Find out what's new on our websites, where we've been, what's on our minds and the things we're doing.
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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…
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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…
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An interview with poet and comedian Tim Key
Posted Tuesday January 19th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaStand up comedian and poet Tim Key won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2009 with a show full of idiosyncratic poetry about the heart-breaking and the pointless. His wonderfully uncynical view of the world is at times dark and at others poignant. It is always funny. Having recently put together a collection of his ramblings in book format and gearing up to bring his award-winning Edinburgh show to London, we thought it would be good to talk to him about comedy, poetry, words and the book: Instructions, Guidelines, Tutelage, Suggestions, Other Suggestions and Examples Etc. An Attempted Book by Tim Key. (And Descriptions/Conversations/A Piece About A Moth) which is reviewed here
You may have also seen him on television on Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, Armando Iannucci's Time Trumpet or Mark Watson's recent We Want Answers.
> Is there a definitive acronym for your book?
Is the acronym the one where it's the first letter of each word? If so then there's nothing useful to be had I don't think. But if acronym means a short way of saying it then yes, my publishing house often call it simply Tutelage. In fairness I prefer the full title: Instructions, Guidelines, Tutelage, Suggestions,…
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Precocious Reading
Posted Tuesday January 12th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaI recall being 11 and winning a school prize for being good at English. The prize was a ten pound book voucher. I remember trawling the local bookshop for something to read. My mum refused to let me spend the prize money on Spider-man comics as I was to be presented with the results of my voucher-spend at a school awards day. Mum insisted I get something 'intelligent' so she could be proud of me when I was presented with it.
I chose to get a copy of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I was ten years old. I had read about the book's existence in a teenage novel called The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman.
>> Flash forward to the awards day. I was sat on the front row. Mum was in attendance, camera at the ready for my big moment. Junaid Bajwa's dad was video-taping the whole thing with a big camcorder reserved for the 80s, taking no heed of other parents' sightlines or the conventions of sitting silently during the ceremony. My name was called and I walked forward to accept the prize from the guest presenter, one of the old headmasters of the…
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Books 2.0
Posted Wednesday January 6th 2010
by Nikesh ShuklaSanta gave one of the Booktrusters an iPhone for Christmas and we've all been playing with it. Once we'd tired of the lightsabre noise and of playing old arcade games and Tap Tap Revenge and auto-tuning our voices to sound like Kanye West, we decided to play with some of the iPhone reading applications to see what they were like. There are some really innovative things happening now with books and the reinvention of our methods of telling stories. What amazed me about the whole session (I won't admit to it taking up an entire afternoon) was the imediacy of it. A recommendation would come through Twitter or Google or the Guardian gadget blog and we would have it downloaded in a minute, only to use it moments later.
The range of styles is great.
Our first stop was Stanza, a free application that offers access to 50,000 free titles as well as bestsellers you have to pay for. We downloaded Little Women and we read through the opening ten pages. The ease of use, the clarity of the text and the ability to change views, text size and font to adjust to your reading needs make it immensly…
