TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| TBR: Inside the List It’s not even Thanksgiving, and some Christmas-related books are already creeping up the list and Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, “The Lacuna,” enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 5. feeds.nytimes.com |
Borders's demise is not the end of the book world The trade is going through convulsive changes, but some trends in British books actually point upwardsIt's tempting to see the end of Borders as another consequence of the hurricane that is hitting the usually tranquil boulevards of the British book world. Tempting, but wrong. Borders is a casualty of market forces and internal mismanagement. Its demise is essentially similar to the fate, before it, of Dillons, Hammicks, Books Etc and Ottakars.The truth is that this country, with a population of about 60 million, offers the ambitious bookseller a rather small market for books, despite the growth in higher education, and one that can only sustain a single big American-style book chain. At the moment the name of that chain is Waterstone's, and even Waterstone's is struggling, having become a byword for shoddy retailing. In the short term, it will pick up some extra business from Borders refugees. Eventually, it may well face the same inexorable pressures as its now defunct competitor.Anyway, my guess is that, within the next decade, this drama on the High Street is going to recede in significance as digitisation gathers pace. That must be the future. Google is already beginning to capitalise on its Google Books Library Project. The momentum behind this can only accelerate as publishers of all stripes, big and small, adjust to the technological imperative of the IT revolution.As I've written here before, no one, from any contemporary vantage point, can know the final outcome of these changes. All we can say with certainty is that it's a case of "Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentleman. It's going to be a bumpy night."If this is true for publishers, it's likely to be even more true for the creative community of writers, illustrators, and journalists. Already, it's obvious that the literary generation of, roughly, 1980 to 2010, has enjoyed a long boom of extraordinary rewards in which print runs mushroomed, advances blossomed and expectations soared to unsustainable levels.To this, the recession of 2008-2009 has come as a timely punctuation mark. Full stop, comma or semi-colon? It's too soon to say. In Britain, the significant factor that diminishes the force of these changes on publisher and writer alike is the global explosion of the English language, in a variety of media, the phenomenon I call "Globish". That's not my term, by the way, it was coined by a delightful Frenchman, Jean-Paul Nerriere in 1995 as a very specific description of the ease with which non-native English speakers communicate with each other in Anglo-American English. As the second decade of the 21st century heaves into view all the signs are that "Globish" (English as a global lingua franca) is going to make the shock of digitisation, and the demise of High Street bookselling, a transitional not a cataclysmic moment.BooksellersBordersRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Hobbit: Jedwood's prospects rise as Tobey Maguire's wane | Ben Child Tobey Maguire denied he was to slip on the furry feet earlier this week. But Bilbo Baggins aside, which other characters need shoehorning into Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro's film? And who should play them?Just about every diminutive actor in Hollywood (and beyond) has been mentioned in connection with the role of Bilbo Baggins in Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit. Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe was the first to rule himself out of the running - and thank goodness. This week Spider-Man's Tobey Maguire has made it clear he's not been approached for the role, despite persistent rumours."I have not met with del Toro. We don't have any near future plans," Maguire told the Hollywood Reporter. "I don't know if something got misconstrued or miscommunicated but the source was not accurate at all. "I love Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, and I certainly wouldn't take myself out of the conversation … if I was part of it," added Maguire. "But I haven't read a script or talked to anybody about it."Others so far touted to slip on furry feet and head out on the long road to the Lonely Mountain include James McAvoy, Martin Freeman and David Tennant. Back in August I put my cards on the table and stated that an unknown would make the best candidate to play Tolkien's most famous homunculi. No one wants to see a familiar face step into such an iconic role: it's pretty hard to suspend your disbelief when the figure on screen is someone you've seen stumbling, bleary-eyed, out of China Whites at 2am in the gossip pages. Speaking of which, if you do read those, you're probably convinced that X-Factor's Jedward are going to star in The Hobbit as Fili and Kili, the most youthful dwarves in the company attempting to wrest their ancient homeland back from Smaug the Dragon in Tolkien's much-loved novel. Aside from Bilbo, there are some other pretty choice roles in The Hobbit, particularly if Del Toro and Jackson implement their current plan of filming the book in two three-hour segments, which would presumably require every last dash of dialogue in the novel to make it into the finished screenplay. Whoever plays Thorin, king in exile of the dwarves, will have to strike the right balance between winning magnetism and disagreeable avarice, just as Sean Bean did in the difficult role of Boromir in Rings. And whoever takes the role of Smaug the Dragon will have to be capable of reflecting the wyrm's ancient cunning and inhuman nature through voice alone.There are other roles which are only half-drawn in the novel, but which will be vital if the film version is to work. I'm thinking of the King of the Wood Elves, Bard the Bowman, the Master of Lake-town. Hugo Weaving's Elrond is a good example of a role underwritten by Tolkien which was expanded considerably - and successfully - in the film version of Rings. It will have to happen again.As a slight aside, thanks to Cherubino, who pointed out in last week's post, also on The Hobbit, that they could not