'"In collage, every fragment is a capsule: I’m on my way to the moon on every page.'"
David Shields' new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, calls on writers, artists and all working in the creative fields to be ever more mindful of reality in their work. In an increasingly manafactured world, he argues, it is the unadorned truth that must take precedent in the arts. Here he chooses a selection of books that have been stripped of artifice and lay bare their essential message.
Thursday, 25 February, 2010
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Set against London's creaking financial industry in the autumn of 2008, Henry Sutton's novel Get Me Out of Here holds a mirrror up to city greed in the noughties. Here he traces the rise and fall of money men in fiction, from Jay Gatsby to Patrick Bateman. More...
Wednesday, 27 January, 2010
2009 was the year that saw the demise of Borders, the deaths of John Updike and Frank McCourt, the wrath of Alain de Botton and the resignation of Ruth Padel as Oxford professor of poetry. We asked some leading writers and poets for their highs and lows of the last twelve months in literature. More...
Tuesday, 22 December, 2009
For centuries, London has fed literature with some of our most enduring stories. Home to Shakespeare, Dickens and Pepys, and now to Sandhu, Self and Sinclair, Rebecca Yolland explores a capital history of words. More...
Thursday, 19 November, 2009
Hog-butcher to the world, hardscrabble city on the make, Chicago is experiencing a literary renaissance. The loose, talky style of the city¹s best writers has been reinterpreted by a whole new generation of novelists, poets and memoirists, finds Granta editor JOHN FREEMAN. More...
Monday, 12 October, 2009
BBC World Affairs correspondent HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY considers how our notions of democracy inform and obscure foreign policy, and explores the impact of failed and violent states in fiction and reportage. More...
Monday, 7 September, 2009
Language is one of the few realms we have jurisdiction over as children, and where we first learn to test the limits and lengths of our power, finds poet and novelist JACOB POLLEY
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Monday, 20 July, 2009
ALAIN DE BOTTON, author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, champions those pessimistic philosophers who relish the banalities of life and embrace its imperfections.
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Tuesday, 7 April, 2009
KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of Burnt Shadows, finds an affinity for the literary sleight of hand of Michael Ondaatje and Ali Smith. More...
Tuesday, 10 March, 2009
IAIN SINCLAIR has been charting London's forgotten corners for decades, bearing witness to the ebb and flow of development and its fast fading histories. His new book about Hackney is a hymn to the changing East End and its importance as an archive. He traces its progress through previous generations of Hackney writers. More...
Monday, 9 February, 2009
Islands have long provided the perfect microclimate for the novel, concentrating the action, testing character and contending with nature. SAM TAYLOR's new novel The Island at the End of the World updates this idea, and gives it a contemporary bite. He examines a rich thread of islands novels from Shakespeare to Huxley. More...
Tuesday, 13 January, 2009
Literature provides us with some of our most enduring visions of Christmas, from the Bible to A Christmas Carol, but it needn't stop at Dickens. The festive season, with all it's conflict, family drama and high emotion, is ripe territory for modern fiction. Christmas on the page needn't be all snowflakes and rosy cheeks to conjure a little Christmas Spirit, finds VIOLA FORT. More...
Monday, 8 December, 2008
SARA MAITLAND takes us on a tour of the natural world on her bookshelf, from Robert Macfarlane's book on mountains, Paul Davies' exploration of the universe and Ken and Rod Preston-Mafham's ode to the 'pyschology of invertebrates'. More...
Thursday, 6 November, 2008
Every so often SUSIE BOYT finds a book that fills her with passion and kindles a sense of kinship between her and the author. From Henry James' In the Cage to Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, these are the books that inspire hero worship and drive her to write.
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Thursday, 2 October, 2008
RON CURRIE, author of his own gripping, artful and often amusing apocalytpic vision God Is Dead, takes us on a journey to the end of time, from the sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut to the good old zombie yarn of Max Brooks.
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Friday, 5 September, 2008
The Iliad is one of the most enduring and emblematic stories history has ever given us. ADAM FOULDS, author of the remarkable narrative poem Broken Word, traces its subject - the Trojan War - through centuries of literature and finds the rich cluster of stories it spurned endure into the present day.
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Friday, 1 August, 2008
REBECCA ABRAMS' new novel Touching Distance tells the story of a brilliant but largely unrecognised doctor working in 18th century Aberdeen. Here she talks about the books, from writers as diverse as Hilary Mantel and Mikhail Bulgakov, which provided her with both a model and an inspiration.
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Friday, 4 July, 2008
STEVE TOLTZ, author of A Fraction Of The Whole, was recently named at The Hay Festival as 21 of the most exciting writers of the moment. He writes of living in Barcelona and Paris, about the peculiar freedom of writing away from home and those, including John Fowles and Henry Miller, who have found the same.
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Friday, 6 June, 2008
TOM COGHLAN, The Economist's man in Afghanistan, on why the best war reportage is seldom about the fighting itself. More...
Thursday, 24 April, 2008
