This is a collection of twenty essays, reviews and magazine columns written by the British novelist and Nobel laureate William Golding, from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. It's a time capsule, packed with riches, and one stand-out comic essay on the body-soul dislocation experienced when flying across the USA. (Bourbon is involved.) Much … Continue reading The Hot Gates, by William Golding
Category: book prizes
The 2017 Vondel Prize
The Vondel Translation Prize - a bi-annual prize established by the Society of Authors - has been awarded to the American translator David McKay, the translator of Stefan Hertmans' novel Oorlog en Turpentijn / War and Turpentine. It's set during before, during and after the First World War, in Flanders and is based on the … Continue reading The 2017 Vondel Prize
Ted Chiang’s polymathic story bombs
I haven’t seen Arrival, but I wanted to read the book because the story as told to me by someone who had seen the film interested me greatly. I spotted the book in the bookshop because of the Amy-Adams-in-a-spacesuit cover, and was surprised to see that a whole film had been based on a short … Continue reading Ted Chiang’s polymathic story bombs
Jemisin, Leckie, Letters to Tiptree: praise ye them
The 2016 Hugo Awards were announced last night, and I am SO PLEASED that N K Jemisin's The Fifth Season won the category of Best Novel. It is groundbreaking, superb, a work of utterly readable literary invention that I am proud to have reviewed, here. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy was one of the five other shortlisted … Continue reading Jemisin, Leckie, Letters to Tiptree: praise ye them
Letters to Tiptree: homage to a ground-breaking author
Update: On 25 September 2016 Letters to Tiptree won the British Fantasy Award for best non-fiction. Well deserved! If you’ve not heard of James Tiptree Jr, the acclaimed author of science fiction short stories and a handful of novels, he was active from 1967 to the late 1980s. He also wrote as Raccoona Sheldon, and … Continue reading Letters to Tiptree: homage to a ground-breaking author
The Golden Age of Murder
Martin Edwards' The Golden Age of Murder is a fat and heavy hardback (the paperback is due out in 2016) endorsed by Len Deighton, as a study of the British writers who created the Golden Age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s an absolute treasure chest of writers’ names and novels that have … Continue reading The Golden Age of Murder
The disappearance of women: those BBC ‘best novel’ numbers again
Nicola Griffith's Literary Prize Data experiment looks at the data of books awarded prizes, to see how they can be analysed by numbers of male and female writers awarded, and also (much more importantly, I think), how the sex division works for these novels' protagonists. You can see the preliminary results here, and join the group to help … Continue reading The disappearance of women: those BBC ‘best novel’ numbers again
The BBC’s 100 best British novels: unpacking the numbers
The BBC released a list on Monday 2 December called ‘The 100 Greatest British Novels’. Jane Ciabattari collated this in an imaginative way, by asking literary critics (ie people who make their living from reviewing books) from outside the UK to give their personal lists of the 10 best British novels, assigning each title points from 1 … Continue reading The BBC’s 100 best British novels: unpacking the numbers
Kate Macdonald 