TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. BORN OF FIRE, by Sherrilyn Kenyon2. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham3. CROSS COUNTRY, by James Patterson4. YOUR HEART BELONGS TO ME, by Dean Koontz5. ANGELS AT CHRISTMAS, by Debbie Macomber feeds.nytimes.com |
Telling a picture's story Joel Stewart is the writer and illustrator of books including Dexter Bexter and the Big Blue Beastie and Have You Ever Seen a Sneep? In this exclusive gallery of his illustrations, he explains how he sets to work feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Elizabeth Berridge 1919-2009 Underrated novelist and a perceptive celebrator of family lifeThe novelist Elizabeth Berridge, who has died aged 89, was a writer of rare distinction who deserved more recognition than she ever received. She was born in south London, of English/Welsh ancestry. Her father was a land agent, administering large London and country estates, and she may have inherited something of his eye for property, for her descriptions of houses and localities, especially of the growth and development of the southern suburbs where she grew up and lived for large parts of her life, are memorable for their sharpness and accuracy.Berridge was educated in London and later in Geneva, and in 1940 she married Reginald Moore, founder and editor of Modern Reading and other wartime literary magazines. In 1943 the family moved to Wales, where they lived until 1951 and where she brought up their two children and started writing.Her first novel was The Story of Stanley Brent (1945), more a novella than a novel, and compared by Edwin Muir to Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple. In the same year she also published The House of Defence. But at the same time she was writing short stories, a form of fiction that came naturally to her and at which she excelled, and these appeared in a number of periodicals. Her first collection, Selected Stories, was produced in 1947 in the Hourglass Library series published by her husband, and shows all the assurance and insight that was to mark her more mature work. From the beginning, she was a master of what she herself described as the "tiny, concentrated explosions short stories should contain" and which were so striking in, for example, Lullaby, a horrifyingly haunting story of fewer than three pages.Her next novel, Be Clean, Be Tidy, appeared in 1949 and was also published in the US. This was followed by Upon Several Occasions (1953); Rose Under Glass (1961); Across the Common (1964), which won the Yorkshire Post's book of the year award; Sing Me Who You Are (1967); People at Play (1982); and Touch and Go (1995), which was adapted as a radio drama. The writer and editor Diana Athill, on reading it, said: "Now here is a true novelist."Berridge continued to write short stories, publishing them in the Cornhill, Winter's Tales, London Magazine, New Writing and elsewhere. A further collection, Family Matters, appeared in 1980 and a selection of her short stories was published in 2000 by Persephone Books, to the pleasure of her admirers. She also published The Barretts at Hope End (1974), an edition of the early diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with an introduction that deserves reading on its own account, described in his review by Paul Scott as "a minor work of art".Although she was, on the surface, a conventional master of conservative suburban fiction, her work concealed a deep subversiveness. The reader continually finds his expectations railroaded on to a completely different track. She was, par excellence, the celebrator of family life. There is, as she said herself, no substitute for the family: "It is society's first teething ring, man's proving ground. When repudiated, it still leaves its strengthening mark. When it does the rejecting, the outcast is damaged. Within its confines, devils and angels rage together, emotions creep underfoot like wet rot, or flourish like Russian ivy. It is the world in microcosm, the nursery of tyrants, the no man's land of suffering, a place and a time, a rehearsal for silent parlour murder."Berridge was an expert at charting the small cruelties that husband and wife, parent and child, can inflict on each other in the domestic arena, and at describing the intrinsic dignity and extrinsic humiliations of old age. On the other hand, she freely admitted to a preoccupation with aunts, and this is manifest in most of her finely crafted fiction, where aunts of all varieties – mainly elderly – proliferate on the page, realistically, if lovingly, described. Readers of Across the Common will not soon forget Aunt Seraphina, expertly stuffing her bag with cuttings from the flowerbeds of Regent's Park under the nose of the keeper for the benefit of her garden at home.She was perhaps unfortunate in having spent the largest part of her writing career in the days before the proliferation of literary prizes raised the publicity value of writers to a pitch undreamed of in the 1940s and 50s. Her name was largely unknown in her latter years except to her contemporaries, partly because of the resolution with which she protected her private life. The reissue on Faber Finds of six of her novels in 2008 and 2009 gave her pleasure, and her writing retained its freshness and elegance to the end.Two young editors, themselves novelists of distinction – in