Follow the northern coast of Venezuela east until you get to the Paria peninsula and there, on its very tip, is the Caribbean village I made my home: Macuro. When Columbus arrived there, the only place where he set foot on the mainland, he thought he had found the literal garden of Eden. I too was faced with a biblical vision: a dirty, bearded man who looked like he had been struck by lightning. I turned on the taps. It was time to shave, to clean up my act, and this village took me in. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

Removing your ‘reviewing’ head and replacing it with your ‘fiction writing’ head at the end of the day is tricky. What is perhaps even trickier is putting on your ‘fiction writing’ head an hour before breakfast, and then replacing it with the ‘reviewing’ head just before the regular working day begins. The most difficult thing is the very beginning — both in the larger sense of having a workable idea in the first place, and in the smaller sense of filling the empty computer screen at 6am every day. Just as a jetplane uses up a lot of fuel on takeoff, but comparatively little gliding along at 10,000 feet, so the beginning is the most exhausting thing for a writer, more exhausting than when you’re up and running with a project [Read more...] in Authors and articles

In writing Lamb, I did not experiment with language or philosophy, I did not push the boundaries of what fiction is. I wanted David Lamb to speak in the voice of an assured storyteller who seduces his readers and put them into just such a position of complete and passive absorption (like watching TV). If the larger novel is seductive and pulls readers into a story they’d really rather not inhabit, that’s no accident. [Read more...] in Authrs and extracts

For those quickly bored by rural delights, an orchestra played in a Chinese pagoda around which couples could dance. A theatre produced ballets and operettas, or – as described in the novel – a viewing of the Beckwith Frogs: a daring act of aquatic prowess where men clad in nothing but ‘fleshings and drawers’ performed astounding physical feats while immersed in a large glass aquarium. From that excitement an audience could move on to the glamorous banqueting hall, or the Hermit’s Cave, or the Fairy Bower or – as in the realms of my imagination – enter the dark confines of a somewhat shabby freak show [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

Today, a Q&A with A.M. Homes about her new novel

‘This has always been a curious question—the idea that men write the large social novels of great importance and women write small domestic tales. As Grace Paley once said to me, ‘Women have always done men the favor of reading their work and men have not returned the favor…’ I think she was right. And yes there are fewer reviews of books by women. And in terms of my work—it’s even stranger—because I write and exist between spaces—I am a woman who doesn’t write women’s books and I find myself trying to stretch across a great divide and or falling through the crack.’ [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

I’m a political animal and in my writing I wanted to look at themes of justice on a human as well as a universal scale. The desire for revenge and retribution which often results from injustice offers a writer a rich and compelling canvas to explore because it it’s an age-old struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate. As a narrative for a story, it’s hard to improve on. It’s biblical, Shakespearean, Gothic, Jacobean Tragedy and Victorian melodrama all rolled into one. [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

It was astonishing. A pale, shell-pink, Greco Revival mansion with twenty-foot columns and black shutters and a wraparound balcony, set at the end of a long alley of aged live oaks and bordered to the north by the Mississippi River, to the east and west by fields of swaying sugarcane. It was one of the most spectacular visions I’d ever laid eyes on, and I immediately felt sick to my stomach, my insides turning over a whole cocktail of conflicting emotions: rage and revulsion over what the antebellum scene represented, but also a deep and unexpected feeling of love and filial longing, at an almost cellular level, as if I were coming face-to-face with a distant relative for the first time. [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

Interviewed by Deborah Brooks

A quick read of his biography has told me that Koch is also an actor who has performed in a very-long-running comedy series in Holland. From what he tells me it sounds like a sketch show of the Mary Whitehouse Experience or Fast Show ilk – a fast-moving, topical programme where he and his colleagues both write and act the sketches. The Dinner is so closely observed that at times it can feel like a script complete with stage directions. Any actor picking it up would know exactly what gestures to make and when, a director would know at exactly what point an annoying waiter should enter and disrupt the flow of conversation or spill wine ineptly on the table. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

I know what they hide when they hide those teeth. By the time Mama was fifteen she had three left that weren’t already black or getting there, and jagged. She had a long time to learn how to cover that smile. No matter how she looked otherwise, tall and long-legged, long brown hair, pale skin that held its flush, it was this something vulnerable about the mouth and eyes too that kept men coming back to her. The men would likely say this was due to her willingness to welcome them back, and Mama may have been an easy lay, but I’m cool with that because any easy lay will tell you making it look easy is a lot of work. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

Now available in paperback

Reared by an aunt after the rest of her family emigrated to Canada, Kathleen swam every day at dawn in the baths on the seafront, but facing down a channel with the second highest tidal range in the world was another matter altogether. A slip of a girl in a stylish Wolsey bathing suit and submarine cap succeeding where men with arms the size of her thighs had failed? Women might be wearing baggy trousers and cutting their hair in bobs but this was ridiculous, surely. [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

Today’s post is not a review or an article, but a link to Michael Cunningham’s fascinating insider’s piece, published by The New Yorker on 9 July 2012, about the mystery of this year’s non-awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Not only does it tell this particular story, but it opens a window on how judges of literature approach the task: the pre-requisites, the personal styles, the elimination process. It’s a two-parter, with a link to the second instalment. Gripping stuff. [Read more...] in Authors and extracts

