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The title is a quote from Shaun of the Dead — meaning something that can’t be bettered, that is as good as it gets — and it is not a celebrity memoir. It is a cookbook. But Delia it is not.
“I thought, ‘What if Hunter S Thompson wrote a cookbook?’ and went from there,” Frost says, which isn’t a bad way to describe it, but doesn’t fully capture how sweet and funny and weird it is, as well as genuinely insightful about cooking.
Frost has been cooking for friends since he and Pegg were flatmates. When I tell him that I’ve heard from multiple sources what a brilliant cook he is, he dismisses the compliment and says cooking is just another symptom of his people-pleasing tendencies and his ADHD (the slicing and dicing soothes him) and, really, it’s just a way for him to hide in the kitchen when people come over. “I feel that maybe cooking is an apology sometimes: ‘Sorry I’m like this,’ ” he writes in the book.
Maybe it is all of that, but I also feel he is possibly pathologising one of the few healthy hobbies he has had for the past 20 years. The recipes are all hearty but healthy and made for sharing: fish pie, Sunday roast, curries — the opposite of furtively bingeing on chocolate bars in a loo. It is also, clearly, a way to give his children the kind of nourishment that perhaps he and his siblings didn’t always have. The food is almost by the bye because this is a cookbook that is really about the writing, and the writing is very funny. Yes, he references what he has been through recently, and yes, he writes about his neuroses. But there are also pages of what he calls his “flights of fancy” that can take you from a ragu recipe straight into the romantic life story of a fictional Italian nonna before, without so much as a pause, hurling you into how to make gnocchi.
“I just feel that the book can be weird. I’m allowed to be weird,” he says. In a section on whether it’s worth making your own pastry or not, Frost writes: “If I like my guests enough, maybe I’ll go that extra mile, but usually I want them in and out so me and my lunacy can settle in for the night editing photos of dead mice I find and sitting them in a selection of tiny chairs I own. (When you put a beautiful dead mouse in a tiny reproduction of the classic Karuselli chair, they end up looking like 1960s Bond villains.) Turn your oven up to 180C ”
Frost has always been good at finding the humour in his anxiety and anger, so much so that some friends didn’t realise how bad they were. In his recipe for children’s porridge he segues to an anecdote about when he and Joe Cornish — who directed Frost in the sci-fi comedy Attack the Block — went to Japan on a press trip for the film. When he found out his bedroom was on the 50th floor of the hotel he thought his “heart would burst” and immediately checked out, petrified.
Cornish, when I speak to him, says what he remembers about working with Frost is “how he’s so confident and funny, but also so bullish and vulnerable”. “He was the big star on Attack the Block because all the kids in it were first-timers. Nick had that experience when he was on Spaced, because he’s not a trained actor and was inveigled into Spaced by Simon. So he was really sweet with the kids, teaching them tricks to memorise their lines.”
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Russell Brand Dropped From Jeremy Corbyn And Len McCluskey's Poetry Book
(www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)
A spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Peace and Justice Project’ said: “In light of the recent allegations concerning Russell Brand, we have removed his contribution from our upcoming Poetry For The Many project.”
Other contributors include the actor Maxine Peake, children’s author Michael Rosen, director Ken Loach and former Labour Party official Karie Murphy.
...
Speaking when the publication of the book was announced, Corbyn said: “This book grew out of regular conversations Len and I hold about poetry: the enjoyment we get from it and the opportunity it provides for escape and inspiration.
“When putting it together, the hardest part was deciding what to leave out.”
“There is a poet in all of us and nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry,” he added.
McCluskey, the former general secretary of the Unite union, said: “It should be mandatory on the national school curriculum to make poetry accessible to every child and student, so that the stigma in working-class communities about it being only for ‘posh people’ or ‘softies’ can gradually be eliminated.”
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I'll kick us off with a few of my favourites.
Things Can Only Get Worse? - John O' Farrell
The story of twenty confusing years as a member of the Labour party. From the pre-Blair years through to the Corbyn. An absolutely fascinating read for someone like me who's both a member of the party and someone who's interested in leftist politics and British political history.
The Social Distance Between Us - Darren Mcgarvey
Great read if you're looking to get angry about the state of the UK. Doesn't pull any punches and isn't afraid to get it's hands dirty.
Impeachment - Jon Meacham
I'm really into US Presidential history. This book covers the Johnson, Nixon and Clinton impeachments, and explains why they were bought, the narrative around the cases and why they reached the conclusion they did. This is genuinely one of my favourite books going.
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After four decades in the comic book industry, Alan Moore is relishing being in the world of literary publishing. “I’m having a very good time of it,” says Moore, whose debut collection of short stories, Illuminations, is just out in paperback.
He says that his publisher, Bloomsbury, “respect my decisions and opinions. And I own my own work. It doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re used to traditional grown-up publishing, but it means an awful lot if you’re used to the comic books industry. It does make me wish that I’d maybe gone into writing prose fiction back in the late Seventies.”
...
Talking to me over Zoom, the 69-year-old Moore – a hirsute figure whose aesthetic might best be described as WFH Gandalf – insists that he has formally retired from writing comics now, despite the challenges that prose fiction brings.
The stories in Illuminations are in equal parts weird, funny and exhilarating, but what stands out – whether he’s describing an apocalyptic battle between angels and demons in the skies above Bedford, or the lovemaking of two disembodied brains in the moments after the creation of the universe – is his visual impact of his prose.
“I’ve always had, I think, a fairly decent visual imagination, and when I was working in comics the visual descriptions would be going into the lengthy notes that I was writing just for the artist.”
The centrepiece of Illuminations is a long story on the theme of the decline of the comic book industry. His objection is to “the gentrification of comics that happened post-Watchmen: that neighbourhood has been lifted out of the reach of its original inhabitants” – i.e. children.
...
The strength of Moore’s opinions is belied by their matter-of-fact delivery in a gentle Northampton accent. The son of a brewery worker, he was brought up in The Boroughs, “the most impoverished area of Northampton”.
Moore says that his “values system was formed in The Boroughs”: “although it was destitute there was an astonishing sense of community – nobody would rob anyone else because nobody else had anything. There was a kind of commonality.” In the 1970s he worked in underground comics and music papers, and those egalitarian values were nourished by the counterculture.
...
He’s now working on a series of fantasy novels set in mid-20th-century Britain. “Fantasy these days seems to have been boiled down to a kind of JRR Tolkein, George RR Martin world of warriors and dragons and, for some reason, dwarves. The fantasy books that inspire me are things like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which is actually about the real world in some ways, the changing nature of British society.
“Fantasy has no restrictions whatsoever, so it’s a bit lame to be constantly hitting the same note on the piano. Let’s have fantastic visions that nobody has ever seen before – and lay off people of restricted height for a change.”
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JRR Tolkien interview: ‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey than The Lord of the Rings’
(archive.ph)
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/7566814
JRR Tolkien interview: ‘I never expected a money success’
JRR Tolkien interview: ‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey than The Lord of the Rings’
After the publication of his Middle Earth epic, the writer spoke to the Telegraph. 50 years after his death, here is the archive interview
This interview was originally published in The Telegraph magazine on March 22, 1968
“Spiders,” observed Professor JRR Tolkien, cradling the word with the same affection that he cradled the pipe in his hand, “are the particular terror of northern imaginations.” The Professor, now 76, is the author of The Hobbit and of the three-volume epic fairy-tale, The Lord of the Rings, the slowest-developing bestseller in modern publishing history. He was on the subject of dragons and the other horrenda which are his scholarly stock-in-trade.
Discussing one of his own monsters, a man-devouring, spider-like female, he said, “The female monster is certainly no deadlier than the male, but she is different. She is a sucking, strangling, trapping creature.”
To Professor Tolkien, a retired Oxford philologist and a man used to dealing evidentially with his material, everything, even in fantasy, must be specific. In his world of wondrous things, he moves with the surety of a white hunter on a game reservation. His dwarfs have detailed family trees. His elves have their own carefully-constructed languages. His wizards work according to union rules. And his hobbits, the most famous of all his characters are a distinctly unfanciful race – food-loving, gift-giving, house-proud, paunchy – and as believable as your local newsagent.
When John Ronald Reuel Tolkien leads you into the cramped garage that serves as library, he leads you at once into the magic and legend of Middle-earth, the three-dimensional cosmogony of The Lord of the Rings. Not that the garage itself is any cave of wonders. Jammed between the Professor’s own house and the one next door, in an undistinguished Oxford suburb, it would be no more than a banal little room, filled with files and a clutter of garden chairs, if it were not for the man.
Tolkien, who describes himself as “tubby”, has grey eyes, firm tanned skin, silvery hair and quick decisive speech. He might have been, 50 years ago, the model of the kindly country squire. Any hobbit would trust this man, any dragon would quail before him, any elf name him friend. Effortlessly, he compels you to admire him as much as – and herein lies his charm – he clearly admires himself.
To the small but bitter anti-Ring coterie – some of whom profess to see sinister meanings in the text – his very ebullience would presumably constitute an irritant. But to devotees, all this adds up to the perfect cult-hero.
Tolkien cultists, though predominantly academic and egghead, are not wholly so. Housewives write to him from Winnipeg, rocket-men from Woomera, pop-singers from Las Vegas. Ad men discuss him in London pubs. Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles, Japanese, Israelis, Swedes, Dutch and Danes read him in their own languages.
He is also a literary opiate for hippies, who carry his works to their farthest-flung pads, from San Francisco to Istanbul and Nepal.
Despite the fact that his books lack perversion, four-letter words, homosexuality and sadism – virtually everything that makes 20th-century fiction so commercially desirable – the Professor and those connected with his publications have found the streets of Middle-earth paved with gold.
“I never expected a money success,” said Tolkien, pacing the room, as he does constantly when he speaks. “In fact, I never even thought of commercial publication when I wrote The Hobbit back in the Thirties.
“It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
“I knew no more about the creatures than that, and it was years before his story grew. I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.”
'In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit': the inspiration for Middle Earth came while Tolkien was marking exam papers 'In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit': the inspiration for Middle Earth came while Tolkien was marking exam papers Credit: Pamela Chandler
When Professor Tolkien spoke of the hobbits’ limited world, he was referring only to their native heath, the Shire, where they built their snug homes in the ground, fitted them with round doors and windows, and placidly surveyed their possessions and studied their family trees. But the rest of Middle-earth, in which Bilbo Baggins of the Shire unexpectedly finds himself adventuring, is a boundless horizon filled with marshes and mountains, terror and beauty.
Tolkien let a few of his Oxford friends read The Hobbit. One, a tutor, lent it to a student, Susan Dagnell. When, some time later, Miss Dagnell joined Allen & Unwin, the publishers, she suggested it as a children’s book. Sir Stanley Unwin assigned his son, Rayner, then ten, to read it. (“I gave him a shilling,” Sir Stanley recalls.)
Although The Hobbit was no runaway bestseller, readers were fascinated by Middle-earth, and Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel. Tolkien then offered The Silmarillion, a saga of the mist-shrouded beginnings of elves and men, which he had begun in 1916. But it was turned down in Museum Street as being too dark and Celtic. “They were quite right,” Tolkien recalls. He is now revising it.
Even before The Hobbit, he had been gestating The Lord of the Rings, which historically, in Middle-earth terms, actually follows it. Now, with The Silmarillion rejected, he returned to the Ring, which relates the deeds of Bilbo’s nephew Frodo, and of a mighty wizard called Gandalf. Over the next 14 years the bulky manuscript slowly took shape.
Sir Stanley Unwin, whose competitors called him mad when he published the first two volumes in 1954, told us, “I was in Japan when the manuscript arrived. Rayner wrote to say it seemed a big risk. It would have to be published in three volumes, at a guinea each – this at a time when 18 shillings was top for a bestseller. But Rayner added, ‘Of course, it’s a work of genius’. So I cabled him to take it.
“Of all the books I’ve brought out in 63 years, there are few that I can say with absolute confidence will sell long after my departure. Of this one I had no doubts.”
Tolkien’s imaginary landscapes grew out of his predilection for creating languages. “Anyone who invents a language,” he said, “finds that it requires a suitable habitation and a history in which it can develop. A real language is never invented, of course. It is a natural thing. It is wrong to call the language you grow up speaking your native language. It is not. It is your first learnt language. It is a by-product of the total make-up of the animal.”
Tolkien’s Middle-earth, with people, histories, languages all logically integrated, corresponds spiritually to north-eastern Europe. But it extends southward to include lands where dark-skinned people ride to battle on beasts called oliphaunts, and east to evil Mordor which “would be roughly in the Balkans”.
Tolkien’s friend and fellow author, the late C. S. Lewis, “was immensely immersed” in the development of the Ring, but not always mutely admiring. “He used to insist on my reading, passages aloud as I finished them, and then he made suggestions. He was furious when I didn’t accept them. Once he said, ‘It’s no use trying to influence you, you’re uninfluenceable!’ But that wasn’t quite true. Whenever he said ‘You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!’ I used to try.”
Professor Tolkien sold his original 4,200-page typescript of the Ring to Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “I wanted the money very badly to buy this house.”
He was born at Bloemfontein in South Africa. “I was three when I was brought to England,” he said. “After the dry, barren places I had known, I had in a way been ‘trained’ to savour the delicate English flowers and the grass. I had this strange sense of coming home when I arrived. The hobbit business began partly as a Sehnsucht for that happy childhood which ended when I was orphaned, at 12.”
The scene of his déjà vu – Sarehole, on the outskirts of Birmingham – became the model for the Shire.
He recalled, “As a child, I was always inventing languages. But that was naughty. Poor boys must concentrate on getting scholarships. When I was supposed to be studying Latin and Greek, I studied Welsh and English. When I was supposed to be concentrating on English, I took up Finnish. I have always been incapable of doing the job in hand.”
He was a scholarship student at King Edward VI School in Birmingham, then went on to Oxford. With the Lancashire Fusiliers on the Somme, he saw tattered and burnt-out landscapes which find unearthly echoes in the Ring. The years that followed – in Leeds University and later at Oxford – were marked by academic honours. But parallel to scholarship has always run his strong preoccupation with the mystic land of Faerie.
This, to him, is a rich and wondrous realm filled with beauty, peril, joy and sadness – to be relished for its own sake, and not dissected.
So, naturally, he resists the earnest student who tries to read “meanings” into the Ring. “The book,” he said, “is not about anything but itself. It has no allegorical intentions, topical, moral, religious or political. It is not about modern wars or H-bombs, and my villain is not Hitler.”
Must fairytales be confined to legendary times and places, or could they be staged in modern settings? “They cannot,” he said, “not if you mean in a modern technological idiom. The reader must approach Faerie with a willing suspension of disbelief. If a thing can be technologically controlled, it ceases to be magical.”
Tolkien regrets that, over the centuries, fairytales have been downgraded until they are considered fit only for very young children. Most of all, he dislikes the story that moralises: “As a child I couldn’t stand Hans Andersen, and I can’t now.”
He has written: “The age of childhood-sentiment has produced a dreadful undergrowth of stories adapted to what is conceived to be the measure of children’s minds and needs. The old stories are bowdlerised. The imitations are often merely silly or patronising or covertly sremoveding with an eye on the other grown-ups present. ...”
He said to us: “Believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough. Otherwise you wander all over the place. In The Lord of the Rings I never made anyone go farther than he could on a given day.”
So real to its creator is Middle-earth that he has included a 127-page appendix which is his characters’ “actual” historical, sociological and philological underpinning. For Tolkien to have created a hobbit without a calendar and a family tree would be to leave him without flesh.
For the same reason, he must accompany his languages with notes on vowel-sounds and stresses, scripts, alphabets and derivations. ‘“I have constructed them,” Tolkien explained, “by scientific methods. They must be at least as complete and as organised as the history of the Elves.”
It is the appendix, Tolkien thinks, which has helped trigger the enormous new enthusiasm for the Ring among students in the United States: “A lot of it is just straight teenage stuff. I didn’t mean it to be, but it’s perfect for them. I think they’re attracted by things that give verisimilitude.”
Professor Tolkien has, in effect, provided an intellectual Meccano-set for civilisation creators. Students search for word derivations in the invented tongues. They create new and improved Middle-earth. They build hobbit houses. They try to fill in the early unrecorded portions of Middle-earth’s history.
What he calls, rather affectionately, the ‘absurd frenzy” began in America in 1965 with an unauthorised paperback of the Ring by Ace Books. Previous hardback editions of The Hobbit and the Ring had sold unspectacularly to limited circles whose most vocal devotee was W. H. Auden. The Ace edition was cheap, and suddenly campus booksellers couldn’t cope.
'Go, go Gandalf': Ian McKellen in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 'Go, go Gandalf': Ian McKellen in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Credit: Warner Bros
The unauthorised, i.e. non-royalty-paying, publication became a cause célèbre. In the autumn of 1965, Ballantine Books brought out an approved paperback. Hobbitomanes promptly made it a point of honour to buy the sanctified version, even if they already owned the exorcised one. The true aristocracy own the original English edition. “It smells right,” one fan said.
