Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

Alexander McCall Smith’s Heroine Precious Ramotswe Set to Publish Cookbook

Monday, June 29th, 2009
Woman cooking Botswana Fat Cakes - a favourite food of Precious Ramotswe

Woman cooking Botswana Fat Cakes - a favourite food of Precious Ramotswe

Precious Ramotswe, leading character of  Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is “writing” a cookbook to share her favourite recipes for Botswanan dishes.

The cookbook is actually the brainchild of charity worker and former BBC journalist, Stuart Brown.  While working  for a charity in Africa, Brown collected authentic Botswanan recipes and with McCall Smith’s blessing,  the cookbook project came to life.  “I am delighted to be working with Stuart on this book, which will raise funds for worthwhile causes in Botswana,” says McCall Smith who will write a forward and reflections from Ramotswe for the book.

Precious Ramotswe’s  generous figure is a recurring theme throughout the series and in Blue Shoes and Happiness, the seventh book, she tries dieting before deciding that satisfying her appetite is more important. As for the cookbook, Brown says that concessions have been made to healthy eating but much of the food is of the calorific type enjoyed by the heroine. “As fans of the series know, Mma Ramotswe is quite a fan of doughnuts, or fat cakes as they are called in Botswana. They feature heavily in her recipe book, as well as fruit cake. The book is a celebration of what she calls the ‘traditional African build’, as she is very much against the tyranny of the thin shape which dominates the fashion world.

Watch for the book in November the  scheduled date for publication by Polygon.

Charles Bukowski letter to Ann Menebroker sells for $1,500

Friday, June 26th, 2009

We sold a typed Charles Bukowski letter earlier this week for $1,500. It’s a great letter, from the poet to Ann Menebroker, another poet and long-time friend.

Hello Ann—
Hold yourself together, the glue may arrive to keep you and Wayne going.
Of course I’d like to see you but I can promise you nothing–
neither sex or love or maybe not even understanding. But
I would like to see you. We could have some drinks and lounge
about and you could stay as long as you wished. Things are
quiet here. People do come by but not too often. I have no
strong attachments. There is one lady who says, “Bukowski,
I don’t see why you don’t love me. I’m a beautiful woman.”
“Sorry,” I tell her, “I’ve got the lever turned to OFF.”
I don’t know if I ever want to get back into a strong
affair again. I am too emotional, I am too sentimental; when
when the games begin–the hard games men and women play against each other, I am lost.
Well, the book finally came out, it’s a fat one, SELECTED POEMS,
and my name’s on the cover so I suppose that I wrote them.
Try to stay well and don’t feel too bad, or if you do
feel too bad, remember it happens to all of us. Hold, dear,
hold to the fucking walls, and soon you’ll be laughing, you’ll
be thinking, how did I ever let it get hold of me like that?
All we need is time–to straighten out, feel better, and then
make the same mistake all over again.
love, BUK

Life coaching - Bukowski-style.

Twitterature - Classic Literature Retold in “Tweets”

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The Telegraph reports that two American students have been commissioned by Penguin to write a compilation called Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less.

The book will be made up of classic novels, abridged in the style of Tweets. (For those not familiar with the lingo, Tweets are short messages sent via the social networking site Twitter.)

At this time, it’s not known what literary masterpieces will be dramitically pared down but the book is expected to be released this autumn.

Making hay for John Berger’s archives

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

“Sure - come and get my papers, letters and manuscripts, but you’ll have to help with the haymaking.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s journalism apprenticeship

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell talks to the Independent about his early days as a journalist shaped his book writing skills.

Modesty may not be Gladwell’s natural mode, but nor is he arrogant in any unpleasant way. But, yes, sir, he did do the necessary apprenticeship to become excellent at what he does. “There is this moment of mastery that descends,” he offers. It happened for him as a reporter one afternoon in 1993 when a gunman had opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Gladwell was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. With the first deadline almost upon him, he made it out to the scene and dictated the entire front-page story over the phone without writing down a single word.

“In my first years I wouldn’t have conceived of doing it,” he says. “I just got on the phone and called it in and didn’t think twice about it.” He has since done a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation of the hours spent writing for the paper up until that day. Ten thousand hours, of course. “It’s a marvellous moment. There is a reason why cognitively complicated jobs require long apprenticeships.”

John Steinbeck - legend of literature

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

We have just posted our latest legend of literature feature. John Steinbeck - author of classics like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden and Of Mice and Men - goes under the spotlight this time. Enjoy.

Slumdog Millionaire Star to Publish Autobiography

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Rubina AliRubina Ali, child star of the Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, is set to publish an autobiography.

It amazes me to think that a 9-year-old would have material for such a book but having been discovered in the slums of India and then achieving international fame, I’m sure she has more to tell and say than 16-year-old Miley Cyrus.

Slumdog Millionaire is an adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A.

Read more about Ali’s upcoming book.

See our Indian novels feature.

