A real life Ian Rankin mystery

How brilliant is this? Read this Scotsman story

Sean Tan Interview – something a little bit different

Australian author-illustrator Shaun Tan recently gave SPIEGEL an interview — and expressed himself using just pen and paper.

See the interview here.

Twentieth Century British Authors : making connections

Look at what I found doing a Google search for the International Man Booker Prize this evening.

This comes from the UK’s Open University and is a twentieth century author wheel showing the links between authors. I thought I’d explain it to you in person because it wasn’t immediately obvious to me how it worked. I was looking for a legend that told me what all those coloured lines meant and there isn’t one.

So, to get started Click here to get to this jumping off space pictured above.

Once there, click on the Click to launch button. Click on Start and then Next to get to this page.

Choose an author and explore the links he/she has with others.

Here is Iain Banks whose non-Sci-fi writing I enjoy. (When he’s writing Sci-fi he calls himself Iain M. Banks.)

If I click on one of the coloured circles I can see what it is that links Iain Banks with the authors at the other end of the coloured lines.

Here the orange dot is a link to other Sci-fi authors.

Iain Banks (with or without his M.) is tame compared with some. Just take a gander at old Kingsley Amis.

To find out about the author click on his/her name or to find out more about the connection, click on the coloured dot.

The only annoying thing about this wonderful gadget is that once you’ve clicked on a link you can’t page back. You’ll be taken out to the beginning again and it gets a bit wearing.

Biography to Look Out For

There’s an Harper Lee biography in the pipeline – read about it here.

3 Cups of Tea or 3 Cups of Bullshit????

This story from LIS News, a librarians journal in the US about Greg Mortenson. Despite selling more than 4 million copies of his book which is required reading for US servicemen going to Afghanistan there have been complaints about the Three Cups of Tea author, including one from another author we’ve read, Jon Krakauer.

Watch this : http://lisnews.org/node/39011/

Another literary visualisation

This is from The Strand Magazine in 1906. Authors are sized by how much the public read his or her work at the time.

The giant is Dickens, followed by Thackeray and the now largely forgotten Hall Caine. Lesser mortals, left to right, are Thomas Hardy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Augusta Ward, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley Weyman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Israel Zangwill, Charles Reade, and E.F. Benson.

Jonathan Franzen Interview

Jonathan Franzen in interview on the ABC about Freedom

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2011/3154823.htm

Have a listen . . .

Why we do it

I know we didn’t appreciate their lack of appreciation when whe did the MS Society’s Throw the Book thing earlier this year but this article from The Guardian is a sober reminder of the disease we are helping to combat (one of its victims is my cousin Ian).

 The article on The Guardian website  also has video of Collette Waller – leaves me speechless.

Collette Waller: ‘Without MS, there wouldn’t be all these poems’Collette Waller’s powerful poetry – bitter and humble, funny and furious, savage and insightful – records the reality of her life with multiple sclerosis

