookScan, the Sunday Times bestseller list – like the New York Times chart in the US – has become the gold standard. But making the bestseller list isn’t necessarily as straightforward as tallying sales. Not all is fair in romance and war (and other genres) when it comes to getting to the top of the charts.

Take the case of Mark Dawson, a British writer who just over a week ago hit No 8 on the Sunday Times hardback list with his thriller The Cleaner, released by the independent publisher Welbeck at the end of June. This is a great achievement for any author or small publishing house, but Dawson had done something remarkable: he bought 400 copies of his own book, at a cost of £3,600, to push his sales high enough to make the top 10.

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Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week? [20 Jul 2020|02:00pm]

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them

Welcome to this week’s blogpost. Here’s our roundup of your comments and photos from the last week.

“I’ve just finished and enjoyed Fresh Water For Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated from French by Hildegarde Serle,” says safereturndoubtful:

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Not the Booker prize 2020: nominate your favourite book of the year [20 Jul 2020|01:19pm]

Returning for its 12th year, our collective search for the year’s best novel gains its bracing charm from readers’ involvement – so we need your votes by 1 August

The Not the Booker prize is back – again! It feels great to write those words. After all we’ve been going through, it’s all the more astonishing the award has made it into its 12th year. Many of us have turned to books during the pandemic, and if we can shine a light on some quality literature and bring some excellent novels out of the shadows we’ll achieve something truly worthwhile.

When I say “we”, I mean “all of us”, because the Not the Booker is a collective endeavour. It relies on public nominations, public voting and the enthusiasm and knowledge of readers like you. And you can start to make your mark right here and right now. This year’s Not the Booker prize begins like every other, with nominations for this year’s best fiction on this very blog.

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Poem of the week: On First Knowing You’re a Teacher by Peter Kahn [20 Jul 2020|09:00am]

The classroom’s unpredictable demands provide surprisingly poetical inspiration

On First Knowing You’re a Teacher

Robert’s not coming in, my boss tells me.
I’m sitting sweating in a windowless office,
a stack of résumés eye-balling me, stinking
up the desk – I’m first screener and sleepy
in this stuffy box. Would you be able to lead
a workshop on résumé writing?
I’m 22
and my own résumé got me the most boring
gig at Jobs for Youth-Chicago. Some of the “youth”
I’d be teaching are nearly my age, but there are
windows, and people, in that classroom
so I nearly yell, yes! 30 students look at me
and 45 minutes later look to me and I’m hooked.
And I’m floating and anchored at the same time.
For the first time. And I’m whole and broken
open. And I’m spinning and stunned still.

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Modern Times by Cathy Sweeney – twisted fables from a new talent [20 Jul 2020|08:00am]

The debut Irish author delivers taut, surreal tales that take your breath away

As the first lines of short story collections go, it’s pretty hard to beat the one that opens Modern Times, the debut of Irish writer Cathy Sweeney: “There once was a woman who loved her husband’s cock so much she began taking it to work in her lunchbox.” This, and the darkly funny page-and-a-half (A Love Story) it kicks off, are representative of Sweeney’s off-kilter sensibility. Her writing is direct, no-holds-barred; her sentences are as taut as bow strings.

Each story seems a twisted fable: we meet a woman with too many mouths; a woman whose child is in fact a very old man; a man who goes “striding all over a provincial town, making films without a camera”; a woman who saves for years to buy her husband a sex doll for his birthday.

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Green shoots: the best books to inspire hope for the planet [20 Jul 2020|06:00am]

The economist and author Ann Pettifor suggests books that offer hope for the future and the Green New Deal

Everyday life has been upended by the pandemic, but the Arctic heatwave is a reminder that the climate crisis still poses an urgent threat to humanity. We will need resolve, ambition and optimism as we emerge from lockdown, so we can forge the green recovery that is so crucial. One book that has sustained my faith in the future is Herman E Daly and John B Cobb’s hopeful vision, For the Common Good. Daly, once (briefly) the World Bank’s chief environmentalist, is an advocate of the steady state economy, central to the Green New Deal. This book is as relevant today as when it was first published, more than 30 years ago.

JA Baker’s 1967 memoir The Peregrine, is another vision – of the ecstatic joy brought on by a deep connectedness to nature. Baker documents his daily and increasingly close connection to the austere Essex landscape that was his home, and to what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the brute beauty and valour” of an extraordinary bird. For greater understanding of how connected all living things are, Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Network of Nature is less intense, but startling and delightful. Each chapter is a self-contained exploration of some link in nature: “How Earthworms Control Wild Boar”; “Fairy Tales, Myths and Species Diversity”. Or try Lev Parikian’s witty Into the Tangled Bank. He starts with the wildlife found in your kitchen sink, and gradually deepens connections to nature within and outside your own four walls.

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Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski review – supremely sharp [20 Jul 2020|06:00am]

The late writer’s singular qualities shine through in these brilliant columns for the London Review of Books

When the novelist Jenny Diski was diagnosed with cancer, she wrote in an essay in the London Review of Books (A Diagnosis) that her first feeling was of embarrassment: she did not want to join the herd who had already written about cancer; and yet she recognised that, as a writer, she could not avoid the subject.

If you knew nothing of her, you might assume this to have been the disdainful shunning of what she seemed to see as a cancer club, but it was more that apartness was key to the way she wrote. Debating in another essay (The Natural Death Centre) a friend’s proposal that they jointly buy a plot in Highgate cemetery, she envisaged her possible headstone: “Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” Solitude being her thing, she decided against the grave share, but her DIY epitaph remains appropriate. For in these brilliant, singular, posthumously published columns from the LRB, she writes in an adjacent way: the truth is “over there”.

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Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce review – self-discovery in the South Pacific [19 Jul 2020|10:00am]

The “up lit” novelist does more than warm our hearts in this 1950-set tale of one woman’s journey from mediocrity to adventure

Since her 2012 bestselling debut The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has specialised in stories about overlooked people jolted out of their routines into unexpected situations that allow them to face the buried griefs that have kept them trapped in small lives. She might almost be credited with inspiring the recently popular “up lit” genre, but it would be a mistake to think of her novels as merely “heartwarming”, though the word is frequently attached to them. Joyce has a clear-eyed, unsparing view of regret, failure and loss, and the cost that life exacts from so many, even while she counters it with a belief in the resilience of the human spirit and the possibility of second chances.

Margery Benson shares these traits with Joyce’s previous protagonists, but is unhappy in her own way. In 1950 she is a frustrated teacher in her mid-40s, with a secret passion for beetles – an interest inspired by her father, who told her in 1914 of the fabled golden beetle of New Caledonia, shortly before he shot himself on learning that all four of his sons had been killed at Mons. A failed romance put paid to any hope of a career in entomology for Margery – not that she could have aspired to such a thing, except as a man’s assistant. “She was a woman who’d had a period of excitement, who’d dared to dream of adventure and the unknown, but who had retreated instead and made no further disturbance.”

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Children’s books roundup – the best new picture books and novels [27 Jun 2020|08:00am]

How to show love while we can’t hug, 50 poems dedicated to the moon, a memorial to Scottish witches and the best new YA

Warm, consoling, funny and sad, this month’s picture books offer something for every mood. From Anne Booth and Robyn Wilson-Owen, Bloom (Tiny Owl) is a story of hope, persistence and finding love in small things. Every day, a little girl speaks to a beautiful flower on her way to school, telling it how much she loves it, until the possessive gardener sends her away. Unable to understand why the flower then closes, he tries to make it bloom again – but only when he asks the girl’s advice will the flower again share its beauty. Wilson-Owen’s delicate illustrations are the perfect complement to Booth’s poetic text, with echoes of The Selfish Giant.

The tender simplicity of the tiny While We Can’t Hug (Faber), meanwhile, pairs Eoin McLaughlin’s text with Polly Dunbar’s rosy-cheeked images. Hedgehog and Tortoise, who love hugging, are not able to touch for a while – but Owl reminds them that a wave, a funny face, a letter, a shared song or a painting are wonderful ways to show love.

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Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell review – endless prog rock noodling [19 Jul 2020|08:00am]

The acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas hits a bum note with this hackneyed story of a band in the late 1960s

I may never forgive David Mitchell for writing Cloud Atlas. It was a gloriously inventive mind-storm of a novel, leaping wildly through time and space, seemingly unconstrained by the narrative gravity that pins other books to the ground. I was in my early 20s when it came out and remember pressing it on everyone I knew. I devoured his other novels and waited eagerly for new work. I’ve carried on reading him dutifully since, but nothing has come close to the heights of Cloud Atlas, and each new novel is met with a mixture of hope and the sense that he’d pulled a fast one on me with the glory of his one-hit wonder.

