TOP 100 BOOK SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, on life since Berlin Wall collapsed Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, the award-winning book by Anna Funder, is an investigation of how East Germans' lives were shaped by the Berlin Wall. As Germany commemorates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, she looks at how citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have adapted to life in the west. feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Talking turkey The US's day of national celebration, Thanksgiving has received the attention of many writers. But were you paying attention, or too busy eating and watching football? feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A life in writing 'I like biography so much β because it's somehow easier being somebody else'There's something winning about Jenny Uglow's insistence that she's always been "terribly lucky". The author of a string of hugely admired historical biographies, she still refuses to think of herself as "a writer with a capital 'W'". A distinguished figure in publishing who's known as "the best editor in London", she still expresses surprise that Chatto & Windus, where she is editorial director, tolerates her preference to work part-time. She "slipped by accident" into becoming the adviser on every worthwhile period drama on TV. And it becomes clear she considers the whole idea of being interviewed for a newspaper profile "a little weird".Sitting in the kitchen of her house in Canterbury, almost her first remark is that she just lives an "ordinary family life". Later, in the course of remembering her student acting days, she wonders whether "that's why I like biography so much β because it's somehow easier being somebody else". But her capacity for self-effacement is matched by her friendliness and the enthusiasm she radiates when talking about her work. She isn't reflective about the writing process, she says; she's "much happier talking about the stuff".At Chatto, she has edited such stellar titles as AS Byatt's novels since Possession, Edmund White's Genet, David Kynaston's four-volume history of the City, and Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton by her close friend since college, Hermione Lee. Uglow describes herself as happily "plunged by editing into different worlds all the time", and it doesn't take much encouragement for her to turn the focus of conversation away from herself towards a "thrilling" volume on stained-glass windows, or a "fabulous" new study of Montaigne.Uglow's own books similarly originate in an eagerness to share her sense of enthrallment: "I always get terribly excited and want to say to other people 'Hey, look'." As a result her writing is, according to Peter Conrad, "aglow with affection", and she admits to feeling very partial towards the biographical subjects she chooses ("you're on their team. And you get really cross with people who are against them").Her biographies span art, literature and science, and together they map a route of rigorous but evidently gleeful intellectual discovery. There are many connections, more or less obvious, between the works. Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, a life of whom Uglow published in 1993, had family ties to Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, who are at the centre of The Lunar Men, her account of the 18th-century Lunar Society, so-called because it met around the time of the full moon, when there was enough light to walk home.Wedgwood had "witty, minutely observed landscape vignettes" by the Northumbrian engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick on some sets of his Queensware. Bewick, who democratised book illustration, is another of Uglow's subjects, and is described by her as "an adherent to the Hogarthian, English school that placed the particular above the general or idealised, the observed above the academic" (which might be said to be her own method too). Her much-heralded biography of Hogarth was published in 1997. Before that was a "little book on Henry Fielding", who was Hogarth's good friend.Incorrigibly curious herself, she reflects that "looking at different times, I always find curiosity an engaging quality". It's easy to see why she found the Lunar Society irresistible. Its members β who included James Watt and Joseph Priestley as well as Darwin and Wedgwood β were astonishingly inventive and adventurous, building clocks and telescopes, flying in hot-air balloons, inventing machines that could speak, and coming up with recipes for disappearing ink. Darwin even designed a mechanical bird whose wings were to be flapped by the detonation of small charges of gunpowder. "There was a sense of possibility that you could make anything," Uglow marvels. "Take an imaginative leap then fit the technology to it."Having immersed herself in 18th-century science, an obvious pathway was further back to the beginnings of the Royal Society, set up in 1660, the year Charles II returned to England to assume the throne. But curiosity got the better of Uglow once again, and she became, she says, intrigued by the Restoration and by Charles II himself β his appetite for pleasure, his own interest in the "new science" and his often risky strategies