The science book author become a wiiner of London literature festival
06 Jul 2012 03:06:32
Heavyweight US novelist Don DeLillo's unpublished one-act play The Word for Snow is set to receive its European premiere in London next week.
Originally commissioned by US theatre company Steppenwolf in 2007, the play is DeLillo's response to climate change and tells of an Earth where the physical world is disappearing, with only the words describing that world left in their place. The title is drawn from a question asked during the play: "Are you saying children will build a snowman with the w... Read Full Story
Book about rock musicians!
06 Jul 2012 03:04:23
Peter Hook will publish a new memoir looking back on his years in Joy Division. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division follows 2009's The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, which traced the origins of Manchester's most famous nightclub.
Publishers Simon & Schuster have officially announced the book, which will be published on 1 October. "In [his] frank, no-holds-barred style … Peter 'Hooky' Hook gives us the inside story of life with Joy Division," according to the publisher. "He talks with eye-o... Read Full Story
Caine prize has taken by Rotimi Babatunde
04 Jul 2012 22:58:53
The "ambitious, darkly humorous" story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in Burma during the second world war has won Nigeria's Rotimi Babatunde the £10,000 Caine prize for African writing.
Babatunde, who beat authors from Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa to win the prestigious award for a short story by an African writer published in English, tells of the experiences of Colour Sergeant Bombay in his winning piece Bombay's Republic. Chair of judges, the novelist and poet Bernadine Evaristo... Read Full Story
Dan Brown's popularity doesn't weakens
04 Jul 2012 22:56:06
Dan Brown may no longer be the fastest-selling adult author of all time, losing out on that record last week to EL James and her slice of erotica Fifty Shades of Grey, but The Da Vinci Code author has retained another, less sought-after honour: he has topped Oxfam's list of the writers most donated to its charity shops for the fourth year running.
Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin was the second most likely author to have his books donated to Oxfam's 685 shops, followed by James Patterson, Alexa... Read Full Story
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn
03 Jul 2012 11:35:10
Kuhn's study of scientific revolutions was not an instant bestseller. It sold just 919 copies in 1962-63 and slightly less the following year. But more than 1.4m copies have been bought since then, and the influence of this seminal text spread far beyond the history and philosophy of science. As Ian Hacking rightly says in his excellent introduction to this 50th anniversary edition: "Great books are rare. This is one." Kuhn argued that science was not just about the simple delineation of materia... Read Full Story
What children like to read?
03 Jul 2012 11:23:29
Blyton's stories remain popular today, with over half a million copies of the Famous Five books sold every year, but they are dogged by accusations of sexism and implicit racism. The books were even reworked two years ago to give them more appeal to modern children, with changes including replacing the word "tinker" with "traveller" and making the text more gender-neutral (Anne loves teddies rather than dolls). But the poll of 20,000 adults, carried out by children's charity Plan UK, found the a... Read Full Story
Auctions are going to sell all relics?
03 Jul 2012 11:22:09
Thought the conditions under which women gave birth in the 1950s, laid out in Call the Midwife, were harrowing? Try the 17th century, when with much "strugling [sic], halings, and enforcements" midwifes would attempt to pull babies out before labour had even begun, and a hooked stick, or "crotchet", was used in the place of forceps.
Percival Willughby practised as an obstetrician from around 1630, and recorded more than 200 cases in his Observations in Midwifery, a work written around 1670 in w... Read Full Story
Broken standards - prize winners
01 Jul 2012 02:55:28
I hope it doesn't sound too pompous if I say that of all the things I've done in the course of my work, helping to get the Cape/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize up and running is perhaps the one of which I'm most proud. The standard of entries is always amazingly high. The winners – and even a runner-up, in the case of Joff Winterhart, whose brilliant Days of the Bagnold Summer has just been published – often go on to land a publishing deal, or a newspaper strip. Best of all, during the... Read Full Story
What ministers are promise for libraries?
01 Jul 2012 02:53:33
Crisis, what crisis? Despite a report earlier this week predicting that public libraries could disappear by the end of the decade, the culture minister, Ed Vaizey, hailed the "thriving library service that we have in England" as he announced a series of initiatives at Thursday's Future of Library Services conference.
Unveiling plans to boost cultural activities in libraries, automatically enrol primary school pupils in their local libraries and an ambition to put Wi-Fi in libraries across Engla... Read Full Story
The Land of Decoration Grace McCleen
01 Jul 2012 02:49:53
The debut, which beat titles including Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson and Patrick McGuinness's The Last Hundred Days to win the award, is narrated by 10-year-old Judith McPherson, a member of the Christian Brotherhood of the Last Days. Bullied at school, Judith finds solace in the model world she creates in her bedroom: "An acorn cup becomes a bowl, toothpaste caps funnels for ocean liners, twigs knees for an ostrich." When she makes it snow in her Land of Decoration, and it snows in reality,... Read Full Story
Bombing and poetry in one day in one time in London
29 Jun 2012 02:25:43
The event, which opens what is being called the biggest gathering of poets in world history, Poetry Parnassus, will take place at 9.15pm on Tuesday over the Southbank Centre's Jubilee Gardens, next to the London Eye. The half-tonne of bookmark-shaped poems are by more than 300 contemporary poets from 204 countries, including Seamus Heaney, Jo Shapcott, Kay Ryan and Alain Mabanckou.
"We want to create an image in the sky over these urban spaces that were bombed in the past," said Cristóbal Bianc... Read Full Story
Tandem in writing - husband and his wife are the bestsellers
29 Jun 2012 02:22:26
Niall Leonard, aka Mr Fifty Shades of Grey, or the husband of bestselling erotic novelist EL James, has won a book deal of his own.
The millions of fans of James's erotic trilogy are likely to be disappointed, however: Leonard will not be providing a male perspective on the dark relationship traced in his wife's books, which are told from the viewpoint of a young college student who falls for a businessman with bondage fantasies. Instead, he's been signed up for a young adult thriller in which ... Read Full Story