Collette Waller can’t read her poems out loud any more. In fact, there are lots of things she can’t do any more. She can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t swallow. She is confined to her bed and her wheelchair, and fed through a tube in her stomach. She can still smile though, grin even, and turn a pair of still-bright eyes on you and make a noise – an exaggerated exhalation, a sort of throat snort – that is, quite plainly, a laugh. She does this often. Even pale, puffy, unable (literally) to move a muscle, a cloth under her chin to catch the dribbles, she’s a force of nature. “She’s a stubborn old mare,” kids her partner, Paul Giannini, ruffling her hair. “To be honest, you couldn’t print what we feel about what’s happened, Collette and me. It’s so often the good people, isn’t it? People who make other people’s lives better. She was so busy, so giving. So many friends. She’d played netball for south-east England, you know. She’s no muppet.” Fortunately, a recording exists of Collette reading some of her verse, and a small anthology, Party Girl. You can tell from the DVD that her speech was beginning to go even then, a couple of years ago; she slurs some words, stumbles over others. It makes the poems, by turns bitter and humble, funny and furious, savage and insightful, all the more powerful. They are about the dreadful, sometimes unbearable frustration of a young woman – Collette is still only 39 – who has a particularly aggressive form of multiple sclerosis. There are “shits” and “bollocks” and “fucks” aplenty, but also poignant, wrenching lines about mistaking a streetlamp for the sun; being manhandled by strangers; struggling to drink from a mug. About numb bums, and constantly having to say sorry, and desperately wanting a dog just so she could walk it. “I admit to being,” she writes in one, “somewhat miserable at times/ I think I have good reason/ It’s not as if it’s just a bad hair day.” Or again: “When I’m around others who have MS/ It frightens the shit out of me/ All these poems are saying just one thing/ I’m scared of getting worse.” Several mention her tears: “My quiet Niagara.” She’s not crying today. We’re all sitting in a sunlit residents’ rest room in St Cecilia’s, a Leonard Cheshire Disability home in Bromley, Kent, where she has been since last March. She was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996. It had been pins and needles at first; a trapped nerve, they thought. Then she noticed she could no longer control the netball like she used to be able to. Then she started having trouble putting her earrings on. She and Paul, a plasterer, had known each other since they were teenagers: “She was a friend of my sister’s,” he says. “Whenever she called, me mum used to say: ‘There’s that girl who speaks so nicely.’ ‘Fraid that all went rather downhill once she got together with me.” The first three years after the diagnosis “weren’t too bad”, he says. Collette was working, in the IT department of the Daily Telegraph. “She could walk, and talk. We had two great holidays, in Kenya and the Maldives. Then, in 1999 it must have been, we went to Cuba and I had to carry her back up the cliff from the beach.” Paul says he knew “almost nothing” about MS, and still doesn’t really understand exactly what it does, how exactly it stops the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord communicating, how it “disrupts the signals”. In 2000, they moved in together, Paul going self-employed so he could organise his work around the increasingly hard and stressful task of being Collette’s primary carer. In 2004, as she became progressively more incapable, they had to move out of their Victorian semi and into a bungalow. Sometime round about then he proposed to her, at a party on Denmark Hill in south London. “She laughed at me,” he says. Collette grins, and snorts. “She said we’d been to all these exotic places, and you propose to me on Denmark Hill.” She still wears the engagement ring, though, around her neck; she had to take it off her finger a while ago because, with so little sensation left, she could never tell whether she was about to lose it. The poems were published in 2008. Chris Rawlence, artist-in-residence at a hospice to which Collette was going a couple of days a week for respite care, helped nudge her frequently explosive words into shape. “Often when talking with Collette,” he writes in an introduction to the collection, Party Girl, “I’ve been struck by a turn of phrase or an insight that on the face of things is comically mundane yet somehow conveys the essence of what she endures with disarming originality. “These poems face us with the reality of disability in a way we cannot avoid. Through Collette’s unique voice, that can render even swearwords lyrical, she pulls off the remarkable feat of enabling us to experience her isolation, depression, anger and exhaustion with a smile.” It was, frankly, a relief when she finally moved in to St Cecilia’s, Paul confesses. He’s strong, and willing, but working days and caring nights had become more than even he could bear. “I was against it at first, mind you,” he says. “Wasn’t ready. But it was the right decision.” As with many MS sufferers, Collette’s prognosis is now uncertain: she could live like this, stable, for years to come, or she could succumb tomorrow, most likely to an infection. All that’s certain is that she won’t get better. But even in her current, cruelly diminished state, she’s an almighty, even an uplifting presence. “Collette just gives off good vibes,” says Clare Hardman, one of her carers. “There’s an energy about her; the relationships she’s formed with the staff and other residents . . . You can’t help but connect with Collette. People just gravitate towards her.” Another staff member, Jo Letts, agrees: “She’s still a party girl, in her mind and in her spirit.” Collette always was, says Paul, a girl who “grasped life with both hands, who talked to everyone, who partied every night she could. She just can’t communicate that any more. It’s the not being able to do anything she hates. Sitting in front of the telly; she loathes it. It’s not communicating with people she misses the most.” (These days, Collette’s communications are mostly confined to nods of the head at an alphabet board). The whole business is just such a waste, Paul says: a big, total, horrible waste. “But look,” he adds, hopefully, “without it all, there wouldn’t have been these poems, would there?” Collette beams, eyes shining. “She’d never have written poetry otherwise. Never. Nor had journalists coming to see her. Because of what’s happened, you know, she’s done something . . . brilliant.”

Margaret Atwood film screening

The Wake of the Flood, a feature documentary on Canadian author, poet, critic, feminist and environmental campaigner Margaret Atwood, will have its world premiere at Possible Worlds, Sydney’s 5th Canadian Film Festival.

The film will screen Wednesday 4th August at Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe followed by a live video conversation with Margaret Atwood in Toronto.

The evening will kick off with a welcome drink at 6:30pm, followed by the screening at 7pm.

Tickets are $14 and available from Gleebooks from July 1st

Ph: 02 9660 2333 or visit http://www.gleebooks.com.au/

Directed by acclaimed director Ron Mann, the film follows the author’s unique carbon-neutral world tour which accompanied the release of her recent bestseller The Year of the Flood. Each event along the tour was designed with environmental sustainability in mind, each a fundraiser for a local green charity. The documentary follows the author as she travelled around the world, taking part in locally hosted theatre and choir performances inspired by the novel.

“I’m so pleased that In The Wake of the Flood will be screening at Possible Worlds, Sydney’s 5th Canadian Film Festival in Australia”, says Atwood. “This festival is bringing together relevant films from Canada engaging work on an international stage. Ron Mann and I are thrilled that In The Wake of the Flood will be a part of it.”

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. She is Canada’s most eminent novelist and poet is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin have all been shortlisted for the Booker Prize with the latter winning in 2000. Her work has been translated into thirty-three languages.

Her latest novel, The Year of the Flood will be published in Australia in paperback on July 29 by Virago and will available for purchase on the night.

Sydney’s Canadian Film Festival showcases the best new films made in Canada. The Festival unfolds August 2nd – 8th 2010, running a week of film premieres, filmmaker Q&A’s, industry talks and of course, parties. Welcoming prestigious filmmakers to Sydney, the Festival is a meeting point for the Canadian and Australian film industries, while providing a rare chance for locals to watch the best new Canadian films and meet the artists. The full program will be revealed on Canada Day, July 1st 2010.

For more details about the festival visit the website: http://www.possibleworlds.net.au/

I”ll be reading this book later in the year with my other book group.

Heidi

Stieg Larsson fans rejoice

Two early science fiction stories by the late crime novelist Stieg Larsson have been uncovered at the Swedish National Library in Stockholm.

Library spokesman Hakan Farje says it received the two short stories as a private donation in 2007.

Farje says Larsson sent them to a Swedish science fiction magazine when he was 17, hoping to have them published, but the magazine rejected them.

Farje said Tuesday that Larsson had described the stories as his “first tentative efforts.”

Larsson died in 2004 at age 50 and didn’t have time to enjoy the success of his Millennium trilogy, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.

(Associated Press)