So we come to his latest, the hefty Utopia Avenue, which is the story of the rise and fall of a rock band in the late 1960s. The novel is arranged into three separate “albums” – Paradise Is the Road to Paradise, The Stuff of Life and The Third Planet, with each “track” written from the perspective of a different member of the band (or, on one occasion, the band’s manager, Levon Franklin). Dean Moss, on bass, is a heart-throb from Gravesend who speaks in a grating cockney pastiche; Peter “Griff” Griffin, the drummer is “a northern diamond in the rough. Anarchic, sweary, likes a drink”; “Elf” (Elizabeth) Holloway, the singer, has recently separated from her musical and romantic partner, a laddish Australian, and is primly middle class; finally, there’s Jasper de Zoet (yes, a relative of Jacob de Zoet, the title character of Mitchell’s 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – and living off a Dutch East Indian legacy). Jasper is on guitar, a quiet, troubled, intense young man.

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Kit de Waal: 'As soon as you introduce a talking horse, I'm just not interested' [18 Jul 2020|05:00pm]

The novelist on overlapping identities, having to read the Bible, and why she doesn’t like fantasy fiction

Kit de Waal is a novelist and short-story writer. Her debut novel, My Name Is Leon, was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award while her second, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction. She has also written Becoming Dinah for young adults, and edited Common People, an anthology of working-class writers. In 2019, she was part of the BBC panel creating the 100 Novels That Shaped Our World list, and recently co-created an online literary festival, the Big Book Weekend, in association with the BBC and Arts Council England. De Waal’s new book, Supporting Cast, is a collection of short stories featuring the lives of secondary characters from her previous two novels.

What made you want to write these stories?
All of the characters that I write – even before I sit down to write – have a life beyond the page. They’re not waiting in the wings to walk on. They’re off living their own life, and then they’re in my book, and then go off to live the rest of their life. Nobody’s a secondary character in their own life, but some people skirt around the edges of a party and I always think they’re undoubtedly the most interesting. I had most definitely not finished with these characters.

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Remain in Love by Chris Frantz review – once in a lifetime with Talking Heads [19 Jul 2020|06:00am]

The band’s drummer describes his glory years with the post-punk art-rockers, his bass-playing wife, Tina, and the enigma that is David Byrne

Talking Heads were the most innovative and among the most successful of the post-punk bands. I considered them a sort of postmodern Rolling Stones, in that they combined danceable rhythms and soul music stylings (echoes of Al Green) with art-rock elements such as synthetic sounds and the paranoid persona (Anthony Perkins with electric guitar) of singer David Byrne.

Chris Frantz was the drummer, and the most normal-looking band member, being clean cut, bouffant-haired, with a liking for Brooks Brothers shirts. His wife, Tina Weymouth, was the bassist, and she rivalled the jittery Byrne for one’s attention. She was (and is) chic, elfin, the bass too big for her, but she swung it about like a dancing partner. Frantz’s memoir is the story of the band, of the Frantz-Weymouth marriage, which is apparently blissful (“How I adore her!”), and their relations with Byrne, which were less so.

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Mary-Kay Wilmers: 'At Faber, TS Eliot was referred to as the GLP – Greatest Living Poet' [19 Jul 2020|08:30am]

The editor of the London Review of Books on its enduring appeal, the late Jenny Diski, and why she’s not ready to hand over the reins in her 80s

Mary-Kay Wilmers, who celebrates her 82nd birthday today, is, according to the New York Times, “Britain’s most influential editor”. She was one of the founders of the London Review of Books in 1979 and has been the paper’s editor for 28 years. Her colourful home life was documented in Love, Nina, a memoir by her former nanny Nina Stibbe. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, a collection of Jenny Diski’s writing for the LRB and selected by Wilmers, has just been published.


What do you like about Jenny Diski’s writing?
She says things that most people don’t say. And she’s funny, really funny, and when you don’t expect it. There’s a wonderful quote I came across this morning: “In my experience, writing doesn’t get easier the more you do it. But there is a growth of confidence; not much, but a nugget, like a pearl, like a tumour.” Who else would think of that?

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