Poetry, as RS Thomas once claimed, is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart. The poet's task is to find the effective middle ground; to perform that lyric trick whereby thought and emotion seem to effortlessly combine. Seek to provoke only feeling, and crude sentimentality ensues; indulge in the cerebral, and the poem might be interesting enough, but it will remain lifeless - a kind of versified intelligence. In Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe's debut collection, winner this week of this year's TS Eliot prize, the poet attempts to merge personal accounts of her dual Anglo-Chinese heritage with her scholar's penchant for the intellectually abstruse. The result is a book of poems that are as playfully and frustratingly recondite as they are memorable and unusually affecting.
Links of the week January 4 2016 (01)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
11 January 2016
Thankfully, Loop of Jade is itself restless. This is true of the poet's journeys through the China of her youth and the clash of differing cultures apparent in her adult life, but also of its formal repertoire. The jewellery box opens on to various worlds - some real; some mythical; some deftly blurring the two and Howe switches between shorter lyrics and longer narrative forms, keeping readers on their toes. In(c) Tame, one of a scattered sequence that takes its titles from a fictional taxonomy of animals, the historical Chinese custom of smothering an unwanted newborn girl in ashes is assimilated into a mythical tale of a daughter transformed into a soaring bird. This kind of symbolic metamorphosis strongly recalls another recent Chatto debutant, Liz Berry, the eerie exactitude of the poem's narration, combined with its magic realist wavering between the brutal and the fantastical, makes for an imaginative dissection of masculine violence.
This is a big year for Shakespeare - a worldwide celebration, honoring the Bard on the 400th anniversary of his death, April 23, 1616.
For those who love his work, it might be a time to reread one's favorite plays: in my case, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts One and Two, and Measure for Measure. But for those who have yet to read him, or who haven't read him since they were forced to read Julius Caesar in high school, now's the time.
So my confession: Despite my current obsession with all things Shakespeare, despite having written The Play's The Thing - a complete guide for young adults (and grown-ups) to all his plays - I didn't grow up loving Shakespeare. Not in the least. I remember my dad having an old one-volume edition, engraved Complete Works of Shakespeare. I tried reading it when I was in my early teens, but could make little sense of it. The language was hard to decipher, and there were ideas being tossed around that I wasn't able to catch. It was intimidating and more than a little scary.
None of the parcels were for me. This time last year, I made a New Year's resolution to give up my appalling Amazon habit. What with one-click ordering it had become fantasy shopping, clicking on Penguins as if they were penny sweets. I was spending hundreds of unthinking pounds - and never visiting the bookshops I claimed to cherish.
And nor does the internet enthuse about its favourite title by clutching the paperback to its chest, as one young man at Daunt on Marylebone High Street did. Pressing the book - Iris Murdoch's Under the Net to his Fair Isle jumper he advised that while he was "devoted" to her first novel, it was not "quintessential" Iris Murdoch. For that I needed The Sea, The Sea the most "Iris Murdoch, Iris Murdoch" of her novels. It was a lovely bit of phrase-making.
Five and a half years ago, I had an idea for a story. It was so out-of-the-blue and exciting to me that I just started writing it down, and before I knew it, it had become long enough to turn into a novel. Part of what had precipitated this was attending a local creative writing class on a Thursday afternoon: I urge any aspiring writer to do something similar. It was just so interesting to be given different ways to look at the world, and then be encouraged to write down what I saw, or heard, or felt - and then have to brave reading it out in class (definitely a good prelude to the scary business of letting people read your novel).
So that creative frenzy became my first novel, One Step Too Far. I wrote it, largely at night, for my mum, who was unwell at the time and read it as I wrote it, and much of my grief and energy was eaten up by that book; and a few days after I finished it my mum died, and it was sudden and awful. I was so convinced that I would get a publishing deal (how innocent and optimistic I was back then!) that I bought the 2010 Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and sent the manuscript off to a handful of agents. And then I sat back and waited. And waited.
