Literature

I don't know about you, but as for me if I never hear or read the word meta again it'll be too soon, unless of course it's someone singing 'I Met a Girl' from that fine old musical Bells Are Ringing. It is not that I have any prejudice whatsoever against self-referential elements within a specific piece of media (at the most basic level we would lose the Christmas Panto for one thing) rather it is the over-use of the...

The Penguin Essentials 'are essential reads' that include 'some of the most important books from the last 100 years – with covers designed by contemporary artists so that they feel fresh and unexpected, appealing to a new generation of readers.' (Including the super-stylish Dave Eggers cover above!) Titles range through the Classic canon with Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby and A Passage to India, through to modern meta-revisions of Classics with Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (reimagining Jane Eyre) and J...

On May 20th and 21st the British Library will be transformed as the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival animates its iconic spaces for the first time in celebration of this cultural partnership. The British Library will present a sumptuous showcase of South Asia's literary heritage, oral and performing arts, music, cinema and illusion, books and ideas, dialogue and debate, Bollywood and politics in the context of this broader view of India and its relationship to the United Kingdon.2017 marks the fourth...

On a personal note, a stored image returns to the forefront of my thoughts as summoned by the reading of Bill Hayes' achingly beautiful memoir Insomniac City. It is a February night in 2010, a Toronto winter considering an early spring, a night four hours' distant from consideration of a whispering dawn. I am stood outside an all-hours McDonald's smoking the fifth cigarette of the first pack after I had given up quitting. My eyes followed the mix of smoke...

He could have blown out eighty candles on a birthday cake this July 28, 2017 if he hadn't blown one bullet through his head on February 20, 2005. If the earlier event never happened the future one likely would have happened in the exact same place, in the kitchen cum office cum command center of a rustic ranch house in Woody Creek Canyon ten miles outside of Aspen, Colorado. The house's owner referred to it as the Owl Farm and...

Hundreds of people witnessed a one-of-a-kind event last night as an audiobook was beamed into space for the first time ever. The audio drama Alien: River of Pain was transmitted from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, with onlookers afforded the chance to see the audio drama get converted into a digital signal and beamed out into the atmosphere, before listening themselves. The transmission was created by audiobook retailer Audible to celebrate the release of Alien: River of Pain, which details the Alien saga...

There are few dimmer endorsements to be made of the human psyche when we consider the historical figures chosen for repeated examination and thus de facto celebration in biographies, novels, films, plays, and multi-part BBC series. By and large we are drawn to the Bad Guys. Send armies into battle for slaughter, execute the enemies, live in appalling decadence, and abuse women; do any of those in combination with one or two others and your name will live forever. Hitler...

The recent controversy over the placing of the small statue of a brave girl opposite the huge statue of a bull in Wall Street, New York, reveals the ongoing lack of female representation in our public spaces. In the UK, statues of men outnumber those of female figures by 16 to 1 and if Queen Victoria were removed from the equation, those numbers are far worse. Virginia Woolf, one of the founders of modernist literature, has been commemorated with a...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - pretty much any time you sit down and try to think of a memorable opening line to anything you write. Indeed there is no more important task than nailing a good opening line to a book. Great first lines from novels, such as Charles Dickens' "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," from A Tale of Two Cities or Jane Austen's "It is...