Category: literary life

Are pre-schoolers’ picture books becoming a tad too realistic? This article reviews a trend of children’s books that seem to boldly go where none had before.

Cinderella’s Bum (and other bottoms), Nicholas Allan’s take on a big sister who is worried about the size of her bottom, is published in a new edition by Red Fox. Jennifer Jones Won’t Leave Me Alone by Frieda Wishinsky and Neal Layton, the story of a classroom crush, is published in a new edition by Picture Corgi. The Sprog Owner’s Manual (or how kids work), a new book by Babette Cole, is published by Cape. But most controversial of all is Where Willy Went: The Big Story of a Little Sperm, a new offering from the pen of Nicholas Allan, under the Hutchinson imprint.

In a bizarrely titled article, the Scotsman‘s Tim Cornwell talks about the process of cataloguing the John Murray archives.

The archive is being offered to the National Library at what is said to be a discount price by today’s John Murray, after the firm was sold to publishing giant Hodder Headline. Quaritch have put the value at 45m, possibly more.
For the last quarter-century or so it has been maintained by Murray’s wife, Virginia. She enjoys the detailed ledgers kept for every book, showing costings, print run, sales figures, correspondence between author and publisher, and even where a book was pulped because it failed to sell.

Read the article here.

The nominees for the PEN/Faulkner awards have been announced: ZZ Packer for Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Tobias Wolff for Old School, Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore, Frederick Barthelme’s Elroy Nights, and John Updike’s The Early Stories.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, Aloft, is about a wealthy Italian-American man going through a series of family crises.

For Lee, writing from the perspective of a character so seemingly different from himself and his earlier protagonists felt unremarkable. “It’s not an issue for me,” he says. “I’m sure people will say, ‘Why did you write about a white guy?’ He shrugs. “Not every hero of mine is Asian.” Still, Aloft is a risky undertaking for a novelist who has, whether he likes it or not, firmly established himself as a “Korean-American writer.”

From Amy Rosenberg’s interview with Chang-rae Lee in this month’s Poets & Writers. Lee will be in town on the 16th, reading from Aloft over at Annie Bloom’s Books.

One evening just after my fiftieth birthday, I pushed against the door of a pub not far from my childhood home. My father, on the way back from his office in London, was inside, standing at the bar. He didn’t recognize me, but I was delighted, almost ecstatic, to see the old man again, particularly as he’d been dead for ten years, and my mother for five.

From “Long Ago Yesterday” by Hanif Kureishi, in this week’s New Yorker.

The amazing Maud Newton is in this weekend’s Washington Post, reviewing Jiro Adachi’s The Island of Bicycle Dancers.