University of Cambridge Contemporary Research Group
‘If The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, had been written by a woman yet still had the same title and wedding ring on its cover, would it have received a great deal of serious literary attention? Or would this novel (which I loved) have been relegated to “Women’s Fiction,” that close-quartered lower shelf where books emphasizing relationships and the interior lives of women are often relegated?’ Read more of Meg Wolitzer’s article on ‘the rules of literary fiction fiction for men and women’
Five poets whose work appears in Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013) – Ágnes Lehóczky, Éireann Lorsung, Sandeep Parmar, Eileen Pun and Marcus Slease – are joined by UK editor/poet Nathan Hamilton, and US editor/poet James Cihlar, for a reading and discussion of literary migration, cross-pollination, belonging and alienation at the British Library’s Eccles Centre on 6th Sept.
Margaret Atwood will be at Topping bookstore in Ely on 31st August to read from MaddAddam, the third volume in the apocalyptic trilogy that also contains Oryx and Crake.
One of the least expected novels to be included in the 2013 Booker Prize longlist is Richard House’s The Kills, not least because of its multi-media dimension. Like the Best of Granta, it’s longlist that smuggles in Americans as best it can. House, now teaching at Birmingham University, lived in Chicago for many years and was a founder member of the art-collective, HAHA. He’s also editor of a digital magazine called Fat Boy Review.
The Promise of Spring is a new immersive online book, a lyric fiction about Vancouver by Graeme Abernethy. Originally composed in response to an extended absence from home, it observes those processes of layering within which we are unavoidably implicated: layers of time, memory, technology, and genre. In addition to providing a narrative of Vancouver life, The Promise of Spring reproduces more than 90 historical photographs from the City of Vancouver Archives’ digital collection.
Tickets are now on sale for Zadie Smith, reading and discussing NW, as part of the Summer WordFest programme.
The first collection of critical essays on Ali Smith is out this month as is the call-for-papers deadline for a conference on her work.
Congratulations to Jenny who has won a Pilkington Prize in recognition of her work developing Masters in Creative Writing and Advanced Subject Teaching at the Institute for Continuing Education.
So, on the one hand, the dematerialisation of the e-book, and on the other, lavish subscription (‘kickstarted’) artefacts such as this new anthology of science flash fiction from the Brookyn-based Gigantic, featuring Jonathan Lethem and Lynne Tillman. Closer to home, London’s Test Centre publishes ‘tangible’ books and spoken word LPs by writers like Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home and Tom McCarthy.
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