AbeBooks' Reading Copy

Cormac McCarthy looks like a typewriter sort of author – I just can’t see him updating his Twitter account from his iPhone some how. His old manual typewriter, a much-used Olivetti that he bought in a Tennesssee pawnshop around 1963, is up for auction on Friday. This antique is definitely a piece of literary history [...]

The Guardian is quick to report the winner of the annual Bad Sex Award, which was handed out in London this evening. The gong goes to Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones. The novel was first published in French and won France’s Prix Goncourt, that country’s highest literary honour. So the judges will have brought [...]

Villagers save a phone box and create their own mini-library.

Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, admits that she has created a monster (in the sense that it has taken over her life), according to an interview in The Independent. I’m sure the creator of The Teletubbies has the same problem. She sighs, slowly and evenly. “This is all going to be about The Gruffalo, [...]

The monster looks a bit like the rubbery squid from the Bud Light advert. Jane Austen must be turning in her grave.

Sad news this morning – Fantasy author Robert Holdstock died yesterday. His first novel, Eye Among the Blind, was published in 1976 but he is best known for the Mythago Wood cycle of novels – Mythago Wood, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985.

William Wordsworth’s birthplace in the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth is taking a beating from the floods that are causing havoc in the region reports The Independent. (Cockermouth is one of my favourite place names along with Puddletown and Piddletown in Thomas Hardy country.)

Once again the mob has spoken, and we have your winner right here… ….You can see all the entries, i’ve fast forwarded to the winners bracket.

Earlier this week the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award was handed out to Duncan Hamilton for the second time in three years – this time Hamilton won for his biography of the cricketer and demon fast bowler Harold Larwood. This book is going straight onto my ‘to read list.’ I think I [...]

Surely the strangest story of the week concerns Herta Müller, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. The former head of Romania’s secret police has claimed that the Romania-born author, now living in Germany, ‘has no contact with external reality’. Basically, he’s saying she’s a nutter, according to this story in The Guardian. Radu [...]