I took it seriously. I wrote a business strategy, and presented it to my husband, to convince him to let me invest some of our savings (£3,000 was our starting budget, to include a cover, ISBN's, proper typesetting, marketing materials and advertising). We did it on the basis that if we lost all of that initial money at least I had tried, and that freed me up to be able to take risks and make mistakes.
Philip Pullman has resigned as patron of the Oxford literary festival, complaining that authors appearing at the event "are expected to work for nothing". Enough's enough - authors can't work for free.
The award-winning author of the His Dark Materials trilogy made the announcement on Twitter on Wednesday, saying that "because of the Oxford Literary Festival's attitude to paying speakers (they don't) I can't remain as a patron any longer. I've resigned".
'The principle is very simple: a festival pays the people who supply the marquees, it pays the printers who print the brochure, it pays the rent for the lecture halls and other places, it pays the people who run the administration and the publicity, it pays for the electricity it uses, it pays for the drinks and dinners it lays on: why is it that the authors, the very people at the centre of the whole thing, the only reason customers come along and buy their tickets in the first place, are the only ones who are expected to work for nothing? said Pullman.
If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children's literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children's literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways.
It all goes back to each country's distinct cultural heritage. For one, the British have always been in touch with their pagan folklore, says Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of children%u2019s literature and folklore. After all, the country's very origin story is about a young king tutored by a wizard. Legends have always been embraced as history, from Merlin to Macbeth. "Even as Brits were digging into these enchanted worlds, Americans, much more pragmatic, always viewed their soil as something to exploit," says Tatar. Americans are defined by a Protestant work ethic that can still be heard in stories like Pollyanna or The Little Engine That Could. Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children's literature. "American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism," he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.
4 January 2016
This year, however, has seen a breathing space, a "year of print" (Bookseller), in which the end of the world was postponed yet again. For a nail-biting decade it was said that e-reading would spell death to the traditional book. Actually, the reverse has been true. A body of evidence now suggests that ebooks have actually stimulated the market for hardbacks. Waterstones, once facing meltdown, has returned to profit; independent bookshops are making money. So the seasonal glass turns out to be (just) half full, with all kinds of print flourishing, and the digital tide receding, as the e-boom stalls and hardbacks rally.
This year, however, has seen a breathing space, a "year of print" (Bookseller), in which the end of the world was postponed yet again. For a nail-biting decade it was said that e-reading would spell death to the traditional book. Actually, the reverse has been true. A body of evidence now suggests that ebooks have actually stimulated the market for hardbacks. Waterstones, once facing meltdown, has returned to profit; independent bookshops are making money. So the seasonal glass turns out to be (just) half full, with all kinds of print flourishing, and the digital tide receding, as the e-boom stalls and hardbacks rally.
Your chance to take part in the Costa Short Story Award Public Vote but you need to act by 13 January.
Launched in 2012, the award is for a single, previously unpublished short story, up to 4,000 words in length. It is run in association with the Costa Book Awards but judged independently of the main five-category system.
Open to the scrutiny of the general public via the Costa Book Awards website, the six-strong shortlist includes stories about a nun and a man losing an arm in a logging accident, as well as the story of William Burroughs' wife who was shot by her husband in Mexico City in the 50s. The winner of the award will receive a cheque for £3,500 while authors in second and third place will receive £1,000 and £500 respectively.
The shortlist comprises of "Fallen", "Gerardo Dreams of Chillies", "Rogey", "The Night Office", "To William Burroughs from his Wife" and "Watching the Storms Roll In".
Whittled down to six from over 1,000 entries submitted, each story was judged anonymously by the expert panel without any knowledge of the authors' identities. These same conditions have been extended to the public when they vote on the short stories in the coming weeks. The identities of the authors will be revealed when voting closes on 13th January.
At the end of every year it's traditional for the CEO of Publishing Technology to dust off the crystal ball and look at what's going to happen in publishing over the next twelve months. In previous years we've predicted the rise of mobile reading, which was a hot topic at this year's Futurebook conference in the UK, and that the acid test for ebook subscription will come when the first ‘Netflix for books' service closes its doors, as Oyster did this autumn.
So what does 2016 have in store for the world of trade publishing? Here are our predictions for next year's publishing top trends.
2. More pressure on the midlist as big publishers pursue "winner-takes-all" publishing Another trend we've covered on this blog this year has been how major publishers are reconfiguring themselves as media companies. This move involves publishers tweaking their business model so that their success depends on them successfully exploiting IP across multiple media and formats, not just books. An example of this strategy in action would be Penguin Random House Children's in the UK, which has just appointed Richard Haines into a new role to head up the development of new TV series from its picture books. The potential rewards of creating content that travels across the media are substantial for publishers, but so are the risks. And in order for their investment to pay off, publishers may find themselves even more reliant than ever before on a few best-sellers. There are already indications that this is starting to happen in publishing, with a small number of authors and brands accounting for large proportions of individual publishers' sales. By becoming more reliant on hits, publishers may well become more effective in exploiting those hits across media types. The fall-out may be, however, that some publishers choose to publish fewer books. Next year we will probably see at least one big trade publisher cut their mid-list, and the definition of mid-list will move so that it includes some authors who were minor bestsellers just a few years ago. It's then very possible that these authors will then go on to join the parallel ebook-led publishing market we identified in our first prediction.
The Society of AuthorsThe British authors’ organization, with a membership of over 7,000 writers. Membership is open to those who have had a book published, or who have an offer to publish (without subsidy by the author). Offers individual specialist advice and a range of publications to its members. Has also campaigned successfully on behalf of authors in general for improved terms and established a minimum terms agreement with many publishers. Recently campaigned to get the Public Lending Right fund increased from £5 million to £7 million for the year 2002/2003. Regularly uses input from members to produce comparative surveys of publishers’ royalty payment systems. http://www.societyofauthors.org/ is seeing a number of "once well-known authors" apply for assistance to its Pension Fund, intended to help those who have fallen on hard times - when with fairer contracts allowing rights reversion they could be making an income from their backlist, SoA chief executive Nicola Solomon has said.
Solomon also warned that the relative cheapness of publishing today had brought "a slew of new publishers into the industry" ranging "from the good to the bad and the frankly ugly." Consequently Solomon said that she believed US media lawyer David Vandagriff's description of publishing contracts as "conscience-shocking monstrosities" might "even be an understatement", because of what the SoA had seen in vetting over 1,000 members' contracts a year. "We see many contracts where authors hand over all their rights for no advance and with no guarantee of exploitation by the publisher," she said.
When trends become clear-from self-publishing to writer events to the boutique model of the industry to the re-growth of print sales and large publisher consolidation-I regularly point out in the office that I predicted them two or three years ago. Given that I'm generally met with bemused looks, I thought I would make an official record of some predictions for 2016.
So here, in no particular order, are 10 publishing predictions for the year ahead:
7. Publishers taking advantage of licensing opportunities. I write with a vested interest, of course, owning a global rights licensing marketplace, but what is clear from conversations is that publishers across the world are now seeing the opportunities in licensing. I expect licensing to move from being subsidiary to a core bottom line revenue stream for publishers in 2016.
A crime biography with a page marked outlining a jewellery raid "exactly like Hatton Garden" was found at the home of a man accused of taking part in the £14m heist, a court has heard.
He was asked if he was interested in the Hatton Garden plan he was "engaged in", and responded: "I wasn't engaged in it. If this book is so prevalent in evidence against me why wasn't it forensically examined?"
Mr Stott continued: "It was bookmarked on a page that is exactly what took place in Hatton Garden." He showed him the grey card used to mark the page which Mr Harbinson agreed was probably the back of a book of taxi receipts.
Mr Stott said: "This was your book and you were reading it, weren't you?" to which the accused replied: "No sir."