Month: August 2013
‘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.