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Authors we love... Karl Marx
Posted Monday July 26th 2010
by Gavin James BowerI fell in love with a bearded German in my second year of university.
I know everyone experiments as a student, but this was a bit extreme – I’m sure you’ll agree. Most people pop a few pills and get off with a housemate. Not good enough for me, it seemed. No, I was proper hardcore. I was radical, even. I was…a socialist. I still am, I suppose, if I had to subscribe to any one ‘ism’. And I have Karl Marx to thank for that.
Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were what really did it. The first book in which the philosopher attempted to synthesise – apt, given his conclusion – his views on political economy, capital and society. It was an exercise in self-clarification, which, for any young thinker – student or otherwise – is pretty sexy, you’ve got to admit.
I’ve still got the copy I used to read on trips between the University of Sheffield and home, complete with my notes in the margins. Incredibly, I’m not embarrassed by them. Passages from Marx on what he termed ‘estranged labour’ – ‘…the object which labour produces – labour’s product – confronts it as something alien,…
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Shallow and Profound: Being Bret Easton Ellis
Posted Wednesday July 14th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaBeing Bret Easton Ellis must be a difficult thing. You have to carefully balance being the misunderstood satirist with the whole ‘voice of a generation’ schtick on two heavily-styled shoulders.
The must-have ticket for this year’s London Literature Festival is to see Bret Easton Ellis in conversation with Suzi Feay about his new book Imperial Bedrooms, with an audience Q&A to follow. The last time he was in the UK was for the crazed Lunar Park so appearances on these shores are few and far-between. This is why the Queen Elizabeth Hall is entirely sold out, with people sat in the aisles, for an author no less. Sat near the front, I gaze back and up into the rafters, aisles and aisles of potential Patrick Batemans, potential Clays and potential Blairs, all enraptured with this short, slightly nervy man.
He arrives promptly, a blazer over what appears to be his gym outfit and sits next to Suzi Feay who immediately grills him on his tweeted response to the death of JD Salinger: ‘Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-f***ing-ever. Party tonight!!’ He dodges an explanation for his celebration of the passing of one of…
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Faber New Poets 5-8: Joe Dunthorne, Annie Katchinska, Sam Riviere, Tom Warner
Posted Monday July 12th 2010
by Anna McKerrowThe confessional poets of the 60s, such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, appeared to be exposing their deepest psyches in their poetry: letting rip with a no-holds-barred (especially in the case of Plath) lyric assault of personal exposure – a poetic Jeremy Kyle Show, if you will. The confessional style reinserted the poet into the work as a subject to be considered instead of being an impartial, external observer of natural phenomenon or a remote god, passing judgement from on high; we could feel their pain, know their minds, their preoccupations.
In reality, this style raises questions about the illusion of intimacy being presented by the writer. When the writer says 'I', does she really mean 'I', or a fictionalised version of 'I'? Where does the personal stop and the fiction begin? It’s something that as readers of poetry we’ll never know, and as writers of poetry we can delight in blurring those boundaries.
This (apparently) intimate approach in poetry has stayed with us, as can be seen in the Faber New Poets selection 5-8 - particularly with Joe Dunthorne and Sam Riviere.
Riviere’s long poem “Myself Included” leads the reader through an ironic maze, confounding the idea of…
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Elias Khoury... in conversation
Posted Monday July 5th 2010
by Ruth CollinsA talk between author Elias Khoury and Jeremy Harding saw out the first day of the World Book Festival Weekend at London Review Bookshop last Friday.
As Khoury is one of Lebanon’s greatest living writers, I was excited at the prospect of hearing Khoury speak about his writing here in the UK. Khoury is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his novels Gate of the Sun and Yalo. Humphrey Davies’ translation of Gate of the Sun was awarded the inaugural Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2006 and Peter Theroux’s translation of Yalo was short listed for the Best Translated Book Award in 2008.
Whereas Gate of the Sun tells the story of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon following Nakba in 1948, when thousands of Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces, Yalo reveals the dark reality of torture tactics employed during the Lebanese civil war. Inspired by the story-telling tradition first revealed to the Arab world in One Thousand and One Nights, the 'retelling' of stories has become an important aspect of Khoury’s writing and is inherent in both of these novels. In Yalo, he explores the idea of 'one story…
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Whose Muse Is It Anyway? match report
Posted Tuesday June 22nd 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaLast Thursday, we decided to try something different. Wanting to put on a celebration event for our former writer-in-residence Nii Ayikwei Parkes, we decided to put on a different type of poetry evening (knowing, somewhat self-referentially, that calling it ‘a poetry evening… with a difference’ doomed it to failure). The whole point of the writer-in-residence programme, which has featured exclusive blogs and work from Patrick Ness, Evie Wyld and Nii Ayikwei Parkes , has been to make different types of writing accessible to all. How best, we wondered, to make poetry accessible.
First of all, with open source technology like Ustream available, we can live-stream everything we do online so that people who don’t live in London, who don’t have nights near them, can get involved and thus interact with us on things like Twitter and Facebook.
Secondly, we needed to come up with a format that circumvented the traditional poetry evening. It appeared to us in a dream: what is we do a poetry version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? With Nii up for it, the concept for Whose Muse Is It Anyway? was born.
To do improvised poetry is hard, especially when lots of parameters are…
