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Platforms
Posted Friday May 7th 2010
by Anna MckerrowThe digitisation of book publishing is all over the news and it’s an exciting time. However, this has been coming for a while now. The first hypertext fictions (electronic texts that give the reader a choice in terms of what order they 'read' the story – a bit like Choose Your Own Adventure books) were created in the 80s and 90s by Eastgate Systems using their Storyspace software. Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, Twelve Blue and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl are some well-known examples. In the US, creating fiction hypertexts has been taught in secondary school for some years.
Those students could tell us in the UK that the opportunities for digital writing are not simply that texts can be displayed on a different kind of viewer, like an e-Reader. For this, text itself doesn’t change – it still reads left to right (for most of us) on “pages” that have a beginning, middle and end. Our physical mode of reading is a bit different – we stroke the screen up and down and from side to side instead of turning pages, but our eyes are doing the same thing. The hypertext suggests that, shockingly enough, linear…
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Literary Deathmatch
Posted Thursday May 6th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaLiterary Deathmatch is the brainchild of sartorial Todd Zuniga, editor of Opium Magazine. Having spread the word around the US, he has now set up a UK franchise in London's fashionable Shoreditch.
It heartens me that the event should take place in a hip bar with a table tennis table called The Book Club, that seems to be the darling of the cool literati set, hosting Let Me Tell You About Me, Bad Idea's Future Human and Literary Deathmatch, a pugilist's version of book readings.
The celebrity judges mark the four competitiors on literary merit, performance and the 'unintangible.' The winner of each round will take part in a bizarre final challenge reminiscent of an ITV gameshow hosted by Vernon Kaye. The night is brilliant, electric and full of fun.
Last night I saw Stuart Evers read his dry, bitter, wonderful 'What's In Swindon' story (from forthcoming collection Ten Stories About Smoking against poet Tim Clare, reading an extract from his hilarious We Can't All Be Astronauts book, recounting the time he went on television to beg Jeffrey Archer for money to publish his book. Round two saw Helen Mort read her delicate poetry…
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Authors we love... by Grant Gillespie
Posted Wednesday May 5th 2010
by Grant GillespieGrant Gillespie, debut author of To Hell with Publishing's first book The Cuckoo Boy, writes beautifully about imagined dreamscapes and viewing the adult world with a child's eyes. We asked him to guest-blog about his favourite author... Lewis Carroll.
Books about children have always fascinated me as children inhabit a terrain free of creative boundaries. Through the eyes of a boy or a girl, a writer can look at the world afresh. There’s a complex simplicity to being a child that can be funny, charming and at the same time very, very dark. The first writer that I fell in love with – for this very reason - was Lewis Carroll, who captured brilliantly the illogical logic of a child:
'I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus,” said the small girl to a sympathetic friend. “Because, if I did, I should have to eat it, and I can’t bear it.'
Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass bear reading time and time again, as a child and as an adult. There’s even a book called the Annotated Alice, which I came across in my late teens, that contains more footnotes and references than in an Arden Shakespeare edition.
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Equal Measures
Posted Wednesday May 5th 2010
by Alexandra StrickWhat does the word ‘disabled’ actually mean? Ten years ago I probably would have said something like ‘having an impairment which prevents an individual from doing things’ because I didn’t know any better.
Until, that is, my eyes were opened one day, when I was introduced to the ‘social model of disability’ (a way of thinking about disability which I strongly believe should be taught in every school). Put simply, this approach points out that it is actually the physical, social and environmental barriers which disable the individual, and not their impairment.
And a few days ago, this message was illustrated perfectly by Kelly Knox, winner of BBC’s Britain’s Missing Top Model. Kelly was talking at Booktrust’s ‘Equal Measures’ seminar at the London Book Fair.
The seminar, developed as part of our wider commitment to supporting diversity in books, aimed very specifically to raise awareness of the need for more positive messages and images of disability in children’s books. And Kelly proved to be the ideal guest host for the event.
As part of her introduction, Kelly told the audience about the crucial importance of the attitudes of those around her while she was growing up in shaping her self-image…
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To Hell with Prizes
Posted Thursday April 29th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaIn the middle of Bloomsbury, there’s an Old Dairy. I’ve walked around for about ten minutes trying to find it round the back of the Brunswick Centre. Finally I spy a pebbled path down into a converted barn and there I spy absolutely everyone in publishing: there’s author Grant Gillespie, there’s DBC Pierre, there’s Andrew o’Hagan... hold on, is that Francis Bickmore from Canongate? No, is that Hanif Kureishi? To add to that, a very glamorous India Knight, Preeya Kalidas from Eastenders, Kwame Kwei-Armah from off the telly and Booktrust writer-in-residence Evie Wyld talking to ex-model and writer Gavin James Bower- it’s a who’s who of publishing. All the agents and editors are here. And for what? It’s a Sunday night, it’s the Sunday night before London Book Fair- what is everyone doing? It’s To Hell with Prizes, a new award from new uber-cool publishing imprint To Hell With Publishing, whio have their own printing press in their own Bloomsbury shop, To Hell with Books- you get the idea.
We’re here for the announcement of the prize, which is £5,000 and a To Hell with Publishing limited edition for the best book, and the obvious hope is that the author…
