Category: literary life
Over at the Times Online, Ben McIntyre rounds up adaptations of books into movies, and concludes that there may be “no such thing as an unfilmable book.” A few adaptations he mentions:
Hollywood cynics maintain that the better the book, the worse the film, but the real equation is not so simple. Certainly some of the very best books make the worst films (Louis de Bernieres’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), while equally good or better books languish eternally in production purgatory (Donna Tartt’s The Secret History). Some dire books make marvellous films (Peter Benchley’s Jaws), and very occasionally good books make even better films (the works of Roddy Doyle). Perhaps the oddest sub-category is that of entirely obscure books that become film classics (who has read Red Alert by Peter George, the book that was adapted into Dr Strangelove?).
Read the rest here.
Robert McCrum comments in the Observer on the oft-repeated canard that fiction is dead. “Every few years,” he writes, “some bright spark pops up to tell us that the Novel Is Dead.”
The most recent pronouncement I can think of came from V.S. Naipaul (see here, for instance.) But McCrum dates these cries of doom and gloom all the way back to the 1960s, and trots out counter-evidence along the way.
McCrum seems particularly annoyed with an essay by Rachel Donadio that appeared in the New York Times (“Truth is Stronger Than Fiction“) last month. Says McCrum:
There’s not enough room here to explore the fascinating nuances of a well-argued piece, and I suppose it depends how you define your terms, but in the same issue of the NYT, the bestseller list showed that a novel, The Da Vinci Code, had been in the charts for 123 straight weeks. That, according to the NYT, is not ‘culture’, it’s ‘escape’.
Maybe. However, in the season in which McEwan’s Saturday has been breaking all previous records for serious fiction and in which the Booker Prize longlist includes important new books by Ishiguro, Barnes, Ali Smith and Salman Rushdie, the suggestion that, in the aftermath of 11 September, ‘non-fiction is better suited than fiction to capturing the complexities of today’s world’ is perverse, even baffling.
Granted, the great novel of our millennial crisis has yet to be written, but when it appears, as it surely will, the publishers who told the New York Times that ‘non-fiction dominates’ will be the first to reach for their chequebooks.
Stories, not facts (or ‘truth’, as the NYT has it) are what we turn to when we want to make sense of chaos and complexity. Fiction does not answer to a 24-hour news cycle, but when it delivers, it is the news.
I think these things are sort of cyclical, and we may have been at the bottom of the curve for a while, but things are looking up.
David Ulin became the new editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, effective in October. Here he is on notable books for the fall.
David Kipen left the San Francisco Chronicle for Washington, where he’ll direct the literature program at the NEA. Check out the farewell party report by Mark “In The Know” Sarvas.
The Booker Longlist was announced, and includes all the big names you’d expect: Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith. The shortlist will be announced this Thursday.
The Lit Blog Co-Op, of which I’m a member, wrapped up preparations for its fall pick announcement. Here are some clues on the nominees, courtesy of Ed Champion.
The new issue of Ruminator came out, with contributions by Gloria Kurian Broder, Daniel Handler and David Sedaris, and an interview with actor Joan Allen, among other things.
826LA announced that Los Angeles mayor Antonia Villaraigosa will guest edit its newest anthology of student writing (scroll down).
Outsider Ink published a fall issue devoted to life under George W. Bush.
After complaints from the ADC, the entry for the word “Arab” on Thesaurus.com was amended to strike out pejorative synonyms such as welfare bum, homeless person, and beggar.
A.L. Kennedy wrote an excellent piece for the Huffington Post about the travelling life of the modern writer.
American-born novelist Diana Abu-Jaber was held at Miami International Airport for two hours while immigration officers “checked her out with Washington.” She was told this was likely to happen again next time she travels by plane.
Adam Langer’s latest column for the Book Standard is about author interviews. Who gives good ones? Who doesn’t? Langer sorts his answers into five categories: The Freewheeling Improviser, He/She Who Does Not Suffer Fools Gladly, The Unself-conscious Subject, The Consummate Storyteller, and The Genuinely Decent Human Being. Good stuff.
Doreen Baingana, the author of the lovely collection Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, writes in the Guardian about expectations made of African writers that they only about the tragic and the horrifying. But, she says,
Fiction writers have the language and leeway to play with received notions of truth; to form new stories out of raw material, like glass out of sand, creating something different and idiosyncratic.
Link swiped from Lit Saloon.
Here’s a brief article on blogs, courtesy of the Guardian. Among the findings cited: A new blog is created every second, but only 13% of blogs are updated once a week or more.