When I was young, in a distant century, there was an odd feature of the literary community: celebrated authors writing essays for magazines or newspaper book sections chronicling the horrors of their tours. Usually amusingly, sometimes just trying to be. Laments about arriving at a bookstore to find many people waiting, but no copies of the book. Or many books but no people, because someone had forgotten to promote the event (or there was a playoff game in any relevant sport that night). A reading for five people, two of whom were the mother and father of the bookstore manager, under orders to look attentive and enthused. Or, airline chaos with a luggage follies subplot. Hotel booking failures, weather events. Interviewers confusing the author for someone entirely else. (This is real, by the way, happened to someone I knew well.)
Links of the week May 16 2022 (20)
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:
16 May 2022
it needs calibrating these days. Is a tour really the best way to allocate budget and time? Will it be a painful experience? Awkward for everyone? Might email or telephone interviews with whatever media exists in a given city not be smarter? While aggressively going the online route: magazines, blogs, social media? Or, more recently, Zoom conversations with an audience logging in and asking questions? One rarely loses luggage en route to one's computer, after all.
In April 2020 I found myself sat in my back garden, bathed in unexpectedly glorious sunshine. Amidst the chaos of the first lockdown - the closed shop, homeschooling, hurriedly built website and new career as a delivery driver - I found a few hours of peace. In fact, I found two afternoons of peace. The only time that has happened since having kids (I'm not sure how this happened, maybe they discovered Narnia in their wardrobe without my noticing).
On the first afternoon, I read The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam, a meditative, poetic tale of personal connection amidst the horrors of a war-torn refugee camp. On the second I read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a magical story of memory, childhood fears and the fallibility of parents.
Anuk Arudpragasam's protagonist, Dinesh, is engulfed in the physicality of his body and the mutilated bodies around him. Days blur as survival becomes the only ambition. Neil Gaiman's unnamed narrator finds himself negotiating a world where space, time and reality blur, where the monsters under the bed weave their way into the fabric of his life.
Reading them side-by-side, during the surreal novelty of the first and most severe lockdown, when my world had shrunk to my house and my bookshop, turned these individually brilliant books into a collective contemplation of what it means to be alive, to exist, to be human. Neither before or since have I read two books that seemed so perfectly, oddly, entwined.
I have just been to the Bath festival of books to talk with my esteemed colleague John Crace about his book A Farewell to Calm. It has been two years, more or less, without these events - two years when we had to pretend the experience was the same as we watched on a tiny screen, only half listening, only for it all to come rushing back: the steamy crowd (it had been raining), the thrill of the spoken word.
There is one specific thing I love about book festivals. It's a convention that you have to spend the first five or even 10 minutes pretending to think the audience are politically neutral. You enter into the charade of thinking these are just regular, respectable people, who may disagree with the government but equally, may agree with it; they may be remainers, they may be leavers; they may be left, they may be right. Just think of them as shareholders, except instead of buying shares, they buy books.
You will never meet a group of people more consistent in their views than at a literary festival Yet this is the absolute opposite of the truth. You will never meet a group of people more consistent in their views, and not because most of them also go to the same pilates class. Every man jack of them voted remain, and they are considerably more leftwing than those at any meeting of any political party.
Publishing is facing "industry-wide burnout" according to a survey conducted by The Bookseller, which revealed 89% of staffers responding to the survey had experienced stress during the course of their work over the last year, while 69% reported burnout.
The survey also found a significant number of employees are working more than their contracted hours each week, with many unhappy at the state of their work-life balance.
With more than 230 responses, heavily dominated by publishing staffers (87%), the survey found 64% of people working in the industry felt their work had impacted their mental health in the last year. Many attributed this to unsustainable workloads and an "always on" culture, worsened by the pandemic.
One editor, who has worked in the industry for seven years, said they are required to do "entire strands" of their job outside of contracted hours, to the extent they feel unable to start a family and are "seriously considering" leaving the industry.
The Flavia Albia series is a spin-off from your original Marcus Flaco series. Why did you end the Falco series and switch to his adopted daughter, Flavia?
I'd written 20 Falcos, and everything in my life had changed. My partner died, my editor moved, and I was getting older and having to face it. And I realized I had just said everything that I had to say that was useful and interesting about Falco.
I know the Roman world, and I love writing about it. I moved the setting forward 12 years, so everybody who was in the previous series has developed in some way. And Flavia's a different voice because she's a woman and because she comes from Britain, seeing Rome through an outsider's eyes. Women in the Roman world couldn't do absolutely everything that men could do, although I believe they could do more than the textbooks tell you. She always has to be conscious of the fact that she's a woman, and she won't be welcomed as much as a man would be, and she might have to escape being groped or worse.
After all these years I can actually call myself a professional author. I've collected rejection slips, laboured in magazine writing, perfected my craft and built an audience until Lo! An agent came seeking me. Wanted to know about my book ideas. Wanted to represent me to editors. And proceeded to sell my book to my dream publisher.
My historical biography, The Last Viking, came out in late 2021, riding the wave of Viking mania filling our streams. The London Times called it "great fun" and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda of the Washington Post compared it to I, Claudius and Game of Thrones, saying, "It's that exciting, that good." Reader reviews are overwhelmingly five-star. In four months it became an Amazon bestseller in its modest niche, and my publisher's bestseller for the year, even though it wasn't released until September. It's still going strong, now in its fifth printing.
Then came another milestone in my career as a professional author. My Viking met a troll.
An Amazon reviewer called me a liar and a plagiarist, claimed the book was full of errors and gave it a one-star review.
Never give up
I still have my first rejection letter from Mills and Boon. They were so encouraging, I tried again, and my next book was accepted. I had studied a law degree, and spent years in a job I hated, as a computer programme manager. Finally, I took redundancy, and that gave me the chance to write. So if you think you have a story in your head - write it down.
Put characters before plot
I always start with my characters. They come first - before plot. I think about what kind of person they are, and then wonder what would happen if this hero met that heroine. For my current book, I started wondering about people who suddenly disappear from their own lives - and I wondered what would happen if a character was married 200 years ago, and then walked away - returning years later. How would they have changed over the years in between?
How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin's imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb. While on the home front, and quite suddenly-or so it seemed at the time-congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the "Red Spy Queen" Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Soviet Union, 37 of them in the federal government, including Alger Hiss. Many, like Hiss, were Washington insiders, high ranking officials in the State Department, Treasury, and even the White House. Soon, another ex-Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers (then an editor at Time Magazine) would be debriefed by the FBI and add his own names to Bentley's list, including Alger Hiss and his brother. Understandably, the American public was shocked. Could these ex-Soviet agents be believed? Had Communist subversion reached into the Roosevelt White House? And so the scene was set for the divisive McCarthy era and the "Red Scare" of the mid-1950s.
These issues crystalized in the most famous spy trial in American history, when Alger Hiss was accused in 1949 of lying about passing top-secret State Department documents to Whittaker Chambers, then an agent for Soviet military intelligence, in the late 30s. The trial, like the Dreyfus affair in France fifty years before, divided the country between those who believed the upstanding civil servant Alger Hiss (Harvard Law, friend and confidant of Presidents and Secretaries of State) to be innocent and those who believed he was a spy-and worse, an agent of influence who sat at Roosevelt's right hand at Yalta. The Hiss trial was a sensation, stranger than fiction, involving a controversial Woodstock typewriter on which the FBI claimed Priscilla Hiss had copied stolen documents, where the star witness for the government, onetime GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent, Whittaker Chambers, was dismissed by the Hisses as someone they'd never known.
During the recent pandemic, when children were going hungry because their parents were destitute, it took the moral authority of a 23-year-old footballer to get them fed. In earlier times it was the job of poets to summon our better angels, in the face of such obvious need.
Coleridge campaigned for the Factory Act of 1819, the first legal limit on child labour. Swift's "Modest Proposal" - that Irish babies be reared for the rich man's table - was a protest against restrictions on Irish trade. Walter Scott saved the Scottish banking system, on which fledgling Highland industries depended - his image has adorned the Scottish pound ever since. John Ruskin and William Morris, from different ends of the political spectrum, tore into the complacent nostrums of a "common sense" that saw poverty as part of the natural order.
Such men were not content to campaign on the issues of the day. Economic ideas - mostly gathered second hand from pundits and the press - were becoming society's unspoken religion - even the dominant one. A cold utilitarian credo was ripping apart the social order. Poets saw themselves as the heirs of Homer, Dante and Milton. It was their job to protect the wells of culture.
The bells of St. Mary-Le-Bow toll eleven o'clock. The narrow streets of London's East End are strangely deserted. Out of the swirling fog comes the clip-clop of horseshoes on cobble. A carriage appears. I squint, struggling to decipher the crest on the carriage door. From within the passenger compartment, a gloved hand emerges. Wait - is that a gun?
I flip the page, my heart in my throat, as the modern world vanishes in the foul-smelling mist.
It's London, 1850. Soon a body will turn up-floating in the Thames or sprawled in one of the brick-walled alleys. I settle in for another blissful sojourn in Victorian England.
"Sexual repression, dark alleys, great detectives, ornate prose," says author James McCreet ("Why we all love a Victorian Murder," The Guardian, 15 May 2011). "No wonder the 19th century is our template for crime fiction...[and] if there's a silhouetted top hat, a rustle of crinoline and a scream cut short with straight razor, all the better."
Many years ago, Milwaukee-based book influencer Cree Myles first picked up Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and found the validation she didn't know she needed. The book affirmed many of her experiences moving through the world as a Black woman.
"I'm reading it and I was like, yes! And yes! And yes! And I was like, I'm not crazy," she remembers. "That was a seminal moment in my life for sure."
Myles immersed herself in other pioneering works by Black authors: James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. She read Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. "I emerged from the ashes a new person, and I just needed to tell the whole world about it," she says. "And that's how it kind of all started."
Now, Myles curates the Instagram account @allwaysblack, on behalf of publishing giant Penguin Random House. Myles says the goal of the account is "to celebrate Black writers and the readers who love them," and Myles is voracious in her ability to come up with fun and innovative ways to do that.
You would think by now I would know how to make a book of poems. Apparently, I have written six books of poetry. But books are still a mystery to me. I begin, as most poets do, with one poem at a time. I make one poem and then stare at the terrifyingly bright world and convince myself I will never make another poem. Then, I somehow surprise myself and make another poem. I've learned, despite all the protestations of the blood, to trust the process. So that even when poems don't come. Even if I am silent for a long period of time, I believe poems will return to me eventually.
But how does a book of poems become a book? How does one make a book out of pages of single poems written over a span of years? This is still hard to explain. But I will try, and most likely fail, to convey how I have done it. But first, a caveat: everyone makes books differently, everyone makes poems differently. There is no one way, no right way, only the way that brings you pleasure, the way that lets all the poems vibrate and pulse within the pages.
Since I was a young child I've been fascinated by the identity people get from their families, good and bad, being part of a ‘gang'. The idea that for some people being in a large family gives them protection from the real world. I remember an interview with one of my favorite novelists, Kate Atkinson, who was frequently bemused at being told by adults: you're an only child, you must be spoilt. She'd think about the houses she'd go to where the children fought and smashed each other's toys, the constant, multi-layered land wars of siblings and she'd go home and calmly play with her unbroken toys and think: but none of this is spoilt-I'm not the spoilt one.
I was once with an old friend who is one of four, whose family lives in one of those large houses where everyone, young and old, would congregate. We bumped into an acquaintance who asked, eagerly, after her parents. My friend answered, but she talked only about them, her siblings, and the house. She didn't ask a single question back. Her family was the mythical one, she didn't need to express interest in the asker's life. It wasn't rudeness, it was total obliviousness, and the other person lapped it up. But I saw then how corrosive that blinkered view can be. I'm part of a big family and love it, but many of my favorite people, from my dad to my closest friends, were only children, who I've found are often more robust and curious and accepting and interested in all people from all walks of life.