Bookmans discussed Harry Potter's texts
20 May 2012 18:33:49
Academics gathered in Scotland on Friday to discuss hot literary topics including the racial politics of goblins, the canonisation of Neville Longbottom, and Beedle the Bard as mythopoesis in the Chaucerian tradition. Welcome to the UK's first conference on Harry Potter.
Entitled A Brand of Fictional Magic: Reading Harry Potter as Literature, the conference brings together 60 scholars from around the world for a two-day event hosted by the University of St Andrews school of English. Billed as t... Read Full Story
Cannes film festival and its connection with bookworm
20 May 2012 18:30:47
The Cannes festival is, famously, the keeper of the flame of the auteur tradition. The ritual of honouring the overarching vision of a single writer-director is entrenched in its history – from Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni to Jane Campion and Andrea Arnold. Since the turn of the millennium, only two winners of the Palme d'Or have been literary adaptations: Roman Polanski's The Pianist, and Laurent Cantet's The Class. Of the remaining films, only one – Ken Loach's The Wind that Sha... Read Full Story
Soon will be a biography from David Cameron
20 May 2012 18:21:15
The book, Cameron: Practically a Conservative, describes how on a weekend Cameron may practice his game with a tennis machine he calls "the Clegger", after the deputy prime minister. Later on, he would cook dinner, have a few glasses of wine and sing My Way on his personal karaoke machine.
But the prime minister's ability to relax can cause problems, such as when last year's riots intruded upon his summer holiday in Tuscany and he was slow to realise the enormity of the situation.
With Britain... Read Full Story
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
18 May 2012 08:45:05
It has been eight years since Stephen King presented readers with the controversially open ending to his epic fantasy sequence, The Dark Tower. The seven-book series eventually stretched to nigh-on 4,500 pages, and it would have been fair to assume the author was done with a story he began over three decades ago, inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", and by the spaghetti westerns of the 1970s.But Roland the gunslinger and his battered band of followers – a ... Read Full Story
True story about Spencer Perceval in the book called 'Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die by Andro Linklater'
18 May 2012 08:43:23
High on a wall in Westminster Abbey, in anything but pride of place, is Richard Westmacott's monument to Spencer Perceval, who, 200 years ago today, was shot dead in the House of Commons, the only British prime minister so far to have died by assassination. The memorial was "erected by the Prince Regent and parliament", and perhaps it would have been given a more prominent position if the prince had not been a late and reluctant supporter of Perceval's ministry. His straitlaced evangelical premi... Read Full Story
Talking about Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel book
18 May 2012 08:41:12
Philippa Gregory has very successfully tackled the Boleyn girls, Mary the Mistress and Anne the Aggravating. Then there's The Tudors, the TV series, in which church geopolitics are ably dealt with, though some of the underwear is anachronistic and Henry VIII is a dark, brooding romantic who never gets fat. This is stretching it, but makes for much better sex than if he were to wheeze and grunt and ooze from his decaying leg all over the bedsheets, as in real life.
I have a weakness for the Tudo... Read Full Story
Aharon Appelfeld won the prize for Blooms of Darkness
17 May 2012 10:32:53
Inspired by his experiences during the Holocaust, a novel by the 80-year-old Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld has won the Independent foreign fiction prize.
Blooms of Darkness is loosely based on his childhood during the second world war. The author was deported to a labour camp at Transnistria at the age of seven, later escaping and ending up in Palestine in 1946, aged 14. Although the author grew up speaking German, he chooses to write instead in the Hebrew he learned from the age of 14, calli... Read Full Story
Every school should have a copy of Bible
17 May 2012 10:31:10
Millionaire Conservative party donors have clubbed together to rescue a plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to send a copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the country.
Gove hoped to mark the 400th anniversary of the Bible's completion by donating a leather-bound copy, written in 17th-century English, to all primary and secondary schools by Easter.
However, his plans were said to have run into trouble in January when government sources reported that David Cameron had... Read Full Story
Vampire stories are still popular
17 May 2012 10:29:38
Mourning has broken out among fans of the telepathic Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse after author Charlaine Harris announced that next year would see the publication of the final novel in her Southern Vampire Mysteries series.
Harris, whose bestselling books about vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings in the small southern town of Bon Temps was made into the popular True Blood television series, has previously hinted that she was planning to bring the story to a close. But she... Read Full Story
About writers protesting and their members
13 May 2012 15:37:57
Major literary names including Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman and Mario Vargas Llosa are protesting the planned $300m restructuring of the iconic Fifth Avenue branch of the New York Public Library, saying it is "a misplaced use of funds in a time of great scarcity".
A letter signed by more than 700 writers, academics and others was sent to the library yesterday, criticising plans to add a collection of books for lending to the reference library currently housed on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. ... Read Full Story
Shortlists with beautiful stories
13 May 2012 15:36:40
The shortlist for perhaps my favourite of the literary awards has just been announced: the Ondaatje prize, which goes to the "book of the highest literary merit – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – evoking the spirit of a place". This year a wonderfully varied lineup of titles is in the running, from Rahul Bhattacharya's evocation of Guyana in his first novel The Sly Company of People Who Care, to Olivia Laing's meditation on the Ouse, To the River, and from Teju Cole's slice of New York Open City t... Read Full Story
Jeanette Winterson become a teacher
13 May 2012 15:32:44
Jeanette Winterson has been appointed professor of creative writing at Manchester University, a post held in recent years by Martin Amis and, briefly, Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.
Winterson, 53, is best known for her 1985 debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published soon after she left Oxford University. She will take up her post in October and teach both undergraduates and MA students, as well as giving four public lectures each year.
Winterson was born in Manchester and brought up i... Read Full Story
