Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer
“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.
“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.
Continue reading...Copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Refugees was due to be returned to Helsinki’s central library month after USSR invaded Finland
A book borrowed from a Helsinki library has been returned – 84 years overdue.
A Finnish translation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novel Refugees was received by librarian Heini Strand on Monday at the main desk at the Helsinki Central Library Oodi.
Continue reading...Bestselling writer says Lake District sites in new book You Are Here are ‘genuinely all made up’
David Nicholls has warned his fans not to attempt to visit the locations in his new novel. While those who loved the hit Netflix adaptation of Nicholls’ novel One Day have been able to visit locations from the series, such as the Lewisham pizza joint Bella Roma or Charlton Lido, the locations in You Are Here “are genuinely all made up”, the author said.
The novel, which was published last month and follows a midlife couple as they hike through the Lake District, contain a disclaimer from the author explaining that while he has “tried to describe the landscape as accurately as possible, the pubs, hotels and restaurants along the way are all entirely fictional”, and he has also “taken a few small liberties with the route”.
Continue reading...The subversive work of Eliza Haywood, the feminist forerunner of the TV show’s gossip columnist, is about to be republished
She is the real-life Lady Whistledown, an eyebrow-raising female writer who penned a salacious anonymous gossip sheet that skewered 18th-century London society.
Like the fictional pamphlet from Netflix hit Bridgerton, which returned for a third series last week, Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot, published in 1746, has a distinctive, mocking voice that punches up and “speaks truth to power”. Now, a new book will republish Haywood’s funny, subversive periodical, which she wrote from the perspective of an angry green parrot, and seek to raise awareness of her groundbreaking work.
Continue reading...Book prompts conflict over claims of Métis identity in eastern part of country where group doesn’t have a homeland or deep historic ties
A graphic novel investigating Indigenous identity in Canada has prompted outrage from Métis groups, who say the book undermines their history and represents an attack on their sovereignty.
The work is the result of a third-year history seminar at Dalhousie University, where students collaborated on a book examining thorny questions over ancestry and identity.
Continue reading...Locals hope TV adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude will bring new life to Aracataca, birthplace of author’s magical realism
In sweltering mid-afternoon heat, children splash in the clear water of the canal that threads through town as elderly neighbours look on from rocking chairs on the porches of their sun-washed houses. Butterflies spring from every bush, sometimes fluttering together in kaleidoscopes.
At the foot of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains, about 20 miles from the Caribbean coast, Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional world of Macondo lives on.
Continue reading...Freedom: Memories 1954-2021 will cover Merkel’s childhood, political rise and 16 years as German chancellor
Angela Merkel will release her long-awaited memoirs in November under the title Freedom: Memories 1954-2021, sketching her journey from life behind the Berlin Wall to the top echelons of power “more intimately than ever before”.
Merkel, whose image in Germany and abroad has been tarnished by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, will turn 70 in July. She notes that her life can be neatly cleaved into experiences in “two German states – 35 years in the German Democratic Republic, 35 years in reunited Germany”, according to the book’s English publisher, Pan Macmillan.
Continue reading...Bestselling author of Lace and Superwoman turned her attention to helping people overcome anxiety about maths
Shirley Conran, the author of Lace and Superwoman, has died aged 91, her son the designer Jasper Conran has announced.
The bestselling “queen of the bonkbuster” was also the founder of the Maths Anxiety Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to help people who experience anxiety or fear when faced with maths problems. Last week Conran was awarded a damehood in her bed in Charing Cross hospital in London for her services to mathematics education.
Continue reading...The set of folios published by John Gould will be presented at Firsts book fair in London in mid-May
John Gould was one of the most sought-after taxidermists in 19th-century London, commissioned by King George IV to stuff the first giraffe to arrive in England.
But Gould’s lasting legacy is birds. He travelled the world documenting and cataloguing as many avian species as he could find, many of them never seen before, earning him the nickname the Bird Man and the appointment as official “bird stuffer” to the Zoological Society.
Continue reading...Palestinian restauranteur speaks from Bethlehem, where food stalls are sparse as farmlands are under attack
Fadi Kattan looked forlornly at the stalls inside the Bethlehem vegetable market bearing small quantities of oranges, watermelons and cauliflowers. “This stall should be heaped with products, he said. “And over there should be piles of aubergines and courgettes.”
The watermelons from Jenin looked too small for the season, while he wasn’t sure where the boxes of oranges were from. They would normally be from Gaza. At Um Nabil’s stall in the West Bank market where Kattan is a regular customer, she told him she could no longer afford to bring in the best small local cucumbers or piles of green cherries from her village of Artas.
Continue reading...South Dakota governor says she met North Korean dictator in same book in which she describes killing her dog
The South Dakota governor, Republican vice-presidential hopeful and self-confessed dog-killer Kristi Noem’s bizarre claim in a new book to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dismissed by experts as “dubious” and not “conceivable”.
The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s claim, which is in her forthcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.
Continue reading...Newly deciphered passages describe Greek philosopher critiquing slave musician for her lack of rhythm
Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy.
In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl.
Continue reading...South Dakota governor’s account of family dog Cricket killing neighbor’s chickens may be an offence, according to state law
Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, may have committed a class two misdemeanor offence when her fated dog Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer Noem deemed “untrainable” for hunting pheasant, killed a neighbor’s chickens.
Under South Dakota law, “any person owning, keeping, or harboring a dog that chases, worries, injures, or kills any poultry or domestic animal is guilty of a class two misdemeanor and is liable for damages to the owner thereof for any injury caused by the dog to any such poultry or animal.”
Continue reading...South Dakota governor says she ‘understands why some people are upset’ about story of shooting family puppy but points to state law
Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful, on Sunday again defended killing a family dog and goat on her farm, two days after the Guardian revealed how she describes those actions in a forthcoming book.
“I can understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book – No Going Back,” Noem wrote on Twitter/X.
Continue reading...Revelation in new book that possible Trump running mate killed ‘untrainable’ hunting dog prompts widespread revulsion
Conservative pundits have condemned the South Dakota governor and possible Trump running mate Kristi Noem, amid widespread horror over her admission in a new book that she killed both an “untrainable” dog and an unruly goat during a single day in hunting season.
Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Trump White House staffer turned critic, said: “I’m a dog lover and I am honestly horrified by the Kristi Noem excerpt. I wish I hadn’t even read it. A 14-month-old dog is still a puppy and can be trained. A large part of bad behaviour in dogs is not having proper training from humans.
Continue reading...Cancellation of World Voices festival comes days after organization cancelled 2024 edition of its annual awards ceremony
The free speech organization PEN America has cancelled its World Voices festival after several authors withdrew their participation over the non-profit’s response to Israel’s military attacks against Gaza.
The festival was scheduled to take place on 8 May in New York City and Los Angeles. A prominent group of writers including Naomi Klein, a Guardian columnist; Isabella Hammad; and Zaina Arafat signed an open letter to PEN America in March announcing their decision not to participate in this year’s festival.
Continue reading...US activist, 69, speaks to NBC amid growing effort to prevent I Am Ruby Bridges and other works being available to school students
Increasingly, the US civil rights icon Ruby Bridges – the first Black child to integrate a school in Louisiana – has seen some adults seek to prevent grade-school students from accessing the books and films that chronicle her story, saying the tale makes white children feel bad about themselves.
But that justification is “ridiculous” because “my biggest fans are kids all around the world”, Bridges told NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker in an interview airing on Sunday morning’s episode of the show.
Continue reading...Ex-Democrat, reported contender for Trump running mate, sued Clinton for Russia remark but dropped case
Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.
Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”
Continue reading...Authors and translators say PEN America has ‘had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza’, in stark contrast to other national centres of the organisation
Thirty-one authors and translators have withdrawn their work from consideration for or declined PEN America’s 2024 literary awards over the organisation’s “failure to protect” Palestinian writers in Gaza.
Nine out of 10 longlistees for the PEN/Jean Stein book award, worth $75,000 (£60,143), have withdrawn their books. Christina Sharpe, Catherine Lacey and Joseph Earl Thomas are among the withdrawing writers.
Continue reading...Despite his lack of faith, the author believes ‘something happened that was not supposed to happen’ on the day he was attacked
Salman Rushdie has revealed an abiding sense that his survival after a brutal knife attack two years ago was a miracle, in spite of his lack of spiritual faith. “I do feel that something happened that was not supposed to happen and I have no explanation for it,” Rushdie said this weekend before the publication of Knife, his account of the incident.
“I certainly don’t feel that some hand reached down from the sky and guarded me,” but it still presents a contradiction, he admits, “for one who doesn’t believe.”
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