TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Stephen King fans join gigantic 'hide and seek' to mark book launch To mark publication of Under the Dome, snippets of the story are seeded in unlikely locationsStephen King fans have been taking part in a game of literary hide and seek, concealing snippets of text from his new novel Under the Dome in random locations around the UK and cyberspace.One reader dangled a snippet from Hungerford bridge; another scribbled their extract on a wall in central London's Bourne housing estate. Others took an electronic route, hiding text in website code or blogs. One put two snippets up for sale in a fake auction. The game was devised by the novel's UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton, which broke the 900-page Under the Dome into 5,000 small pieces, seeding them across fansites itself and also inviting fans to collect their own snippets and hide them in the most creative way possible.More than 5,000 people took part. "The fans are so desperate to read the book that they have been trying to collect all the pieces," said Laurence Festal, head of consumer marketing at Hodder.Under the Dome, out today, runs to 336,114 words, featuring more than 100 characters, telling the story of a Maine town cut off from the world by an invisible barrier. "I tried this once before when I was a lot younger, but the project was just too big for me. But it was a terrific idea and it never entirely left my mind," said King. "Every now and then it would say write me, and eventually I did. I sure hope people like it."Mark Nelson, a 42-year-old amateur photographer from Chester, won the Hodder competition after hiding his extract in a Flickr photograph of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, and providing a clue on his Twitter stream. Nelson said he had been a huge King fan in his teens and early 20s, when he "consumed everything Stephen King wrote". He thought his 2001 novel Dreamcatcher was "terrible", but that last year's Duma Key was "excellent, and a real return to form"."I've got high hopes for Under the Dome," he said. "It's being compared to The Stand, which was his masterpiece. People get a bit snotty about genre fiction, but King is almost Dickensian in his character development and plots."The end of the campaign saw 25 King fans positioned along the skyline on the north bank of the Thames, "under the dome" of St Paul's, holding giant placards with segments of the final lines from the book."You couldn't really work out what happens from it – it's another teaser," said Festal.Stephen KingScience fiction, fantasy and horrorAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Digested read podcast: The Habit of Art by Alan Bennett John Crace explores his thespian sideJohn Crace feeds.guardian.co.uk |
On Kindness by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor Nicholas Lezard's choiceLate in this book, we are told of the lengths some companies, renowned for their rapacious, unfeeling capitalist tendencies, go to in order to make it seem as though their employees are full of "warmth" and "empathy". "The ironies", we are told drily, "are not subtle ones." However, as we learn here, kindness itself involves not so much subtle ironies as wildly counter-intuitive ones. For this co-authored book (more of a long pamphlet, really) is composed of two very different parts: one is a historical overview, presumably written largely by historian Barbara Taylor, and the other is by Adam Phillips, the acclaimed psychoanalyst.Taylor begins with a largely uncontentious reading of attitudes to kindness (or, in Christian terminology, caritas), taking us from the Stoics to the modern age, her longest digression being on Rousseau's Emile, for whom kindness is an extension of his self-love. I am surprised, incidentally, that Taylor does not mention Bernard Mandeville's hugely influential Fable of the Bees, which proposes that it is our tendency to vice, pleasure and selfishness which actually keeps society going. And you don't have to be a conservative, as Taylor claims, to denounce Rousseau as "a mealy-mouthed hypocrite".But anyway. It is as Phillips gets into his stride that you can hear the commonsense Englishman begin to harrumph. You can almost sense the bellows of outrage when he says, apropos of love, that "the person who might seem most essential to us becomes the person who is most replaceable"; or, quoting Freud: "it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really happy and free in love must have surmounted his respect for women and must have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister."That last is just the kind of thing that makes the believer in "common sense" reject Freud, and by extension the psychoanalytic project itself (actually, I have more problems with the book's initial assertion, that we are suspicious of kindness these days, or that "kindness has always been contentious"). But psychoanalysis is, as Phillips puts it, "an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other", and if in trying to uncover our hidden motivations he disturbs a lot of muddy soil then that could well be an indication that he, and his mentors, are on the right track.A faith in "common sense" is not going to be one that can easily accommodate the paradoxes of our emotional lives; and Phillips certainly does a good job of persuading the reader about Freud's remark about love and incest. So this book isn't just about kindness; it's also about love, and fellow-feeling and humanity. It is a decent attempt to be both emotionally and politically useful (kindness is a good meeting-point for the two, which is why this is actually quite a clever collaboration between psychoanalyst and historian), and so is useful whether our concern is the ideal society or the ideal person. Those of us who puzzle over the eternal mystery of love would do well to read it. The vast bulk, if not all, of psychoanalytical literature attempts to deal with this somewhat intractable problem, but Phillips's prose is more elegant than most.On Kindness deals, en passant, with many varieties of love, from whether, say, you can have a particular "type" you tend to fall in love with, to how children get on with their mothers, or rather vice-versa (upon which, "nothing less than the future of western civilisation might depend").The book ends, or almost ends, with a ringing denunciation of free-market economics, which might slightly be slamming the stable door after the horse has long since vanished, but at least it is music to our ears, and does set up the final conclusion: that kindness is not something to be taught, but to be reawakened, and to be performed instinctively, intuitively, for the good of society as a whole. As the Bible says, when performing acts of charity, the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing.Nicholas Lezardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Row Paperback books of particular interest. feeds.nytimes.com |
For the Heirs to Holmes, a Tangled Web For nearly 80 years Sherlock Holmes has been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn’t have wished them upon him. feeds.nytimes.com |