for survival."I have written about artists and writers, inventors and scientists," she says in the prologue to her new book about Charles, A Gambling Man, but "what if a person's art is also his life, his role simply 'being the king'?"In a related sense, too, A Gambling Man represents a departure for Uglow. "My books look as if they're on disparate subjects,'" she says, "but I realise after having written them that they're all about stroppy bourgeois radicals who were fighting the centre." And it's with these people that her sympathies lie. But "I began to wonder what things look like from the heart of power. And it's outrageous, of course, but it's also an amazing viewpoint".She was "gripped" by the ecstatic moment of the Restoration: "people really thought their lives would change. It's very moving." The events called to mind more recent political upheavals, in particular 1989 β "those astonishing scenes on television, everybody out in the street in eastern Europe. Then when I was finishing the book, there was Washington on the TV, with people crying with happiness at the election of Obama."When Charles landed in Dover in May 1660, "Onlookers wept. Bonfires flared . . . fires sprang from beacon to beacon, lighting him home." As his coach headed towards a tumultuous reception in London, "country girls with laced bodices and wide-sleeved smocks . . . ran to throw flowers." I'm really a republican, Uglow admits, "but I grew up with fairy tales" β she is susceptible to the allure of a prince charming returning home.There were, she remembers, "a lot of Greek myths and stories about Hannibal", as well as fairy tales, on the bookshelves of her childhood home in Cumbria. Her father was a classics teacher at St Bee's school on the coast; her mother, who came from the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of North Wales, was a Froebel teacher to young children. As befits an enthusiast of Bewick, she talks a little wistfully of the rural landscape she grew up with β "mountains sloping down to the sea".From the age of seven to 13, she went to "an eccentric school called Calder Girls (long since closed) in Seascale. It was very free and easy, run by two ladies, Miss Bellamy and Miss Gardner, one tall and thin, the other short and fat. We had swimming lessons in the sea, and the grass on the tennis courts was knee-deep. Wonderful."That all changed when the family moved south and Uglow was sent to Cheltenham Ladies College, where she recalls "battling against the system. There were all these rules. What side of the stairs to go up . . . I didn't understand the logic." She describes herself as being "saved by good English teachers", in particular the poet UA Fanthorpe, who died last year: "She was a brilliant analyst of literary and poetic forms β making me understand how great writers respect form yet push against it. She was also the person I turned to when I got into trouble."After five years as an undergraduate and graduate at St Anne's College, Uglow felt the need to "get out of Oxford", largely because she took against the tone of "urbane, ironic detachment" that prevailed in the common rooms there. "We were an outspoken, passionate lot." Uglow met her husband, Steve, at Oxford; they married in 1971. When he was at Berkeley, they travelled in a camper van through Mexico: "very much of the period".The couple moved to London, where they lived in a big, shared house in Cornwall Gardens, Kensington. "A group of us got together and bought it . . . everything had to be done by committee; it was a nightmare, of course." She and Steve were involved in grassroots radical politics β "it was the era of cyclostyle magazines and going off to meetings". Uglow got a job at Macmillan, where she worked for a few years.They then moved to Canterbury, and have stayed there ever since (Steve Uglow is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent). Between 1975 and 1983 Uglow had four children (three sons and a daughter). She also helped set up one of the first women's refuges and taught adult education courses for the WEA: "It led me to a different kind of reading β very direct." Encountering the work of Raymond Williams and EP Thompson "was like opening a window after the stuffy rooms of formal literary criticism. Different writers sprang into focus, and alerted me to a rich 'people's culture' β not so much 'popular culture'."This had an obvious influence: her own books are celebrated for their vivid reimaginings of everyday lives in the past. ("She has a novelist's imagination as well as a historian's, and has a brilliant eye for detail" says Byatt. "Her writing captures what it's like to cook a certain stew or take a particular Northumbrian walk in wet weather.") Another hero was Angela Carter, whose journalism and other writings Uglow edited into a collection entitled Shaking a Leg. "I adored her," Uglow says. "Her stories and novels were wild, bloody-minded and brilliant, funny and dark (and empowering, to use a word from those early feminist days)."One product of her freelancing was the Macmillan Biographical Dictonary of Women, first published in 1982, and now in its fourth edition. Its origins lay in Uglow's work for the reference division of the publishing house, and her frustration that all the books