remember a single named female character in the book. I have to say I can't either - but don't be surprised if Del Toro and Jackson shoehorn some in: the film version of Lord of the Rings expanded Arwen from a barely mentioned character into a pivotal figure in the narrative. Maybe this time round, Bard will turn out to be a lady, or we'll have the Queen of the Wood Elves. Neither could be ridiculous than the non-canonical scene in Jackson's The Return of the King in which Elrond turns up to tell Aragorn that "Arwen's life is now tied to the fate of the Ring". As a bit of a sad Tolkien geek, I nearly choked on my popcorn.Who would you cast in the main roles in The Hobbit? And do you expect Del Toro and Jackson to keep the character list straight this time around?The X FactorPeter JacksonGuillermo del ToroJRR TolkienDaniel RadcliffeBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Toronto authors festival gets $200K for touring The Toronto-based International Festival of Authors is getting a $200,000 boost for its provincial touring program from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, organizers announced on Wednesday. cbc.ca |
Martin Amis on writing Time's Arrow Week three: The author explains what led him to write this novel, and why it wasn't 'a decision'"Why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?" This challenge, which I still sometimes hear, can only be answered as follows: "But I never did." Similarly, I never decided to wite a novel about teenage sexuality, or Thatcher's England, or millennial London, or, indeed, about the Gulag (which I nonetheless completed in 2006). With its hopelessly inapposite verb, and presumptuous preposition, the question reveals an understandable naivety about the way that fictions are made. For the novel, as Norman Mailer put it, is "the spooky art".Deciding to write a novel about something – as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something – sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block. No matter what its length (vignette, novella, epic), a work of fiction begins with an inkling: a Ânotion that is also a physical sensation. It is hard to improve on Nabokov, who variously described it as a "shiver" and a "throb". The throb can come from anywhere, a newspaper report (very common), the remnants of a dream, a half-remembered quote. The crucial, the enabling fermentation lies in this: the shiver must connect to something already present in the subconscious.Time's Arrow depended on a coÂincidence, or a confluence. In the mid-1980s I started spending the summers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I made friends with the distinguished "psychohistorian" Robert Jay Lifton. Bob was and is the author of a succession of books on the political horrors of the 20th century: books on thought reform in China, on Hiroshima, on Vietnam. And in 1987 he gave me a copy of his latest (and perhaps most celebrated) work, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.Here, Lifton's historiographical Âmission is to establish nazism as an essentially biomedical ideology. It is there in Mein Kampf: "Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease." The Jew was the agent of "racial pollution" and "racial tuberculosis": the "eternal bloodsucker", "germ-carrier", the "maggot in a rotting corpse". Accordingly, the doctor must become a "biological soldier"; the healer must become a killer. In the camps, all the non-random murders were supervised by doctors (and so were the crematoria). As one of their number put it: "Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."That year, too, I already had it in my head that I might attempt a short story about a life lived backwards in time. This tenuous proposition appealed to me as a poetic possibility – but it seemed fatally frictionless. I could find no application for a life so lived. Which life? As I began The Nazi Doctors, I found myself thinking, most disconcertingly, this life. The life of a Nazi doctor. "Born" in New England, as an old man; "dying" in Austria, in the 1920s, as a baby boy . . .After more than a year of further reading, and of daily struggles with a sense of profanity and panic (by what entitlement could I address this Âsepulchral subject, and from such an apparently "playful" vantage?), I began to write. And at once I made an emboldening discovery: the arrow of time turns out to be the arrow of Âreason or logic, expectably enough; but it is also the arrow of morality. Set the cinema of life in reverse Âmotion, and (for example) Hiroshima is created in a single moment; violence is benign; killing becomes healing, healing killing; the hospital is a torture chamber, the death camp a fount of life. Reverse the arrow of time, and the Nazi project becomes what Hitler said it was: the means to make ÂGermany whole. Which still strikes me as some kind of measure of this terminal and Âdiametrical atrocity: it asked for the Âarrow of time to point the other way.We often ask ourselves who was worse: the little moustache or the big moustache, Hitler or Stalin? Well, 15 years later I wrote a novel about the Russian holocaust, too (House of ÂMeetings); and the latter, incidentally, was the more difficult to write, because it focused on the victims and not the perpetrators. But that is by the way. In our hierarchy of evil, we instinctively promote Hitler. And we are right.The Gulag – and this is not widely grasped – was first and foremost a system of state slavery. The goal, never achieved, was to make money. Still, this is a motive we can recognise. The German idea, with its "dreams of omnipotence and sadism" (Lifton), was utterly inhuman, or "counter-human", in Primo Levi's judgment, like a Âcounter-clock world. The Nazis were on the intellectual level of the supermarket tabloid. It should not surprise us to learn that there was a government department, in Berlin, set up to prove that the Aryans were not descended from the apes; no, they came from the lost continent of Atlantis, in the heavens, where they were preserved in ice from the beginning of time.Join John Mullan and Martin Amis for a discussion about Time's Arrow on Monday 25 January at 7pm, Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG. Tickets are £9.50 online (www.kingsplace.co.uk) or £11.50 from the box office: 020 7520 1490.Martin Amisguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |