University of Cambridge Contemporary Research Group
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.
Carrying on our discussion about ‘global’ and ‘national’ literature . . .
A.M. Homes has just won the 2013 ‘Women’s Prize’ for May We Be Forgiven. The Guardian asked if she had set out to write a ‘Great American Novel’: ‘Homes says she’s thought about this, and did once look up the way that that phrase was first intended. “It was not meant as a critical judgement – ‘Oh, this is a great American novel’ – but great as in expansive, and far reaching, and so in that sense, absolutely, very much, I think of myself, in positive and negative ways, as a very American writer.”‘
Far-reaching but only so far then.
Paul Theroux reads from The Last Train to Zona Verde on 3rd June at 7pm at Emmanuel United Reform Church.
A WordFest Event.
Just out – Ali Smith’s new book Shire (with photographs and design by Sarah Wood) mixes fact and fiction, biography and autobiography, to pay tribute to Helena Shire, Spenser scholar and Fellow of Robinson College, and the poet Olive Fraser.
Alison Fornell (MPhil Candidate, Screen Media and Cultures, University of Cambridge)
Loving Television Theory, Investigating the Scandinavian Crime Series “The Bridge”
and
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