of facts were "full of bloody men". It "was a mad undertaking" she has written since, "born of a time when feminists wanted heroines and didn't have Google".She was also one of the gang who helped Carmen Callil with Virago, and wrote a number of introductions to the Modern Classics (Mrs Oliphant, Mary Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward), before embarking, suitably daunted, on George Eliot, for the Virago Pioneers series β "I didn't think I could do it; it was touching the hem."Uglow was pulled back into publishing by Callil who, when she became publisher of Chatto in 1982, hired her to relaunch the Hogarth Press and run it as a radical paperback list. Her editing skills soon became renowned. In Byatt's words, "Jenny has this capacity of knowing exactly what you're talking about at an earlier stage than anybody else. Her mode of editing is precise. She makes very few suggestions but most I immediately accept. I've never had another editor like that."Kynaston, who is also struck by how very quickly she grasps things, remembers that the only time he ever saw Uglow discomposed was the time he "brought into Chatto a copy of her Gaskell biography to have her sign it. It was lying on her desk when Carmen Callil approached. The formidable Callil was a little cross it hadn't been published by Chatto and Jenny said . . . 'Put it away, quick, put it away!'"All but one of Uglow's major books have been published by Faber, beginning with her life of Gaskell, whom she continues to admire as "a daring, pioneering writer, determined to speak out against injustice", and whose cause she was able to champion two years ago, during the screening of the much-loved BBC adaptation of Cranford, in which she was involved as adviser.Her first job of this kind β going through scripts, checking for anachronisms and making suggestions β was on Tom Jones in 1997, "just after I'd written on Fielding. I just kept doing it for fun. A lot of my work has been on Andrew Davies adaptations. It can be maddening but I'm still fascinated by the difference between novel and film, the way dialogue works and the need to 'see' scenes in every tiny detail." Her credits include the film of Pride and Prejudice as well as Bleak House, The Way We Live Now and Wives and Daughters.Davies describes her as "pure gold, so clued up and curious. The other day, thinking about the fact that the Hottentot Venus and Mr Darcy were contemporaries, I emailed her to ask if there were any situations where they could plausibly have encountered each other. She came up with a couple straight away." Working on the script of Vanity Fair, Davies tried out another adviser, but the interloper was phased out when it became clear that only Uglow properly knew the disreputable things that went on in 19th-century pleasure gardens.It is Uglow's success in different spheres that is highlighted in friends' descriptions of her. "Everybody is aghast at what she's achieved," says Callil. "Jenny always struck me as amazingly busy, caring for her family, researching her books and holding down a packed job as an editor," Edmund White remembers. "She seems a bit scatter-brained or at least breathless, but in fact her mind is beautifully organised β how else could she do so much? Hermione Lee once told me that when she would visit a new place with Jenny, within a matter of hours Jenny had sussed out the entire region, taken notes, absorbed everything: she is Henry James's ideal, the person on whom nothing is wasted."Lee herself talks of Uglow having "more than one life. And she lives them all with extraordinary fullness and a sense of fun."It's certainly hard to think of a publisher at the top of the profession in Britain, now or in recent memory, who is as prolific and feted a writer. Lee, Callil and Davies all refer to her as a "kind of genius" β "and now she's a grandmother, too", Callil adds. "She doesn't suffer fools, though," Byatt says. "She may not make a lot of noise about it, but she doesn't." Kynaston describes her as "driven, a smoker, not too interested in food" (Callil emails especially to say "another good thing about Jenny is she's a smoker β or used to be").One of Uglow's secrets, perhaps, is that she long ago realised she didn't want to spend more than two days a week in an office. She describes herself as "not a natural nine-to-fiver. It's a very privileged thing to say, I know, but something about my programming doesn't fit that life."It is at home in Canterbury, now cluttered again with young children's toys, that she works on her books β as sharply detailed, humane and entertaining as Bewick's woodcuts. And if her mind slows, she goes outside and spends half an hour gardening, her passion for which, like her modesty, can be seen as one sort of thoroughgoing Englishness. "It is a misty November morning," she writes at the beginning of A Little History of British Gardening. "Each blade of grass gleams and leans, heavy with moisture, and the air is so still that leaves from the oak tree at the end of my garden fall straight down, twirling and landing like a whisper." It sounds better than the office to me.Paul Laityguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Nonfiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE BLIND SIDE, by Michael Lewis2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin3. FREAKONOMICS, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner4. BLINK, by Malcolm Gladwell5. I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, by Tucker Max feeds.nytimes.com |
