Simon Armitage pogos to neo-punk, Anne Enright craves for Cary Grant, The Seventh Seal cheers up Julian Barnes, Diana Evans works out to hip-hop and Jeanette Winterson talks to herself ... writers reveal how they're surviving the corona crisis
Links of the week March 30 2020 (14)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
6 April 2020
‘I've been rereading the book I wish I'd written'
Hilary Mantel
Sad days if you don't read much, and members of my household run a mile from my recommendations, but I saw one of them cast a hopeless glance at the bookshelves, so after some hours took courage and said: "This is truly one of the best novels I have ever, ever read, and I wish heartily that I could have written it myself, and I don't believe you could start it without wanting to know how it ends." It is Eugene McCabe's Death and Nightingales, set in rural Ireland in 1883, and it is a mystery to me how I only came to hear of it recently. I've made up for ignorance by reading it several times, to see how it's done.
In his remarks to the media and the public, World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom has regularly emphasized that accurate, timely information is essential to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet around the world, governments are cracking down on journalists and implementing sweeping restrictions under the guise of combating misinformation and "fake news."
In recent days, police in Venezuela violently detained a journalist and social media commentator, Darvinson Rojas, in reprisal for reporting on COVID-19 in Miranda State. In Iran, the government has imposed sweeping restrictions on coverage, including in the country's Kurdish region, as part of a systematic effort to downplay the scope of the public health crisis. Egypt, similarly, has pressured journalists to downplay the number of infections, going so far as to revoke the credentials of a Guardian correspondent and reprimanding the bureau chief for the New York Times because of a tweet. In Turkey, seven journalists were detained in reprisal for their reporting, according to a local media monitoring group.
Do you find it as obvious as I do that Don DeLillo richly deserves to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? And right away, as in this year?
The inner workings of the Swedish Academy are opaque, but the one thing everybody knows is that their record of choices for the literature prize is spotty at best and in some cases purblind and scandalous (see: Peter Handke). Their sins of commission-when is the last time anyone said or wrote anything about the laureates Rudolf Eucken, Carl Spitteler, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Pearl S. Buck, Nelly Sachs, or Dario Fo?-are exceeded only by their sins of omission. Writers the Academy have passed over include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and, most recently and conspicuously, Philip Roth.
Nevertheless the Nobel continues to exceed the Booker, the Pulitzer, and all other literary awards in its prestige, global impact, and ability to tip the scales toward immortality. As the snubbing of Roth year after year became something of a rueful running joke in the press and even on the streets of New York, as described in Lisa Halliday's roman à clef Asymmetry, I kept muttering to myself, "But what about Don DeLillo? Isn't that a greater injustice?" Because even while Roth was alive I regarded DeLillo as the greatest living American writer, and now the matter is not remotely debatable.
You can't have a good thriller without a nasty and formidable opponent for your hero. But it isn't enough to just write a character and call him "the bad guy." Just as it's important to create a well-rounded, three-dimensional hero, you must create a villain who is well-developed and not just your standard killer, robber, or kidnapper.
So how can we write a well-developed villain who is a worthy opponent to your protagonist?
Create a backstory
Unless you're writing fantasy or sci-fi or the like, your villain will also be human. They will have a personality all their own and, in most cases, they'll have a painful past, so you must tell their story, just as you would with the hero. You want him to be everything that makes us human - fallible, flawed, and complete with a backstory that explains their motives and their reason for being so downright nasty.
About five years before he wrote his first novel, Killing Floor, Lee Child, whose real name is Jim Grant, began to think seriously about writing. At the time he worked as a presentation director for Granada Television in Manchester, England-an "air traffic controller for the broadcast airways" is how he describes it. He did a little bit of everything, from writing and directing to, of course, traffic management-anything, he says, to avoid the dreaded black screen.
It was part of British television's golden age. During his tenure Granada produced "Brideshead Revisited," "The Jewel in the Crown," "Prime Suspect" and "Cracker." But still there was a sense at the company that things were changing as management was pondering a corporate restructuring. So in the back of his mind, he began to consider a different career. Just in case.
"I'd always been a huge reader. It was my main enthusiasm. I just read constantly, hundreds of books a year," he says. "But I had never really stopped to think where they came from. I had never really examined the process. I never really thought about it." As he read John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, "I began to see how he was doing it. I could almost see the skeleton under the skin. I said, ‘Yeah, I could do this.'
With widespread school and library closures due to the new coronavirus outbreak, children's authors and publishers are going digital to provide kids with ways to read, draw, engage, and support other children who might need a helping hand. PW is tracking some of the most creative efforts on social media and across the web, and will be updating our list regularly.
Updated for the April 2 issue, this list includes a how-to drawing series from Random House, Chicago Review Press's video lessons, DK's digital activity packs, and more.
Life breeds paperwork-bills, bank statements, receipts and subscriptions that accumulate with the years. The I.R.S. requires you to keep tax returns for several years, and some documents indefinitely. Homes have paper trails, too, with warranties, mortgage documents and insurance policies. Every appliance has a user's manual. Do you need them all? It's hard to know, but we can help.
Whether your home office is a desk by the kitchen or a dedicated room where you handle both professional and household business, the space can quickly get cluttered and confusing. Paper piles up. When you need to find a bill, document or receipt, you have no idea where to look.
We won't hide the truth: Bringing order to bills, receipts, documents and taxes can be a tedious job. But there is also something deeply satisfying about a neatly labeled fil¬ing system, so keep that in your mind as you dig through years of paperwork.
My book club was the first to concede defeat. Before my gym, hair salon and therapist accepted that there could be no more business as usual as the coronavirus took hold in the UK, the host of my book club got in touch to say that our March meet-up was off.
The news came as no great surprise. Despite best-laid plans to meet every six weeks, our activity had always been sporadic -our last meeting was in December. We had not even settled on our next book yet, such was our preemptive commitment to self-isolation. As our host said, the book club had already been in quarantine for months.
As the Covid-19 crisis has confined us to our homes, a sliver of a silver lining (entirely inadequate, of course, but we look for them all the same) is that it has provided a chance to catch up on our reading. Being mostly solitary and indoors, it is one of the few pursuits that remain unchanged in this new world, while affording us access to others. With every connected device a potential portal for anxiety, it may never have felt so necessary to escape into the printed word.
If you happen to have been a teenage girl anytime in the last half-century, you likely need no introduction to Judy Blume. If you're woefully unacquainted, imagine a professional advice columnist crossed with the coolest sex-ed instructor you could imagine, and there you have it; generations of young women were introduced to sex, periods, masturbation, and countless other "grown-up" topics through Blume's YA novels.
It's been exactly 51 years since Blume published her first novel, and now we're on the verge of a genuine Blume-aissance, as three different Blume works are poised for adaptation. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Blume's seminal 1970 ode to growing pains, sold at auction to Lionsgate earlier this month - a movie with a budget "in the $30 million range" is in the works.
Who can use the term "gone viral" now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more - a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables - without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?
Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not - secretly, at least - submitting to science?
And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies? The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes. But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest - thus far - in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt.
'I can wholeheartedly say that indie publishing is one of the best things I have ever done'
Last week Jemma Hatt was announced as the first ever winner of the Selfies Awards for children's fiction, for her novel The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle. We asked her about her writing, her inspirations, and why she decided to self-publish...
Where did you find inspiration for the Adventurers series?
My inspiration came from two places - Cornwall and Egypt. When I was young my family went on holiday to the West Country almost every year; it is a magical place with its beaches and caves. I've always been fascinated by Ancient Egyptian history, and visited Cairo in 2009. So The Adventurers and the Cursed Castle, about ancient Egyptian treasure in Cornwall, was a combination of two of my long-standing interests. I guess I was writing a story that my younger self would have wanted to read.
30 March 2020
Book sales have leapt across the country as readers find they have extra time on their hands, with bookshops reporting a significant increase in sales of longer novels and classic fiction.
In the week the UK's biggest book chain, Waterstones, finally shut its stores after staff complained that they felt at risk from the coronavirus, its online sales were up by 400% week on week. It reported a "significant uplift" on classic - and often timely - titles including Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Toni Morrison's Beloved, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.
Waterstones also reported a boost for lengthy modern novels, headed by the new bestseller Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, but also including Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and The Secret History, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Dystopian tales are also selling well, particularly Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell'ss Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Egmont has launched 14Stories14Days: a new website, inspired by the recommended 14 days of self-isolation, offering 14 days of free content to provide entertainment and educational support for parents, carers and children across the UK.
With cities and towns across the country under quarantine, bookstores closing, and in-person promotional events canceled, it's not a great time to be publishing a book. And the urge for many authors with titles scheduled for the coming few months will likely be to request a new publication date. For publishers, though, moving titles in significant numbers will be tricky.
A few of the major publishers have already sent communications to their authors, explaining that they continue to do business as usual, despite the unusual times. And, embedded in some of their messages, is that many authors' books will continue as scheduled, tricky as that may be.
If you're one of those people who always said they would write a novel if only they had the time: this is your moment. As more budding writers self-isolate due to the coronavirus and finally knuckle down on their manuscripts, the publishing industry has already seen a surge in submissions.
Literary agent Juliet Mushens, of the Caskie Mushens agency, usually receives between 10 and 15 appeals for representation a day from new writers. Last Monday alone, she received 27.
"I am all in favour of it," she said, of the increase. "We all know that social distancing is going to be crucial to how we combat the virus and I think it's great if people can use that time productively - whether it's learning the guitar, like one of my clients is, or writing that novel. And perhaps it's also about people who have already written that novel but were too scared to hit send - they are realising that life is too short and you have to seize the day!"
I was an audiobook failure. Not a failure at writing the books, mind you, but at listening to them. I could never manage to get through more than a chapter or two, and then my interest would fizzle out and I wouldn’t go back. I’d try and fail every time.
For me, there were two big barriers to the format. First, you have to enjoy not only the story, you have to enjoy the narrator and the way they tell it. That's a huge leap that can leave you flailing for any surface. The narrator is going to read into your ear for six to thirty hours, depending on the length of the book. What if their accent doesn't fit the story? What if the timbre of their voice reminds you of an ex? What if every word from them is just nails on a chalkboard for no reason at all? Are they too fast? Too slow? Too emotive or reading with all the personality of a voicemail message system? The wrong narrator can make your shoulders tighten and your lip curl.
On Monday night, the literary agent, editor and publisher Andrew Blauner sent his contacts a PDF of "The Patient's Checklist" by Elizabeth Bailey. The book is currently out of print, and with no digital copies available, Blauner wanted people to have access to the text should they fall ill and have to go to the hospital. "You can send this version to anyone you'd like, anyone you think might be helped by it. It's the book which [doctor and author] Atul Gawande said ‘could save your life.' "
Blauner is just one member of the homebound publishing community still trying to find a way to work, even if it means giving away a book that sold a respectable 17,000 copies when it was published in 2011. The editors and writers who create books, most based in the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic, New York, and the retailers across the country who put them into customers%u2019 hands are not considered essential businesses. They are effectively on hiatus.
The outcry from publisher and author groups has been swift and furious after the Internet Archive announced last week the launch of it's National Emergency Library, which has removed access restrictions for some 1.4 million scans of mostly 20th century books in the IA's Open Library initiative, making the scans available for unlimited borrowing during the Covid-19 Outbreak.
"We are stunned by the Internet Archive's aggressive, unlawful, and opportunistic attack on the rights of authors and publishers in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic," reads a March 27 statement from Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies president and CEO Maria Pallante, adding that publishers are already "working tirelessly to support the public with numerous, innovative, and socially-aware programs that address every side of the crisis: providing free global access to research and medical journals that pertain to the virus; complementary digital education materials to schools and parents; and expanding powerful storytelling platforms for readers of all ages."
Scott Turow is sitting in the art-filled living room of his 103-year-old colonial-style home, located in a town north of Chicago, discussing the perils of doing pro bono legal work. Dressed casually in a hoodie and jeans, the down-to-earth Harvard-educated lawyer and megaselling author of legal thrillers says he's had unpleasant experiences involving strangers showing up at his door seeking professional counsel. "I've been stalked a couple of times," he says.
Turow's 13 books have sold 30 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 40 languages, according to his publisher, Grand Central Publishing. His latest, The Last Trial, featuring lawyer and recurring character Sandy Stern, will be released in May.
I have a bias toward the private investigator novel, most of it driven by the imagery of classic film noir-shiny-wet pavements, sinewy cigarette smoke curling upward, vintage cars with fat white-wall tires, hard kisses that dip-to-black. The guys wearing sharp-creased fedoras and baggy-legged pants. The women with lipstick pouts, seamed stockings, and hats cocked to the side.
With all due respect to the accidental detective or law enforcement insider, I'm a hardboiled kind of gal. I'll always be enthralled by the private detective yarns of the forties and fifties, and subsequent stories which pay homage to that tradition.