Find out what's new on our websites, where we've been, what's on our minds and the things we're doing.
‹ First < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 > Last ›
-
Kate Tempest's Broken Herd- is this the future of the printed book?
Posted Tuesday February 2nd 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaThis isn't a book review of the supremely talented poet Kate Tempest's new CD/book Broken Herd. It's a celebration. A celebration with a suggestion that what Kate Tempest and independent record shop, Pure Groove have done is perhaps the future for books. They've brought back the desirable collectable limited edition book.
Firstly, who is Kate Tempest? She's the name to drop when it comes to spoken word at the moment. Her band, The Sound of Rum, has recently signed to Sunday Best, she has graced stages from Glastonbury to Latitude to Battersea Arts Centre and the Big Chill. For someone so young, she comes highly respected and highly recommended. She is loud, quiet, jagged and emotional. She will break your heart, with stories of lost living and yearning love, with tirades against everything from fakery to flippancy. She is the poet's poet, a wordsmith steeped in Wordsworth and Shakespeare as much as she is in MF DOOM and Gza and other rappers. We hope to interview her in coming weeks so we'll get her to tell you more about what she does.
In the meantime, she has, along with Pure Groove, created 300 limited boxsets containing recordings…
-
For JD Salinger- with love and squalor
Posted Friday January 29th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaJD Salinger died this week of natural causes at 91. He became a recluse in New Hampshire after his last book was published in 1965. He wrote one of the definitive teenagers ever committed to the page. This much we all know about the mysterious man.
I’ll share my more personal experience of Salinger.
When I was 15 and preparing for GCSE English Literature, I had a cool teacher, Mr Roseblade. He tried to make English exciting for us and ensured our coursework deviated from the usual musings on Macbeth and Emma. Instead, we studied Annie Hall and Catcher in the Rye- both works about outsiders abstaining from fitting in. For our coursework, we were to write a deleted scene in Annie Hall and a dream that Holden Caulfield might have. He effectively made studying words fun. So, thank you Mr Roseblade, for whom Holden Caulfield meant so much that he had to share him with classes for the rest of his teaching career. And thank you for Holden Caulfield, JD Salinger.
Holden Caulfield was the tipping point in our class where reading went from seriously uncool to slightly rebellious. Suddenly, watching a pirated 18-certificate copy of Pulp Fiction wasn’t…
-
Holocaust Memorial Day 2010
Posted Wednesday January 27th 2010
by Rebecca WilkieToday is Holocaust Memorial Day, which is marked throughout the world every year on 27 January - the date in 1945 that the notorious Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Russian troops; this year’s theme is the legacy of hope.
The day is held to honour and remember those who died during the holocaust and also to ensure that future generations are educated about what happened and reflect upon its consequences and those of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.
Literature is a powerful way of communicating the horrors of the holocaust to young people – reading about the experiences of individuals can be a more accessible way of understanding the atrocities of the Nazi regime and turns the mind -shattering statistics into a human reality.
The first introduction to holocaust literature for many young people of ten years and older is Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. I can vividly recall reading it aged 11 and felt as if Anne was speaking directly to me – it took me a while to finish it and process the tragic ending but I was glad I had read it and it has stayed with…
-
Authors we love... Zadie Smith
Posted Tuesday January 26th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaOriginally I was going to write about Daniel Clowes and his command of esoteric graphic novels but I’ve been dipping in and out of Zadie Smith’s recent collection of essays, Changing My Mind and remember why I’ve been infatuated with everything she has ever lent a pen to since her genre-busting debut in 2000. She gets a lot of stick for the initial hype, for following up the hype with The Autograph Man, for hardly doing any interviews but that’s part of my love for her. She preserves the mystique of the writer with such grace that all we seem to know about her stems from her words.
It was hard not to hear about Zadie Smith in 2000. Her book was put out with a lot of hype behind it. She was an exciting young new voice, fresh and able to write about youth, about race, about London, about dysfunctional families with humour and pathos. She was young and pretty and quiet. We all knew about White Teeth. Before it was turned into a mediocre TV effort, White Teeth was a book that divided people, in that they either loved it or pretended to hate it because of all…
-
Monthly Staff Picks: January 2010
Posted Wednesday January 20th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaOne of the best things about working here at Book House is witnessing the diversity of everyone's reading lists. Which means we do share tips and recommend books to each other, we do swap books feverishly.
This year we plan to share what we're reading with you. Each month five Booktrusters will tell you what they're currently reading and what they're enjoying about it. We hope it helps you to choose your next book when the time comes.
Roland: Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
'This is my first African author since reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for A level English and is quite different. Rather than an image of a traditional African world encountering the colonial West, we get a vivid sense of the divisions within an African society. Set in 1960s Nigeria, Adichie portrays a society deeply divided between a wealthy Nigerian elite- rich on the spoils of mineral and oil exploitation- a white expat Western community, a community of Nigerian academics connected to the University and a large majority of desperately poor Nigerians. From this scenario you might expect to emerge a gallery of caricature characters, created to ‘represent’ good and…