Tolkien addicts wear lapel-buttons that say “Frodo Lives” or “Go go Gandalf ’ in English or Elvish letters, belong to Tolkien societies and write love poems in Elvish.
Tolkien receives innumerable offers for film rights, musical-comedy rights, TV rights, puppetry rights. A jigsaw-puzzle company has asked permission to produce a Ring puzzle, a soap-maker to soap-sculpt Ring characters. Tolkien worshippers are outraged by these crass approaches. “Please,” wrote a 17-year-old girl, “don’t let them make a movie out of your Ring. It would be like putting Disneyland into the Grand Canyon.”
The song cycle, the only commercial venture so far, began when Donald Swann, half of the At the Drop of a Hat team, set to music six of the poems which punctuate the Ring. One is in Elvish.
When we asked Tolkien how Elvish should be sung, he replied, “Like Gregorian chants.” Then, in a wavering churchly counter-tenor, he intoned the first lines of the farewell song of Galadriel, the Elf Queen:
Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
Yéni únótime ve radar aldaron!
He feels strongly that the Ring should not be filmed: “You can’t cramp narrative into dramatic form. It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.”
He dislikes being bracketed with epic-writers of the past. C. S. Lewis once declared that Ariosto could not rival Tolkien. To us Tolkien said, “I don’t know Ariosto and I’d loathe him if I did.” He has also been likened to Malory, Spencer, Cervantes, Dante. He rejects them all. “Cervantes?” he exploded. “He was a weedkiller to romance.” As for Dante: “He doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.
“In any case, I don’t read much now, not even fairy-stories. And then I’m always looking for something I can’t find.” We asked what that was. He replied, “Something like what I wrote myself.”
Some people have criticised the Ring as lacking religion. Tolkien denies this: “Of course God is in The Lord of the Rings. The period was pre-Christian, but it was a monotheistic world.”
Monotheistic? Then who was the One God of Middle-earth?
Tolkien was taken aback: “The one, of course! The book is about the world that God created – the actual world of this planet.”
When we asked the Professor if he would sign our copy of the Ring, he said, “Would you like an inscription? What kind?” We suggested something in Elvish. Carefully he wrote a line in the beautiful flowing script he has invented: “It’s the High Elvish greeting, ‘Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo’. It means, ‘A star shines on the hour of our meeting.’”
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Philologists, pedants and obsessives: how crowd-sourcing created the Oxford English Dictionary
(theconversation.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/7566206
Stuart Kells
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary is a celebration of words and word-people: authors, editors, publishers, linguists, lexicographers, philologists, obsessives, pedants. Its author, Sarah Ogilvie, was formerly an Oxford English Dictionary editor and wrote the 2013 book Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Review: The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (Chatto & Windus)
Ogilvie’s focus in The Dictionary People is on editor James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915), who orchestrated a collective, pre-digital mode of crowd-sourcing to produce the first edition of the dictionary.
Like Murray’s OED, The Dictionary People is a collective exercise. In addition to other supporters and sources, Ogilvie has assembled the book with the assistance of ten student researchers at Stanford University, with an eye for fascinating allusions and anecdotes.
We learn from The Dictionary People that Jane Austen was the first to write the word “outsider” and that a cousin of Eleanor Marx hallucinated that she had written Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
We also learn that the OED entry for ruffle – “to rumple, to destroy the smoothness or evenness of something” – took an illustrative quotation from Eleanor’s 1886 translation of Madame Bovary, and that, at the age of 27, a not-yet-famous J.R.R. Tolkien worked on the OED as an editorial assistant with the lexicographer Charles Onions, whose family referred to Tolkien as “Jirt”, short for J.R.R.T.
Yet another delightful detail: 18 words from the science-fiction novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), including “dimensionable” and “nondimensionable”, made it in to the dictionary. Written by mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott under the pseudonym “A. Square”, Flatland is the story of a square who visits Pointland, Lineland and Spaceland “to explore the possibility of other dimensions”.
A book with Austen, Woolf, Tolkien and sci-fi? The Dictionary People is irresistible.
Many books have been written on the search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin. There are numerous biographies of Leslie Stephen, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Marxes. OED contributor Edward Sugden was profiled in a book by his daughter, as well as in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the centenary history of Melbourne University Publishing. Henry Spencer Ashbee is the subject of Ian Gibson’s book The Erotomaniac (2001). Ogilvie’s previous book covers some of the same ground as The Dictionary People (it contains the Jirt anecdote, for example) and she wrote about Chris Collier for the Australian Book Review in June 2012.
Ogilvie’s bigger picture reveals that the English language is not owned by a club or a committee or a university or by people from a particular social class or place. It is a global language in its sources, its reach and its ownership. The language, and the literary and scholarly traditions that were built with it, belong to all of us.
Read the entire fascinating article on the link above.
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Osman owes an obvious debt to Agatha Christie, but also to more recent light-hearted, larky mysteries by the likes of Alexander McCall Smith and Agatha Raisin author MC Beaton. The crimes “aren’t that grizzly, or they’re off stage, so you don’t see the death”, notes Dr Jennifer Young, head of writing and journalism at Falmouth University, who has researched the “cosy” crime phenomenon. And the gang tends to rely on good old-fashioned “social connections” to solve the mystery. The female characters, Young adds, tend to be “better at making those connections and having those conversations [with suspects] than the police are”. Joyce and Elizabeth are able to operate largely undetected, adds Dr Jo Parsons, a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Falmouth, because the “invisibility of women once we hit a certain age” suddenly becomes an “incredible power”.
The Thursday Murder Club sold 45,000 copies in its first three days and, according to Nielsen BookData, it has been the bestselling book in the UK since then, selling more than two million copies across all print editions. Its sequel The Man Who Died Twice followed in 2021, and knocked Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? off the number one spot. Last year, the third instalment, The Bullet That Missed, became the fastest-selling adult fiction hardback by a British author, beating a record previously held by JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy.
Glance through reviews and you’ll see words like “heartwarming” and “amiable” crop up over and over again, although The Times’ critic Joan Smith was a rare dissenter, describing The Thursday Murder Club as “a novel so flawed that it is hard to believe it would ever have been published without a celebrity’s name on the cover”. The general consensus seems to be that Osman’s books are “amiable if undemanding cosy caper[s]”, as The Guardian’s review put it – and that’s unlikely to bother Osman. “If I’m anything, I’m an entertainer,” he told The Washington Post in a 2022 interview. “I’m here to give people a book that they can’t put down, and if they’re on a plane journey then the plane journey goes quicker.”
British readers, it seems, can’t get enough of the formula. Nielsen reports that Osman has so far sold more than five million books, a number that will only rise further when his fourth novel The Last Devil to Die is released on 14 September. On the book charts, his only real rival is Colleen Hoover, BookTok’s reigning queen of high melodrama (last year, Hoover’s It Starts With Us grabbed the top spot on the annual UK bestseller list, but guess who happily occupied positions two, three and four?).
...
The consensus seems to be that Osman’s success is boosting the crime fiction market, rather than cannibalising it. Of course, his TV work gave him a ready-made platform, but Morgan notes that he has “worked really hard with Penguin [his publishers] to attend all the crime festivals and really immerse himself in the writing community … And he’s been supportive of other writers: he’s given quotes for some of the books that I’ve published from debut authors.”
For Morgan, the “escapist” quality of Osman’s books – and of the entire cosy crime genre – goes a long way in accounting for their popularity. “[They] hold your attention in a way that normal crime [novels] would, without the menace or unease that you get from reading a normal one,” she says, “with the opportunity to play detective yourself in a charming, innocent way. There are twists, but they’re very gentle and mild-mannered.”
But for Osman’s fellow cosy crime novelist Hall, the appeal is more specific. “He just presents such a positive picture of growing old,” he says. Normally, he adds, “you read about a retirement home and there’s lots of people with gaping open mouths, wailing from time to time”, but in The Thursday Murder Club, “you’ve got older protagonists who are firing on all cylinders.” Mortality, Hall says, “is there” in the books (not least in one ongoing sub-plot dealing with dementia) “but it doesn’t define these people”. Osman’s portrait of ageing is an affirming one, that just happens to have arrived in the wake of the pandemic, when we were bombarded with alarming headlines about vulnerable older people trapped in infection-ridden care homes.
Archive of original link.
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This might sound a bit cliche, but The Lord of the Rings was that book for me. I read it when I was 20. I'd just started my first real job, I'd started to spread my wings a little and I'd finally gotten around to reading this absolute titan of a book.
Having been a massive fan of the movies I'm surprised it took me as long as it did to read the books, but I'm so glad I waited. It was the first time In my life I'd ever felt truly lost in a world.
I've not had an opportunity to revisit the books since I originally read them, but one day....
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How J.R.R. Tolkien's novels were inspired by Medieval poems of 'northern bravery'
(theconversation.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/6301707
In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
This became the first line of The Hobbit (1937). From this doodle Tolkien went on to write one of the world’s most popular fantasy adventure series, The Lord of the Rings (1954).
His main work, however, was not as the writer of fantasies that made him so famous. For the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, I want to celebrate Tolkien’s life as a medievalist and philologist (historian of languages), as well as some of his major contributions to the study of medieval literature.
Tolkein’s first teaching post was at the University of Leeds, where he worked on a translation of the 14th-century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For many, his is still one of the best translations.
In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
This became the first line of The Hobbit (1937). From this doodle Tolkien went on to write one of the world’s most popular fantasy adventure series, The Lord of the Rings (1954).
His main work, however, was not as the writer of fantasies that made him so famous. For the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, I want to celebrate Tolkien’s life as a medievalist and philologist (historian of languages), as well as some of his major contributions to the study of medieval literature.
Tolkein’s first teaching post was at the University of Leeds, where he worked on a translation of the 14th-century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For many, his is still one of the best translations.
In 1925, Tolkien won a professorship at the University of Oxford. A year later he translated the Old English poem, Beowulf. He remained a professor of English language and literature for the next 20 years.
Tolkien’s world was in a state of flux. The rudderless turmoil of the two world wars undoubtedly had affected his writing and this is possibly why his preference for settings was always for pre-industrial England. This can be seen in his love of fairy tales and in his drawings, which are almost all natural landscapes, with little architecture.
His love of trees was so great that he wrote a letter to his publisher saying: “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been and I find human mistreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.” In another, he talks of his fondness for myth, fairy tales “and above all for heroic legend”.
A mythology for England
Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, argues that he was attempting to create “a mythology for England” through his fantasy fiction, by creating an imaginary world with its own languages, history, cultures and people.
Tolkien did this by drawing not only on his knowledge of languages and literature in Old and Middle English, but also on those languages that influenced the cultural and historical development of Britain, such as Finnish, Welsh, Old Norse, Old High and Middle German.
He loved languages – both ancient and modern – and was well versed in more than a few, including Finnish, Welsh, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Danish, Old Norse, Old English and Old Icelandic, as well as his invented Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, which have full etymologies.
Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1951 about his desire to “make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story”. He wanted to dedicate it “simply: to England: to my country”.
The source of inspiration for this “mythology for England” was the medieval world Tolkien knew so well from his scholarly studies.
‘Northern courage’
One theme that Tolkien picked up from his work in medieval literature – and which runs like a thread throughout his fictional worlds – is the reckless bravery and heroic courage that many medieval protagonists exhibit.
Tolkien termed this kind of response to challenge “northern courage” in his 1936 essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. It was “northern” because this type of courage is highly prevalent in the Old Norse sagas that Tolkien was so familiar with and which grew out of the northern Scandinavian countries between the 9th and 13th centuries. This concept is probably best expressed in a line from the Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon (AD991): “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.”
Simply put, northern courage is when one exhibits the courage to keep persevering despite the knowledge that sooner or later defeat is inevitable. In constructing his “mythology for England”, Tolkien drew on medieval poems such as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon as he argued that the people of ancient England would have had a “fundamentally similar heroic temper”.
In a moment of distraction from the laborious work of marking an “enormous pile of examination papers”, J.R.R. Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
This became the first line of The Hobbit (1937). From this doodle Tolkien went on to write one of the world’s most popular fantasy adventure series, The Lord of the Rings (1954).
His main work, however, was not as the writer of fantasies that made him so famous. For the 50th anniversary of Tolkien’s death, I want to celebrate Tolkien’s life as a medievalist and philologist (historian of languages), as well as some of his major contributions to the study of medieval literature.
Tolkein’s first teaching post was at the University of Leeds, where he worked on a translation of the 14th-century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For many, his is still one of the best translations.
In 1925, Tolkien won a professorship at the University of Oxford. A year later he translated the Old English poem, Beowulf. He remained a professor of English language and literature for the next 20 years.
Tolkien’s world was in a state of flux. The rudderless turmoil of the two world wars undoubtedly had affected his writing and this is possibly why his preference for settings was always for pre-industrial England. This can be seen in his love of fairy tales and in his drawings, which are almost all natural landscapes, with little architecture.
His love of trees was so great that he wrote a letter to his publisher saying: “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been and I find human mistreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.” In another, he talks of his fondness for myth, fairy tales “and above all for heroic legend”. A mythology for England
Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, argues that he was attempting to create “a mythology for England” through his fantasy fiction, by creating an imaginary world with its own languages, history, cultures and people.
Tolkien did this by drawing not only on his knowledge of languages and literature in Old and Middle English, but also on those languages that influenced the cultural and historical development of Britain, such as Finnish, Welsh, Old Norse, Old High and Middle German.
He loved languages – both ancient and modern – and was well versed in more than a few, including Finnish, Welsh, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Danish, Old Norse, Old English and Old Icelandic, as well as his invented Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, which have full etymologies.
Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1951 about his desire to “make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story”. He wanted to dedicate it “simply: to England: to my country”.
The source of inspiration for this “mythology for England” was the medieval world Tolkien knew so well from his scholarly studies.
‘Northern courage’
One theme that Tolkien picked up from his work in medieval literature – and which runs like a thread throughout his fictional worlds – is the reckless bravery and heroic courage that many medieval protagonists exhibit.
Tolkien termed this kind of response to challenge “northern courage” in his 1936 essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. It was “northern” because this type of courage is highly prevalent in the Old Norse sagas that Tolkien was so familiar with and which grew out of the northern Scandinavian countries between the 9th and 13th centuries. This concept is probably best expressed in a line from the Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon (AD991): “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.”
Simply put, northern courage is when one exhibits the courage to keep persevering despite the knowledge that sooner or later defeat is inevitable. In constructing his “mythology for England”, Tolkien drew on medieval poems such as Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon as he argued that the people of ancient England would have had a “fundamentally similar heroic temper”.
Northern courage in Lord of the Rings
Northern courage is at work in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm. In blocking the Balrog – and shouting his famous line, “you shall not pass” – he refuses to allow the enemy to cross the bridge and buys time for the rest of the fellowship to escape. He exhibits magnanimous courage and perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat.
In a different way, the protagonists Bilbo and Frodo Baggins exhibit courage as they leave the comforts of the Shire to fulfil a greater heroic duty. This is probably best summed up in Frodo’s exchange with Gandalf:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time”, said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The wizard’s words here are steeped in northern courage. They insist that we must rise to the challenges offered in our time.
Fifty years on from Tokien’s death, that spirit of northern bravery endures as an alluring concept. What makes Tolkien’s fantastical world so appealing is the recurrent suggestion that the courage manifested to defeat the big monsters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the very same courage that can be found in hopeless situations of a more ordinary sort.
Author: Madeleine S. Killacky, PhD Candidate, Medieval Literature, Bangor University
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In both ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’, J.R.R. Tolkien crafted a magical realm, captivating the hearts and minds of countless individuals with the dream of exploring the enchanting land.
From dramatic caves, looming towers, and ancient monuments, here are the historical sites in England where you can experience a glimpse of Middle-Earth.
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In the late 1990s, at least a decade before Amazon’s e-reader first came on to the market in 2007, the author and humorist made a series of notes uncannily predicting the rise of electronic books.
But Adams, who died in 2001, did not live to see his musings, spread over three A4 pages, become reality. He wrote: “Lots of resistance to the idea of ebooks from the public. Particularly all those people who 10 years ago said they couldn’t see any point typing on a computer.
“I believe this resistance will gradually disappear as the electronic book itself improves and becomes smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, in other words more like a book.”
Adams’s notes are presented in their original handwritten form in a new book, 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.
Featuring unseen material from Adams’s personal archive, including notes, letters, speeches, fanmail and unused sections of his most famous work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide, it has been put together by Kevin Jon Davies, who first met Adams in 1978 to interview him for a fanzine.
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A review from.the New Statesman:
Different Times is a chronological survey of the last century of British screen comedy, from the first films of Chaplin through to the Ealing comedies, the Sixties satire boom, the alternative wave of the 1980s, up to today. It focuses mainly on our best-loved television shows and comedians while essaying a breezy social history: comedy as a means to interrogate Britain rather than vice versa.
Unfortunately, the diagnosis that Stubbs offers is reliably hackneyed. Humour is a “consolation prize” of life in these dank, cramped islands. The British, by which he is anxious to make known he mainly means the English, are an unfortunate race: terminally frivolous, “miserably monolingual” and therefore xenophobic; where they do have depth it is usually only as stews of repression, bigotry and loathing. That such an immiserated isle produces such joyous comic talent is only lightly pondered. Instead, Stubbs advances further bloke-down-the-pub analysis of what ails us: declinism, deindustrialisation, post-imperial blues, etc.
...
To laugh is not to take a moral position, or not solely so. A good joke toys with our assumptions and expectations, and liberates the unspoken. A really good one will tap into our prejudices not to propagate them but to jolt us into self-knowledge. As for how we approach the comedy of past, it should depend on what we need it for. A social historian who neglected how Dad’s Army or Morecambe and Wise captivated millions would be hindering their own enterprise. The ghastly relics that Stubbs describes, such as The Black and White Minstrel Show and Mind Your Language, also tell us much about their time. But in artistic or entertainment terms they are inert, as much because of how feeble they are as how offensive.
Indeed, at the close of Different Times Stubbs argues that, partly thanks to political correctness and modern identity politics, comedy has become both kinder and better over the past decade as it rejects the crude stereotypes of old. Stand-ups such as Bethany Black and James Acaster and sitcoms such as Detectorists and This Country are “a haven of considerateness, diversity, multiculturalism, richer in comedic detail and observation”. It’s an appealing idea, but as Different Times shows, the very best comedy transcends its time not merely by being correct, let alone nice. Many of Britain’s greatest comic creations – Fawlty, Rising Damp’s Rigsby, Alan Partridge – are monsters, but, through the skill of those who wrote and performed them, retain across the ages the breath of something human.
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It's been roughly a month since the last time I asked this question. So, what are you reading?
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What I mean is, do you enjoy reading on your favourite sofa, or with a cup of tea? Maybe you only read if you can do it for 3-4 hours straight?
How do you settle down to read a good book?
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4
The Sunday Times Bestsellers List — the UK’s definitive book sales chart (August 20th, 2023)
(archive.is)
General hardbacks:
- Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
- Abroad in Japan by Chris Broad
- Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? by Julie Smith
- The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
- 8 Rules of Love by Jay Shetty
- Menopausing by Davina McCall & Naomi Potter
- The Extra Mile by Kevin Sinfield
- Outlive by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford
- Manifest by Roxie Nafousi
- The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
General paperbacks:
- Just One Thing by Michael Mosley
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Undoctored by Adam Kay
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin
- Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson
- Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
- Diddly Squat: ‘Til the Cows Come Home by Jeremy Clarkson
- Hack Your Hormones by Davinia Taylor and Mohammed Enayat
- Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
- The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall
Fiction hardbacks:
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
- Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang
- None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell
- The List by Yomi Adegoke
- The Trial by Rob Rinder
- Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
- Kill for Me Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh
- Lion & Lamb by James Patterson and Duane Swierczynski
- The Ghost Ship by Kate Mosse
- Atlas by Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker
Fiction paperbacks:
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
- It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover
- The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths
- It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover
- Private Beijing by James Patterson and Adam Hamdy
- Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus Read our review of Lessons in Chemistry
- The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
- Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter
- The Woman Who Lied by Claire Douglas
- The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn
Children’s:
- The World’s Worst Monsters by David Walliams and Adam Stower
- Heartstopper: Volume One by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper: Volume Two by Alice Oseman
- Heartstopper: Volume Four by Alice Oseman
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
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His winning book is set in the 2030s and follows the search for a surviving colony of a hyper-intelligent species of fish. Beauman was announced as the winner of the prestigious prize – which celebrates the best science fiction novel published in the UK last year – at a ceremony in London on Wednesday.
Beauman’s novel is a “biting satire, twisted, dark and radical, but remarkably accessible, endlessly inventive and hilarious,” said judging chair Andrew M Butler.
...
His latest novel “takes science fiction’s knack for future extrapolation and aggressively applies it to humanity’s shortsighted self-interest and consumptive urges in the face of planetary eco-crisis,” said the award’s director Tom Hunter. “The result is a bleakly funny novel where the only hope for our species is working out the final punchline before it’s delivered.”
...
In a Guardian review of Beauman’s novel, Kevin Power described it as a “jaunty, cerebral eco-thriller”, a “novel about grief” and an “ironically pristine container for the toxic waste of our self-knowledge”.
Other titles shortlisted for the award were The Coral Bones by E J Swift; Metronome by Tom Watson; The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter; The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard; and Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick.
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44
cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/1152213
Archived version: https://archive.ph/WYdpt
Jacqueline Wilson has said editing children’s books to remove inappropriate and dated language is sometimes justified because young people do not have “a sense of history”.
However, the bestselling children’s author told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that she was opposed to “meddling with adult classics”.
Children’s books by authors such as Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl have been rewritten by publishers to take out words and references that are deemed inappropriate or offensive today.
In February, Puffin Books hired sensitivity readers to review Dahl’s texts to make sure his books could “continue to be enjoyed by all today”.
Hundreds of changes included replacing the word “fat” with “enormous”, and changing “ugly and beastly” to “beastly”. “Old hag” in Dahl’s The Witches was changed to “old crow”.
Blyton’s books, including The Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers, dating back to the 1940s, have also undergone “sensitive text revisions”. Words such as “queer” or “gay” have been replaced because of their contemporary meanings relating to sexuality.
Blyton has also been criticised for racism and xenophobia in her books.
While some have welcomed the changes, others have criticised the rewriting of classics, saying it is a form of censorship.
Wilson said her view on such changes depended on “how it’s done”.
She added: “There are some things I think that would make us a bit worried if we returned to our old children’s favourites and read them with fresh eyes. We might be a little surprised.
“I think with children, they often absorb texts. They still haven’t got the power to sort things out and have a sense of history.”
Wilson has been involved in updating earlier works. Last year, she wrote The Magic Faraway Tree: A New Adventure, a reimagining of a Blyton novel.
Her version is without Blyton’s sexist stereotypes and “unfortunate references that were very ordinary in their times but nowadays don’t fit with the way we think”, she told the Irish News last year.
Wilson has admitted that she would not write one of her books, published in 2005, today.
Love Lessons is about a 14-year-old girl, Prue, who falls in love with an art teacher who partly reciprocates. They kiss and he admits that he loves her, too.
Wilson told the Guardian in a recent interview: “It’s so different now … Nowadays, you’d see Prue as a victim even if she had initiated it and the teacher as a paedophile because he responded to her.”
But she told Good Morning Britain on Monday: “I’m very against meddling with adult classics.
“I was just thinking about Jane Eyre the other day. I mean, with the mad woman in the attic and the way she’s depicted, you’d never find that sort of treatment of people with serious mental health problems.
“And yet, I would be absolutely at the forefront of people saying: ‘No, leave it alone. It’s my favourite book.’”
Wilson also criticised so-called cancel culture, saying that she felt conversations to solve differences would be more constructive.
“I’m of the old school, I think: ‘Why can’t everybody just talk things over? Discuss things.’ You don’t have to agree with someone,” she said.
“But I think it’s more helpful to actually get to the bottom of what’s making people so angry.
“But whether I’d feel that in the midst of a baying crowd or not, I don’t know.
“I mean, life’s changed so much. And I think it’s good that people can make it clear what they feel, but I do think a little bit of discussion [is necessary].
“There’s been a call recently for children to develop their oracy, to become more articulate, to be able to assemble their ideas, and I think that would be a good idea.”
Wilson, a former children’s laureate, has written more than 100 books, which have sold about 40m copies in the UK and been translated into 34 languages.
The Story of Tracy Beaker, about a girl growing up in a care home, was made into a television series. Her books deal with issues such as separation, stepfamilies, sibling rivalry, bullying and falling in love.
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Dennis Knuckleyard is a hapless eighteen-year-old who works and lives in a second-hand bookstore in 1949 London. Aspiring writer though he is, his life feels quite uneventful. But one day his boss and landlord, Coffin Ada, sends him to retrieve some rare books from a strange and paranoid dealer, and he discovers that one of them, A London Walk by Rev. Thomas Hampole, does not exist; Hamphole and A London Walk are both fictions made by another author, so how did they come to be physically in his hands? Coffin Ada informs him they come from the other London, the Great When, a version of the city that is beyond time, in which every aspect of its history from its origin to its demise is somehow made manifest. There epochs blend and realities and unrealities blur and concets such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous and terrible beings. Further, Coffin Ada tells Dennis, if he does not return the book to this other London, he will be killed, literally turned inside out.
So begins Dennis' adventure in Long London. To return the otherworldly book, he must dive deep into the city's occult underbelly, meeting an eccentric cast of sorcerers and gangsters, including Grace Shilling, a sex worker who agrees to help Dennis with the caveat that she will stab him if he makes any advances, Prince Monolulu, an infamous horse race tipster who claims to be an Abyssinian Prince, and Jack Spot, a ruthless mob boss looking to cement his status on top of the city's underworld. But upon entering The Great When, Dennis finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events, one that may have altered and endangered both Londons for good.
The first book, The Great When, will be published by Bloomsbury on the 24th of September, 2024.
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8
‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers
(www.theguardian.com)
Last year, Waterstones Piccadilly hosted a BookTok festival. One sales assistant told the Observer: “I can’t stress how much BookTok sells books. It’s driven huge sales of YA [young adult] and romance books, including titles such as The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and authors such as Colleen Hoover.
“The demographic is almost exclusively teenage girls, but the power it has is huge. We have a ‘BookTok recommended’ table – and you can tell which books are trending by the speed at which they sell.”
47
1
‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love
(www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/958540
Archived version: https://archive.ph/HSmIX
‘I wanted to be No 1. But a certain JK Rowling came along’: Jacqueline Wilson on rivalry, censorship – and love
Interview by Simon Hattenstone
Raised by a ‘scary’ father and a ‘terrible snob’ of a mother, the Tracy Beaker author has always understood the loneliness that marks so many young lives. But at 77, she’s never been happier.
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It wouldn't be a community about books without this question. So I'll ask it.
If you got stranded on a desert island, what 3 books would you desperately hope to have with you whilst you awaited rescue?
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3
Digitization of “The Most Beautiful of All Printed Books,” the Kelmscott Chaucer
(www.openculture.com)
cross-posted from: https://radiation.party/post/63850
[ comments | sourced from HackerNews ]
But what about the most beautiful book? As a contender for that spot, Michael Goodman (previously featured here on Open Culture for his projects on the illustrations of Shakespeare and Dickens) has put forth the Kelmscott Chaucer, including the testimony of no less a literary figure than W.B. Yeats, who called it “the most beautiful of all printed books.” Goodman has also made the book freely available for our perusal on his new web site, The Kelmscott Chaucer Online.
“William Morris, the nineteenth-century designer, social reformer and writer, founded the Kelmscott Press towards the end of his life,” says the web site of the British Library. “He wanted to revive the skills of hand printing, which mechanization had destroyed, and restore the quality achieved by the pioneers of printing in the 15th century.”
Published in 1896, the Kelmscott Chaucer, fully titled The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer now newly imprinted, “is the triumph of the press. Its 87 wood-cut illustrations are by Edward Burne-Jones, the celebrated Victorian painter, who was a life-long friend of Morris. The illustrations were engraved by William Harcourt Hooper and printed in black, with shoulder and side titles.”
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