The late 1930s and early 1940s saw the ‘golden age’ of science fiction, when magazines such as Astounding nurtured a whole generation of writers all too eagerly convinced by Einstein’s dictum that ‘imagination is more important than the truth’ and thrilled by the novelty and shock value of particle physics. A significant group of them regularly met at Robert Heinlein’s SF salon in Los Angeles known as the Mañana Literary Society. Of their number Jack Williamson wrote a groundbreaking story, ‘The Legion of Time’, which, though heavily freighted with pulp clichés, contained a new and highly influential idea – of points in time so delicately balanced that ‘backwards causation’, some kind of intervention from the future, could determine whether we end up in utopia or dystopia – like the double slit experiment where a single unit of light can appear either as a wave or a particle depending on how it is observed. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

By Joanna Kavenna

It’s very strange, how books emerge. There’s an initial phase when the idea is fragile and half-formed, and this can sometimes last for years, until you begin to wonder if the thing has stalled entirely. Panic sets in, you may start to write before the idea is ready – which more usually demolishes your enterprise entirely… So, if there’s one thing bitter experience has taught me, it’s about waiting until the idea has settled, holding off for as long as you can, placating the bank manager if possible by writing articles that help you move softly, softly towards your idea. And in general not panicking… or not too much… [Read more...] in Reviews

Dickens had everything – comedy, characters, complex plots, mystery, theatricality, drama, poetry, light romance, pathetic illnesses and even more pathetic deaths, and a furious anger at the state of the nation – and all in a great doorstep of a novel that could keep you satisfied for weeks. And of course there were all the orphans: Oliver Twist, Smike, Martin Chuzzlewit, Esther Summerson, and Pip. When I came across a contemporary novel (and I didn’t very often as I had no idea about modern authors) the prose seemed strangely flat after the rich and rolling sentences of the Victorians, and the whole thing felt rather slight. No orphans, no madwomen, very few deathbeds. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

Alyosha in Andreï Makine’s novel Le Testament Francais says: ‘When I find myself between two languages, I believe I can see and feel more intensely than ever.’ Artistic expression is about freedom, not about imprisoning yourself as an author within the boundaries of your mother tongue. I think the most acute aspect for me, when I made a decision to write in a second language, was my lack of loyalty to my motherland. I do not pine for Poland nor do I feel it is my duty to present my country in a positive light just because I live abroad and owe the nation I left behind the best possible representation in my writing. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

Athletes are more fascinating than we give them credit for. We tend to focus on them only once every four years, yet for them sport is a holistic commitment across their lives. I couldn’t care less about the winning and losing. For me the interest is what gets these people to the starting line, what they had to give up. We fetishize winners without thinking about winning too much. But there’s a distinction to be made between winning and beating something. Athletes make this distinction all the time. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

Now out in paperback

Jess Richards reveals how the voices and geography in her debut novel came to her

Until I found some archive footage about St Kilda online I knew little to nothing of the history of this archipelago of islands which lies west of the Outer Hebrides. But the footage showed that the women and men were dressed exactly as I’d pictured the inhabitants of the island in Snake Ropes. Their homes look like the cottages I’d envisaged, though to my memory I’ve never seen these images before. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

It is easy to build sympathy quickly for an innocent who stumbles into a conspiracy or a crime, and finds himself in danger – or if not himself then his family, his spouse, his country, his principles. This quickly gives the hero and the reader a huge emotional stake in what will happen next. The pages turn. Paul Murray, the bond trader in Free To Trade, whose colleague Debbie dies mysteriously, is such a character, as are most of the characters in my financial thrillers. But of course, almost by definition, you can be an innocent only once. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

It has taken me ten years and the writing of a couple of novels to question whether the countryside is not the most perverse place to bring a novel up. Where a poem can be stuffed like a mouse into a pocket, a novel yearns towards the constructions of the human landscape – railway stations, tower blocks, backstreet terraces and five storey car parks. The city, like the novel, is an adolescent. It wants to get out; protests that it doesn’t need sleep, but entertainment. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

If the Victorian woman’s experience of mental illness or asylums – not necessarily congruently – is much written about, it is perhaps not surprising. Through much of the nineteenth century, women could be pronounced ‘mad’ for a great many emotional and physical states, including post-natal depression, dementia, alcoholism, depression and unsanctioned sexual behavior. The powerlessness of the Victorian woman was nowhere more evident than in the asylum, where at the pronouncement of two – invariably male – doctors, she could be detained indefinitely. If it seems scandalous now, it also seemed scandalous, to some at least, then. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

By Michael Ridpath

The books were getting better but the sales were slowly falling. I was the country’s foremost financial thriller writer, but no one was buying financial thrillers. I never really was ‘The British John Grisham’. The publishers worked hard to build up my ‘brand’, but results were disappointing and not surprisingly they gave up. One day, in the summer of 2005, I received an e-mail from my editor saying she wouldn’t be publishing any more of my books. [Read more...] in Authors and Extracts

For nineteen years I worked as a criminal barrister, mainly for the defence. Now I have put that aside to write novels. Some of the same skills are required. In both you need to be interested in other people’s lives, in their stories, in their voices. As a lawyer you need to work out what sounds plausible, what motives could push them one way or another…

[Read more...] in Clare Jacob’s article, under Authors and extracts