By Jacob Silkstone
A more or less topical journey around the literary world in 80-word segments, featuring cats, transatlantic grammatical confusion and a little light bondage…
JAPAN
The shortlist for this year’s Nobel Prize has been finalised, and the results are… not available to the public for another 50 years. Based entirely on guesswork, Haruki Murakami (or Murakami Haruki, for those who possess strong views about transliterating from Japanese) is the current favourite, with Ladbrokes offering odds of 7/1. In many ways, Murakami is to highbrow literature what the creator of Lolcats is to the internet: a visionary populist with a disarming penchant for all things feline.
SCOTLAND
During his keynote speech at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, China Miéville grabbed a few headlines with his vision for the future of the novel. Miéville, who has been recommended to me as ‘the best writer you’ve never heard of’ with paradoxical regularity, scored a few cheap points against the ‘Booker Middlebrowmageddon’ before advocating literary mash-ups and ‘guerrilla editors’ (gorilla editors would be fun, too): in the future, ‘we’ll be writing as part of a collective. As we always were.’
USA
Florida-based author Padgett Powell was the winner of this year’s James Tait Black Prize for fiction, described as ‘second to the Nobel’… by Powell’s ‘literary mother’. Confusingly, the winning novel is known as You & I in Britain and You & Me in the US, where ‘I’ is presumably considered a little too verbose. The winner of the biography prize, meanwhile, is known as The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination in Britain and completely unknown everywhere else.
MEANWHILE, IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE…
A former TV executive reads a series of books about sparkly vampires and is inspired to write something even worse. Knowing the secret of what women really want, she reworks a standard Mills & Boon plot (virgin naïve enough to be shocked by Tess of the d’Urbervilles meets enigmatic billionaire) and adds a bit of light spanking and a few toys. This becomes the fastest-selling book ever. And then we woke up and it was all just a hideous dream…
The author is Poetry Editor and Book Critic for The Missing Slate.
