An author faces his public – and grows the brand
The author caught the tube and went walkabout. He walked through the carriages like a mid-thirtysomething man looking for women in a nightclub, with passengers in the role of the potential victims of his chat-up lines. He was looking for something. Five years ago, he’d have been sure to have found it. This time, his...
André Kertész: On Reading
Each of the sixty photographs in Kertész’s book On Reading is a particular portrait and an interruption of a particular story which we can never know. Fortunately each image is indescribable in words. Appearances have their own language. Yet, turning the pages of the book and watching image follow image, I learnt something which I...
The Park
A silent movie plays and those existential clowns Laurel and Hardy are trading blows in their endless feud. In the real world, things aren’t always black and white. In the technicolour glory of summer’s day in a London park, another cycle of tit-for-tat revenge is about to begin… Award-winning graphic novelist Oscar Zarate’s latest work...
Golden rules
In the 1980s Nina Stibbe wrote letters home to her sister in Leicester describing her trials and triumphs as a nanny in north London to the family of Mary-Kay Wilmers, now editor of the London Review of Books. There’s a cat nobody likes, a visiting dog called Ted Hughes, almost daily suppertime visits from Alan...
Lighter Than My Shadow
Like most kids, Katie was a picky eater. She’d sit at the table in silent protest, hide uneaten toast in her bedroom, listen to parental threats she’d have to eat it for breakfast. But in any life a set of circumstances can collide, and normal behaviour can soon shade into something sinister, something deadly. Lighter...
Sathnam Sanghera: Novelist on the corner
Marriage Material is the story of three generations of a Punjabi Sikh family, from the 1960s to the present day, set against the backdrop of their Wolverhampton corner shop. It sets the story of this one family, with its individual secrets and scandals, up against the broader political context of the period. From Conservative MP...
Exemplary epistles
In Darling Monster, John Julius Norwich collects the letters his mother, the screen actress and society darling Lady Diana Cooper wrote to her only son at school and through his early adulthood. Covering the period 1939 to 1952, the letters take in the first rumblings of World War II – which Lady Diana and her...
Ginny & Penelope Skinner channel their teens
Ginny and Penelope Skinner’s Briony Hatch is a warm and wickedly funny graphic novel about a (temporarily) displaced teen who tries to escape reality by immersing herself in fantasy fiction while her parents’ marriage crumbles and her so-called friends obsess about boys and self-image. Mark Reynolds fires off some questions about the book and the...
Italo Calvino’s granular eye
Collection of Sand was published in Italian as Collezione di sabbia in October 1984. It was the last organic volume of new work put together by Italo Calvino in his lifetime (the only book to appear after it and before the author’s death in 1985 was the final anthology of cosmicomic stories which largely reproduced...
Scents, sights and sounds of South Asia
My first journey outside Europe and America took me to South Asia. I was 19 when I arrived in Karachi. It was three in the morning and I didn’t know a soul in the city. Outside the terminal, a crowd of rapacious taxi-wallahs swooped, grabbing at my bag, trying to pull me in different directions...
‘This place is loathsome’: A letter from Hollywood
With the arrival of the Talkies, numerous possibilities opened up for the film industry. The late thirties were, Wodehouse recalls, “an era when only a man of exceptional ability and determination could keep from getting signed up by a studio in some capacity or other”.1 As an Englishman in Beverly Hills, Wodehouse was not really...
Briony Hatch
Briony Hatch hates reality. She prefers the fantasy world of her favourite novels: The Starling Black Adventures, in which ghosts are real and you can cast magic spells to defeat your enemies. In her real life, Briony’s parents are getting divorced and her friends are preoccupied by losing weight and shagging boys. Briony has tried...