deciding what they would include in the next issue of the British Council's New Writing and unaware of her earlier work – picked out one of Berridge's short stories for its originality and excellence, and in the belief that its inclusion would encourage "other young writers". They were astonished, though delighted, to meet the octogenarian contributor at the launch party. After the death of her husband in 1990, she travelled widely. For 25 years she reviewed novels for the Daily Telegraph, and also for the Spectator, the Literary Review and the Tablet. She served as judge for a number of literary prizes, including the David Higham award for first novel, the Katherine Mansfield short story award and the Dylan Thomas short story award, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.She is survived by her son, Lawrence, a film-maker, her daughter, Karen, a potter, as well as four grandchildren, Adam, Myfanwy, Dylan and Lia.• Elizabeth Berridge, writer, born 3 December 1919; died 2 December 2009Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Have you bought a ticket to Orhan Pamuk's new novel yet? The Museum of Innocence is set to appear both in hard covers and as an actual tourist destinationNobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk's new novel, The Museum of Innocence transports us from the pages of its 83 chapters to 83 displays of objects belonging to his fictional characters in his real-life Museum of Innocence expected to open in the summer of 2010 in Cukurcuma, Istanbul. The city, with its lost glory and memories of greatness past is transformed into a museum in Pamuk's work, a testament to the author's love affair with memory and his beloved hometown. The thin line separating fiction from reality is further obscured in Pamuk's attempt to breathe reality into the life of his imagined characters. Visitors to the soon-to-be opened museum in Istanbul will enjoy free admission, provided they bring a copy of the book, each furnished with a ticket on page 520. Here, Pamuk uses collecting as a form of storytelling – the narrative form correlated to the art of curating. In The Museum of Innocence, beauty is preserved not only in memory but also permanently through a catalogue of artefacts that the reader will have the pleasure of viewing (assuming one is able to visit the museum in Istanbul). The actual museum will be filled with everyday objects and curiosities that Pamuk has amassed over the years and evoke the work of fiction: a tricycle, maps, postcards, cups and glasses, garments and underwear depicting the protagonist's affair with his lover. Pamuk's new novel tells of an affluent Istanbul resident, 30-year-old Kemal, scion of one of Istanbul's grandest old families and his bittersweet, almost tragic relationship with a poor, distant relative, the beautiful 18-year-old, "common shop girl" Füsun. He mistakes his fondness for the girl for love and quickly finds his lust transmuted into an Humbertian obsession that has him casting away his bourgeois lifestyle and future with his equally affluent, Paris-educated fiancée for a life spent watching TV with the love of his life and her penniless filmmaker-husband in their modest home, finding happiness in nothing more than stray moments with Füsun. It isn't only stolen moments that he pilfers; Kemal also filches Füsun's belongings and ephemera – from 4,213 cigarette stubs, to 237 hair barrettes to one quince grinder. He seeks consolation in these objects and finds comfort in their connection with his beloved. Pamuk provides a humane depiction of love and his protagonist's obsession with two beloveds: Füsun and Istanbul. Rather than using a linear narrative to tell his story, the narrator becomes an "anthropologist of [his] own experience," accumulating paraphernalia that correspond to specific memories. The author consequently becomes a curator. "Curatorship is a different kind of authorship, not only because arguments and insights are made with objects and images rather than primarily with words but also because collaboration is an inherent aspect of the process from conception to installation," explains scholar and curator Barry Bergdoll in the article Curating History. Pamuk accrues and unearths artefacts by delving not only into his own experiences but also into the mindsets of his characters, creating an innovative form of storytelling wherein the physical and real are intrinsically linked to the abstract and fictional. The novel as a museum, the writer as a curator is a new convention that could possibly lend itself to other works. Kafka's Trial, for instance, might work well assuming it was housed in vast premises with a lot of corridors. Melville's Moby-Dick would look like a cross between the Natural History Museum, the Golden Hind, and a crime scene. The Old Curiosity Shop is a given (with a shop on Portsmouth Street in Westminster thought to be the inspiration behind Dickens's antique shop) so are Nineteen Eighty Four's room 101 and various ministries. Myriad examples present themselves, which poses the question: what novel-museum would you like to explore?Orhan PamukFictionTrisha Andresguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
TBR: Inside the List “Game Change,” John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s dishy account of the 2008 presidential campaign, enters the list at No. 1. feeds.nytimes.com |