Octomom To Write Autobiography

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Nadya SulemanJust when you thought it was safe to go to the bookstore…

Octomom, Nadya Suleman has announced that she will be writing her autobiography. (In the copious spare time that a mother of 14 has.) The book is to be co-authored by Wendy Leigh who also co-wrote Life With My Sister Madonna with Christopher Ciccone.

Claremont Review youth writing contest winners

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

claremont-review1The Claremont Review - the non-profit Victoria, BC-based literary magazine - has announced the winners of its annual writing contest for young people. The competition - which is sponsored by AbeBooks.com since 2005 - attracted more than 700 submissions of poetry and fiction from dedicated young writers, aged 19 and under, from across North America. We love the folks at the Claremont Review - they’re an incredible group of teachers who love books, literature and creative writing. Find copies of their magazine and a collection of Claremont writing here.

This year’s winning entries will be published in The Claremont Review’s fall edition. The top three writers in each category will receive prizes of $500, $300 and $200 respectively. All entrants receive a one year subscription to the magazine.

Fiction
First - Elizabeth Comuzzi from Groton, MA
Second - Robert Pierrard from Victoria, BC
Third - Jillian Aalhus from Fort St. John, BC

Poetry
First - Krista Oehlke from Plano, Texas
Second - Desanka Beslic from Denver, CO
Third - Kelsey Harbord from Calgary, AB

The Claremont Review judges described short story, Up and Down, written by fiction winner Elizabeth Comuzzi as “a piece of writing that exemplifies freshnness of observation perfectly. The hallmarks of bruised youth: drugs, sex and boredom, are reinvigorated here in satisfying and unexpected ways. It’s an edgy, honest story with deeply satisfying conclusions.”

The judges described Krista Oehlke’s poem, Tortilla Moon, as a beautiful piece of writing that “emphasizes how much the narrator learns from her grandmother (her abuelita) about love from the way she is taught to mix flour, water and love.”

Dangerous Book of Heroes

Monday, May 25th, 2009

Conn and David Iggulden write about some heroes in the Independent from their Dangerous Book of Heroes.

More to Conan Doyle than just Holmes

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

coming-of-the-fairiesHaving met a many authors, I can reveal many are just like you and I. But Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, born 150 years ago today, could never be described as ordinary and there’s a lot more to this writer besides Sherlock Holmes. (For instance, did you know he wrote a book about the existence of fairies?)

Inventing Holmes and helping to shape the whole crime writing genre are just a couple of his more high profile achievements. He was also a doctor (who luckily had time for writing books between his appointments), a useful goalkeeper, a pretty good golfer, a handy cricketer who played 10 first-class matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club (that’s the most famous cricket club in the world), a failed ophthalmologist in Vienna, a vocal supporter of the Boer War in South Africa, a failed parliamentary candidate, a keen advocate of judicial law who investigated two apparent miscarriages of justice, and a believer in spiritualism and fairies.

Discover how there’s much more to Conan Doyle than Sherlock Holmles - read on.

Top 10 underground reads

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

web-of-fear1The Guardian tells us about the top 10 best underground reads - not books to be read underground but books with underground themes. I love Moonfleet - a proper adventure book about proper smugglers. The list misses out The Highfield Mole (also called Tunnels), which causes a stir two years ago and was incorrectly labelled as the next Harry Potter. My all-time favourite underground read is Doctor Who and the Web Fear - this takes place completely in the London Underground. London has been evacuated because of a deadly suffocating fog and rampaging Yeti-like creatures are on the loose. The Doctor and some soldiers battle evil in the tunnels.

moonfleet1. Moonfleet by J Meade Falkner
Smuggling was practised not only on the Spanish Main but around our sceptr’d Isle. At New Brighton, Merseyside, where my family is from, the privateers salted their booty away beneath the butter-soft sandstone. Moonfleet contains my cri de coeur: “I believe there never was a boy yet who saw a hole in the ground, or a cave in a hill, or much more an underground passage, but longed incontinently to be into it and discover whither it led.”

2. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Jules Verne’s evergreen page-turner is a reminder that the best adventures may be right under our noses, or rather the soles of our feet. The author described the breathtaking feats of underground engineering achieved by the natural world: “a succession of arches appeared before us like the aisles of a Gothic cathedral; here the architects of the Middle Ages might have studied all the forms of that religious architecture which developed from the pointed arch.”

3. The Underground Man by Mick Jackson
A man in Hackney, east London, was recently dubbed the Mole Man for tunnelling under his neighbours’ houses. Mick Jackson’s real-life model for this novel, the fifth Duke of Portland, was a Mole Man born to the ermine (not inappropriately, you may think, as ermine like to burrow.) He created a sunken ballroom under his ducal seat. He insisted that his servants kept a chicken roasting at all hours of the day, and had it brought to him on heated wagons through underground passages. Jackson brilliantly ventriloquises his lordship in this novel, but the truth is unfathomably stranger than fiction.

4. The Subterranean Railway by Christian Wolmar
The history of the London tube, the first underground train network in the world. Dirty, stuffy, run for the benefit of private business rather than the poor bloody passengers – and it was just as bad when it started! Christian Wolmar knows more about the railways than the men who run them – on second thoughts, that’s not quite the compliment it was intended to be.

5. The Lore of the Land by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson
Though not confined to the subterranean, this essential gazetteer of folklore is chokka with secret passages, buried treasure and the strange tolling of sunken church bells. The book shows that the same myths recur around the country, including the legend of the plucky violinist who enters a forbidding tunnel. The music suddenly stops and the fiddler’s never heard of again. A veritable Crufts of shaggy dog stories.

haweswater6. Haweswater by Sarah Hall
Sarah Hall’s justly praised debut novel is set in the lost village of Mardale in the Lake District. It was so cut off that when anyone died, the body was carried over the fells on a Corpse Road to the nearest graveyard. Mardale finally got its own consecrated plot, but then it was decided to submerge the whole village under Haweswater to create a reservoir. So the dead of Mardale were dug up and taken to join their ancestors. On hot summer days, the dry stone walls of Mardale eerily reappear.

7. The Dig by John Preston
For years, people wondered what was in the extraordinary burrows at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk. They were on land owned by the wealthy Edith Pretty. A clairvoyant told her that her late husband wanted the mounds excavated. The task fell not to Tony Robinson and the gadget-toting Time Team but a horny-handed countryman called Basil Brown, who uncovered the remains of an Anglo-Saxon king. Preston’s novel is a deft excavation of the class snobberies surrounding the historic 1930s dig.

8. Selected Caves of Britain and Ireland by Des Marshall & Donald Rust
The Baedeker of the below-ground world, this is a must for cavers, an excellent primer for novices and deliciously gooseflesh-raising for those who haven’t the slightest intention of going anywhere near a pothole. It was my invaluable companion on a descent of Long Churn in the Yorkshire Dales, which was first tamed in 1848 by “J Birkbeck and party” and is described in this Michelin guide to Middle Earth as “a fine though heavily used cave”.

a-tour9. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe
“Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars,” wrote Defoe. “The bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stocked with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends.” Knowing that the great Defoe had been there before me enhanced my pleasure in keeping alive the tradition of troglodyte tippling in Nottingham, at a pub called The Trip to Jerusalem which was quarried out of the city’s Castle Rock.

10. The Time Machine by HG Wells
One of the finest works of science fiction set in the subterranean. In the dystopian future imagined by Wells, the Morlocks are a race who lived below ground. In researching my book, I was amazed to find that some of my fellow countrymen have made similar lifestyle choices to the Morlocks. It’s no slight on the good people of Wolverley in the West Midlands to say that they’re cavemen. There, a des res called Rock House was on the market, carved out of a cliff face and a snip at £25,000.

Story behind 1984

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Yesterday’s Observer had a wonderful article about the story behind George Orwell’s 1984. If my house was being bombed by the Germans and my wife had just died, I probably wouldn’t be in the right frame of mind to write a masterpiece of literature.

It’s a wonderful article with a painfully sad ending.

Top 26 words in the English language

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Ammon Shea spent one year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, all 21,730 pages of it. He also published a book about the reading of the dictionary in which he lists his 26 favourite words in the English language.

Accismus — An insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.
Bayard — A person armed with the self-confidence of ignorance.
Compotation — An episode of drinking or carousing together.
Debag — To strip the pants from a person, either as a punishment or as a joke.
Exsibilation — The act of hissing someone off the stage.
Fornale — To spend one’s money before it has been earned.
Gaum — To stare vapidly.
Happify — To make happy.
Indread — To feel secret dread.
Jentacular — Of or pertaining to breakfast.
Kankedort — An awkward situation or affair.
Lant — To add urine to ale, in order to make it stronger.
Misdelight — Pleasure in something wrong.

Mumpsimus — A stubborn refusal to give up an archaism, especially in speech or language.
Nod-crafty — “Given to nodding the head with an air of great wisdom.”
Occasionet — A minor occasion.
Paradobre — A defense against bores.
Peristeronic — “Suggestive of pigeons.”
Quomodocunquinze — To make money in any way possible.
Rapin — An unruly art student.
Supersaliency — “The leaping of the male for the act of copulation.”
Tardiloquent — Talking slowly.
Umbriphilous — Fond of the shade.
Vocabularian — One who pays too much attention to words.
Wonderclout — A thing that is showy but worthless.
Zoilus — An envious critic.

(Via Jacket Copy)

Westward Ho! & other exclamation marks

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

The Guardian writes about the apparent revival of exclamation marks. I’ve visited Westward Ho! in Devon and very impressed to see a huge ! on the signs. It has a lovely beach too. Imagine living there and being able to list Westward Ho! as your address.

I’ve never read Charles Kingsley’s historical novel but 1855 first editions of Westward Ho! are super collectible.

For me, exclamation marks should be used sparingly. When someone writes something and then goes !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, they should be hauled out and horsewhipped.