In The Independent…..writers who cannot write and Salman Rushdie (who can write) admits the fatwa made him into a nicer person (and helped him get to know some really nice bodyguards.)
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While attempting to research a biography on Louis XIV’s mistress Veronica Buckley stumbled upon the lost diaries of the former king of France. The problem was the diary was not written 282 years ago, but in 1998.
What Buckley quotes is in fact the work of François Bluche. In 1998 this French academic decided to imagine what the king’s journals might have been like, by piecing together information gleaned from myriad historical documents. The result was a book, Le Journal secret de Louis XIV, which Buckley got hold of and used as a primary source.
I think this brings the fraudulent or recalled memoir/biography count to four? or is it five? this year…
More in The Guardian
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The Hitler Diaries, one of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time, was printed 25 years ago.
There are things you wish you’d never done. One of mine was to have held up the front page to the newsroom, saying: “Look at that. You’ll never see another front page like that as long as you live.”
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One of the last great mystery pulp writers passed on recently. The obituary of Edward D. Hoch was featured in The Guardian this morning.
In every monthly issue since May 1973, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine has featured a short story by Edward D Hoch. Hoch, who has died after a heart attack aged 77, was perhaps the last heir of the penny-a-word scribes who pounded out a living in pulp magazines. He published nearly 1,000 short stories, primarily mysteries, in the few fiction magazines that survived the demise of the pulps…
Hoch was best known for his short stories but also wrote a few novels including The Shattered Raven, The Blue Movie Murders, and The Frankenstein Factory.
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Penguin has released the sixth of its experimental online stories, and it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure, all be it a more literary version written by Booker nominee Mohsin Hamid.
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Phillip M. Parker has “written” over 200,000 books, however some might say he cheated. The New York Times interviews the author who has taken The Long Tail to a whole new level.
Parker has a computer program which compiles the books based on search criteria. In the interview Parker agrees that his books don’t really have any new insight but help take the leg work out of the research process.
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For the past five years, AbeBooks.com has been a sponsor of the BC Book Prizes , for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize which has five nominees this year.
1. The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
2. Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden
3. The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67
4. Phantom Limb
5. Everywhere Being is Dancing
You can even enter to win all five titles
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Author Linda Grant reminds everyone what fiction is all about - making it up.
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Giles Foden - author of Ladysmith and The Last King of Scotland - bemoans the lack of pubs and restaurants where writers can meet and shoot the breeze at a Guardian blog.
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I’m going to create a crazy blog and then wait for the megabucks book deal. Cue article in the NY Times. Stuff White People Like is a very clever blog - as a middle-class white person, I think it is very funny. The amazing thing is that this blog has only been around since January. Someone told me about it three weeks ago and here they are getting the $300,000 advance from a publisher.
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Margaret Atwood salutes Anne of Green Gables in Saturday’s Guardian. To the outside world, Margaret is Canadian literature so I suppose The Guardian had to ask her to write it.
Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, a year before my mother was born, so when I first grinned and snivelled my way through it at the age of eight, it was a youthful 40. I revisited it through the eyes of my own child in the 1980s, when it was approaching 80. Then our family actually went to Prince Edward Island, and stayed in Charlottetown, and saw the sprightly, upbeat Anne of Green Gables musical that’s been running there continuously since 1965. I enjoyed it a lot, but watching a show about an 11-year-old girl with some real 11-year-old girls casts a different light on things: some of that enjoyment was vicarious
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In the old days, there were just cookbooks. Now there are more books about food and eating than you can shake a truffle at. So says a lady in the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon. She’s quite right - last night I started reading just such a book…. Heat by Bill Buford. I love these kind of books but overload isn’t far away.
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I always find them a bit of a let down, perhaps it’s just because I’m sad about finishing the book, but here are the 100 best final lines from novels in handy PDF form!
Thanks to the Blog of a Bookslut
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The Guardian sticks it to My Year of Living Biblically and all those other rubbish books.
Think of something you could do in year and then tell an agent. Trust me, they’ll drool. It doesn’t matter how dull the thing is (I’ve just secured a six-figure two-book deal with My Year of Slightly Changing My Cycle Route to Work and its sequel, My Year of Reverting to the Original Route).
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This American bloke should meet Lynne Truss.
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