Fiction

Editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, is this week’s Shelf Lifer. He reveals a predilection for Herman Wouk, an in depth knowledge of certain sections of the Eaton’s catalogue and a fondness for a particular character in P.G. Wodehouse. What are you reading at the moment? Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk As a child, what did you read under the covers? I grew up in Canada, where the nights end early, and a child’s day does as well. So pretty much all my evening reading was done under the covers. A lot of Hardy Boy mysteries. And the Eaton’s catalogue. For the lingerie ads. Has a book ever

Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so think yourself lucky.) Hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Norman Mailer and Rachel Johnson are, inter alia, Tom Wolfe and Craig Raine. Wolfe must be a strong contender, his Back to Blood containing the sentence: ‘Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was

Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a short story prize for unpublished writers. The competition, which is limited to residents of Great Britain and Ireland, opens on 1 December 2012 and closes on 1 March 2013. Submissions should be made at thewhitereview.org. The prize will be judged by the writer Deborah Levy, Karolina Sutton and Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape.

A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients. Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker’s attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light

Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel Writing Month. Organised by a Californian outfit called the Office of Letters and Light (I know – please stick with me), the event has been running since 1999, and now answers to the moniker NaNoWriMo, which sounds like a toddler doing R2D2. The rules are simple: starting on November 1st, you have until November 30th to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. You upload it to the event’s website, which checks your word count, and assuming you’ve passed

Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the failings and failure of the post-war era, and The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint aren’t too bad either. Roth is an obvious choice for the Nobel committee; but it is simply perverse of them to be scared of his renown, or even to mistrust it. Roth’s retirement recalls Martin Amis’ view that writers die twice:

There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of the super-heavyweight contenders will always be Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel-in-letters, Pamela. When it first appeared Pamela was as much of a sensation as the X Factor and Fifty Shades rolled into one, a genuine ‘multi-media event’ more than two hundred years before that phrase was even coined. Part of that impact

On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those days. The standard question was: why the hell aren’t we in government and whose fault is it? The Duncan Smith leadership was evidently doomed from the moment of its conception, but the ‘quiet man’ stumbled on to his inevitable demise. If the party wasn’t going to find a broadly appealing leader, I’d better write one

During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high? This question plagued the defence of an Italian man named Fabrizio Collini some sixty years later. Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case is based upon that historical trial. Collini, who has lived in Germany since the 1950s, enters the luxury hotel suite of a man named Hans Meyer. They are near the Brandenburg Gate. He

Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. McCormack has published two novels: Crowe’s Requiem, and Notes From a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. Forensic Songs, his latest collection of short stories, fuses traditional social realism with elements of science fiction, and the detective genre. While some stories here follow the path of straightforward naturalism; analyzing the difficult relationships within families; or the alienation of emigration, others probe issues

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled classical ideas about the merits of a space not so dissimilar to this in character. Best to make one’s desk in a room adjoining the bedroom, he said. That way, the writer need not leave his cell at all. In ancient Rome, even more so, nature was often considered a distraction. Both writers and artists

Unless you’re a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham’s cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn’t exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with

Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover? Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his

Assorted literary grandees will squeeze into their tuxes this evening to compete for the Booker Prize. Of the debut novelists, one previous winner and a brace of old-timers, who stands the best chance of winning? Swimming Home by Deborah Levy This is a coiled, unsettling work. A group arrive at their French villa only to find a woman, Kitty Finch, swimming in the pool. Having nowhere to go, she is invited to stay. The book charts the way Kitty’s mental instability wriggles its way into the fabric of the group’s relations: the poet Joe, Isabel (his war-reporter wife), Nina (his teenage daughter) and tag along friends Mitchell and Laura. Written in

Brevity does not imply levity. That, at least, is the view of Ian McEwan. The national treasure was speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival over the weekend when he crowned the novella, which he defined as a book of roughly 25,000 words, as the ‘supreme literary form’. He challenged publishers and critics who believe the novella to be inherently inauthentic and frivolous, arguing that the compact form brings out the best in the greatest writers. ‘Somehow . . . the prose is better, more condensed, more rigorous. Characters have to be established with a great deal of economy. All this makes demands on a writer that brings them to a

mobydickbigread.com is a website. It adapts Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick into an online audiobook. The content is rich: what tech executives might call “trendily interactive”, in that there are Facebook groups, hipster cultural events, academic podcasts, and so on. The Guardian is heavily involved. David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow have all “jumped aboard”. There will be a “Whale-Fest” in Brighton. This kind of thing doesn’t have to be your cup of tea, to admit at least that the effort is genuine. It is a fanzine for Ahab-enthusiasts, self-described as ‘an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome’. From my desk in SW9, I feel a sort of

‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for the Guardian. He draws a distinction between political novels, which dramatise activism, and other forms of literature that ‘politicise’ by deepening awareness. His point is often sunk by his own loquacity (‘These two books [The African Child and God’s Bits of Wood] reveal the continuations between political literature and literary politics. Both achieve transcendence through art that politicises and depoliticises all at once.’); but, that aside, he makes some very compelling proposals about the role that literature can play in