Category: literary life

Another one of these rags-to-big-advance stories, this time for Graham Taylor’s Shadowmancer.

Writer/filmmaker John Pilger writes about what he sees as “the silence of writers.”

That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out – a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway. (…)
What would George Orwell make of [a new world order desired by Downing Street]? There is a series of Orwell events planned to mark the centenary of his birth. Most of those participating are politically safe or accredited liberal warriors. What if Orwell had turned Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four into parables about thought control in relatively free societies, in which he identified the disciplined minds of the corporate state and the invisible boundaries of liberal control and the latest fashions in emperor’s clothes? Would they still celebrate him?

I don’t know that there is as much silence as Pilger thinks. Plenty of writers speak their minds about politics: Norman Mailer, Jonathan Franzen, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie all have given their two cents on the very topics that Pilger brings up. Whether people care what writers say in another matter. And who will turn out to be Orwell among these is for the future to decide.
Pilger link from Kitabkhana.

The Boston Globe has an interview with Edward P. Jones, the author of The Known World.

He got a few temporary college teaching assignments after “Lost in the City” appeared, but kept his job, while casting about for a new story to write. In the back of his mind was a fact he had learned at Holy Cross: that there had been black slaveholders in the antebellum South. For more than 20 years, that fact had gnawed at his imagination.
He says, “It was a shock that there were black people who would take part in a system like that. Why didn’t they know better?” It could make a fine story, perhaps a novel, but by 2001 all he had written was six pages of the first chapter and six of the last. He had been writing the rest in his head.

First it was the Guardian‘s Children’s Fiction Prize. Now Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has won the inaugural Booktrust Teenage Prize. But Haddon is also making the adult lists, too, like the Whitbread shorlist.

I heard this on NPR on my way to the post office this morning: John Gray, the best-selling author of the Men are from Mars series is a fabulist. His Ph.D. is from a school that will give you a degree in three days for 500 bucks. Now I feel bad about the 100 grand it cost to get mine.

The 50th anniversary issue of the Paris Review is out, with an introduction by the late George Plimpton. The issue has work by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Edna O’Brien, Ian McEwan, among many others. From the archives, they have an interview with Chinua Achebe. When asked to talk about what inspired him to write, Achebe answers:

I think the thing that clearly pointed me there was my interest in stories. Not necessarily writing stories, because at that point, writing stories was not really viable. So you didn’t think of it. But I knew I loved stories, stories told in our home, first by my mother, then by my elder sister — such as the story of the tortoise — whatever scraps of stories I could gather from conversations, just from hanging around, sitting around when my father had visitors. When I began going to school, I loved the stories I read. They were different, but I loved them too. (…) When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. In one of my essays, I remember the kind of things that fascinated me. Weird things, even, about a wizard who lived in Africa and went to China to find a lamp . . . fascinating to me because they were about things remote, and almost ethereal.
Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. I instinctively took sides with the white people. They were fine! They were excellent. They were intelligent. The others were not . . . they were stupid and ugly. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb, that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail, the bravery, even, of the lions.

They also have an article from the archives on the friendship and feud between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov.