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Comment from the book world in March 2014

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March 2014

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'What's going to stick around?'

31 March 2014

'Dickens is the best example of someone who, I think, did what I do, or what I try to do, which is to take a difficult or contentious moral or social issue and get people to think about it through fiction. You see highbrow reviews of highbrow books that no one has ever heard of. You see what awards are given at the National Book Awards. But I really wonder 500 years from now, or even 100 years from now, what's going to stick around? Is it going to be those books, or is it going to be, as we've seen in the past, what was read widely.

You can hype a book, you can advertise a book, you can publicise a book, but ultimately if it is not a good book, people are not going to tell their friends about it. To me the highest form of praise, and the best form of advertising, is when someone pushes a book into people's hands and says, "Really, you've got to read this" That's why I have had staying power.'

Jodie Piccoult, author of The Storyteller, in The Times

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'When did you know you were a writer?'

15 March 2014

‘The fantasy arrived when I was 13. I was in Reykjavik for a summer and it never got dark. There was a whole library of English books and I was a great reader. I suddenly had access to books that were too hard for me before. Lots of Dickens. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Jane Austen. I couldn't stop. I read the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I read some of Mark Twain. While reading David Copperfield in the middle of the night - probably because of the light I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, "If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do." I published my first poem in the Paris Review in 1980.'

Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World, in The Times

'Writers have nothing but their integrity.'

10 March 2014

‘My initial career conformed to my original notion of authorship. You wrote a book, you struggled to get it published, if you were lucky you found a kindly editor who paid you a bit of money, and later perhaps you'd be paid for another book. And so on. In the meantime you did other things like secretary work or journalism to make a bit more. But then, between 2007 and 2010, everything changed.,. Being a writer stopped being the way it had been for ages - the way I expected it to be - and became something different...

The digital age is an extraordinary revolution in consciousness. I grew up with the Modernists - Joyce et al - grappling with the technological developments of the early 20th century. The digital age is just as significant. We are developing a completely different mode of consciousness. So the digital age offers this new challenge for writers.

I get the impression that people are sick of being lied to by corporations and governments. Writers have nothing but their integrity. They are disaffiliated. They can tell the truth. Anything doing that might just get an audience, whether it comes as a physical artefact like a hardback, or as an e-book. You don't write unless you hope for that. And you always hope.'

Joanna Kavenna interviewed by Robert McCrum in the Observer for his article From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author's life? | Books | The Observer

'You can strip a novel down like a car'

3 March 2014

'The technical side of writing a novel is fascinating. You can strip a novel down like a car and see how it works. They are beautiful machines if they purr nicely. I like to write a book that is so utterly compelling that you want to read on, and in all my novels I try to build that motor energy in it. But it's very hard to write a complex, compelling plot, very hard. You realise that film is a very simple art form compared to the novel.'

William Boyd, author of Waiting for Sunrise in the Bookseller