Going gets tough for literary agents | Robert McCrum β¦ but the toughest are getting going in the search for new marketsJust over a year ago, to be a literary agent in the Anglo-American world of books must have seemed like the plummiest, most glamorous job imaginable. The newspapers were full of the Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD) drama, a scandalous and fascinating kind of literary soap opera, West Enders, perhaps. Dazzling photographs of Caroline Michel advertised a way of life that seemed to flourish in the antechamber to stardom. Even the new agency formed from the rubble of the PFD earthquake had a Californian ring to it: what could be more Hollywood than United Agents?But it was not all glitz. There was even an artistic rationale to the sudden prominence of the literary agent. As many commentators have noted, when the publisher's editor declined in consequence (a fact whose truth is often exaggerated) the creative vacuum was increasingly filled by the dynamic and supportive figure of the agent, supplying the writers' traditional need for literary mothercare.Now, as the recession gnaws remorselessly into the bone marrow of the book business and the literary blogosphere grows ever more plangent with exclamations of alarm and woe at the industry's bleak future, the gilt is definitely coming off the gingerbread. Big time. Today, the glamour of the literary agent has been replaced by something rather more mundane β the spectre of the redundancy notice and the dole queue. If there is one sector of the book world that is suffering as badly as bookselling and publishing it must be the business of authors' representation, or literary agenting. The figures are hard to get at because almost all the agencies in London and New York are privately owned, but it stands to reason that, if writers' earnings are down, and they are (dramatically), and that if book advances have been slashed, and they have (spectacularly), then those who make their living from 15 or 20% of their clients' incomes will be feeling the pinch, especially if they occupy high-priced real estate in sought-after metropolitan neighbourhoods like Bloomsbury, Soho and Covent Garden. Anecdotally, everyone I speak to in the industry confirms this perception.It's not all doom and gloom. The smaller agencies will weather the storm like any corner shop by tightening their belts, postponing holidays and cutting down on inessentials and luxuries. For the bigger agencies, with intractable overheads, the long-term picture is much bleaker. Which is why London and New York are buzzing with rumours of well-known literary agencies seeking defensive alliances (aka mergers), discreetly putting themselves up for sale, and casting around for white knights of any description.This, by the way, is nothing new. Throughout the 90s and into the 00s there was a constant murmur of background conversation between possible corporate partners. Even PFD itself was, in its glory days, the triumphant combination of AD Peters (books) and Fraser & Dunlop (plays and film). What's new about the current takeover conversations is the desperation of the protagonists. They will be negotiating from positions of weakness not strength. Leaving aside the dreadful market conditions, the ongoing transformation of the book world's economics by the combination of Amazon and Google (to use a newspaper short-hand for a far more complex and subtle process) is rendering the literary agents' role economically, even creatively, pointless.Sure, new writers will be wise to get themselves some representation, but new writers, almost by definition, make very little money, at least to start with. The real money lies with the big names, and these so-called literary brands typically take between five and 10 years (often much longer) to develop. And if, as a literary agent, you are lucky enough to look after a client who is pulling in big sales, there's no guarantee, as there used to be, that you can bank on 15% of many squillions into the foreseeable future. The marketplace is changing so rapidly that some writers, especially in the US, are beginning to make co-venture deals with publishers, deals brokered by lawyers not literary agents. Authors are much less passive about their careers than they used to be. They are beginning to ask questions, and to make demands on their representatives who, for the first time, are having to make a real effort.All is not lost, however. The IT revolution has sponsored an extraordinary proliferation of new markets: new formats, new territories and new media. There's plenty of gold to be mined from the slopes of Parnassus. Your 21st century literary agent will just have to work much harder to maximise that exploitation. I note, with interest, that the celebrated Andrew Wylie, whose Wylie Agency has bucked every trend alluded to above, and has no need of an alliance with anyone, habitually gets up at 5am. And he doesn't eat much lunch, either. Way to go!PublishingRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |