Member of the anarchic Barrow Poets who also wrote prize-winning children's verse The poet Gerard Benson, who has died aged 83, published 10 volumes of poems and prize-winning collections for children; an autobiography, Memoirs of a Jobbing Poet, is to be published this summer. When I founded Poems on the Underground , Gerard was my ally, along with a fellow "Barrow Poet", Cicely Herbert....
My friend and colleague Adam Gelbtuch, who has died aged 93, was the joint founder of Pion , a long-established publisher of academic and technical journals, including Perception and the four Environment and Planning titles, which remain pre-eminent in their fields. He was a man of great intelligence, patience, honesty and loyalty, and these qualities enabled him to create lasting and personal business...
Michael Gove plans to remove Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird from school reading lists, in favour of Dickens and Austen. It's certainly a mistake to abandon American literature but which US classics deserve a place in our classrooms? What was the most important book you studied at school? Cynics will, of course, hear an echo of President Esposito in Woody Allen's Bananas. "From this...
The nine tales in Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck deal with death, tragedy and darkness, but the collection shines due to the mesmerizing strangeness of its extraordinary images....
U.K. Education Secretary Michael Gove has decided that the English literature list for a national exam needs to be more English, so he is swapping American texts in the curriculum for British ones....
Author closes the Sydney writers' festival by saying that she has been changed by the experience After the crowds thin and most of the festival is over, the Sydney Theatre fills for one final session: the closing address from Emma Donoghue . Donoghue's speech, Giving People What They (Don't Know) They Want, explores the tools she as a writer uses to bring readers along for the ride. "It's all...
Yes, it's called My Independent Bookshop, but what does Penguin Random House's new site do for booksellers? I've just opened my very own bookshop at myindependentbookshop.com , the new book recommendation site from Penguin Random House. I enjoyed choosing the font for my logo (Shakespearean), the type of shelf (Victorian), even the colour of the paint (papyrus). Selecting the titles to display on my...
American literature contains nothing else quite like Henry James's amazing, labyrinthine and claustrophic novel There's an old joke (which only makes complete sense in Britain) that there are three, not one, manifestations of Henry James : James the First ( The Portrait of a Lady ); James the Second ( The Turn of the Screw ); and the Old Pretender ( The Wings of the Dove ; The Golden Bowl ). As we...
Itself familiar from many anthologies, this sad and sweet descant on emotional losses has a singular magic I've often wondered how Charles Lamb came up with the form of this week's anthology favourite, The Old Familiar Faces. It's a rare anthologist who includes any other of Lamb's poems, in fact. The poem seems to be a one-off, an unusually-shaped but fully-formed parlour piece among the more fine-grained...
A beguiling fairy tale that blends the glamour of Hollywood's golden age with the sultry rituals of cigar smoking When Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles split up in 1948, she told the press: "I can't take his genius any more." Both sides were said to have been unfaithful. But David Camus and Nick Abadzis have come up with a loopily different version of the story, one they tell in this charming...
A poet allowed into North Korea's inner circle has a riveting, bizarre tale to tell Jang Jin-sung, a 27-year-old North Korean poet, could hardly believe it when he received a summons to meet the first deputy director of the United Front Department (UDF) in Pyongyang. He was working in the covert operations carried out by Section 5 (Literature) of Division 19 (Poetry) of office 101, the UDF's policy-making...
Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi's new book, his first to receive an English translation, is a haunting tale of love, loss, millet wine and whales that walks a fine line between sci-fi and magical realism....
NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with the irrepressible novelist about his latest book — a memoir this time, called Tibetan Peach Pie -- and why he hates being labeled as a counter-culture writer....
The award-winning author Anthony Doerr's newest novel approaches old history with two unfamiliar perspectives: a blind French girl and a German orphan. He says WWII history is as important as ever....
In his short life, 1960s producer-songwriter Bert Berns made an indelible mark. He made many hits, but a changing industry brought tension to the studio, as told in the new book, Here Comes the Night. ...
This enjoyable, if sometimes wordy study of the Greek poet, is impassioned and wide-ranging These days, mention of Homer is more likely to bring to mind the long-suffering Homer of The Simpsons (D'oh!) than the ancient Greek poet. But Homericisms lie all around us. In the part of north London where I live, there's an Odyssey Dryclean and a Ulysses 2000 Menswear (Ulysses being the Latin form of Odysseus's...
The psychological impact of the first world war lingers in London, in 1919, in the stories of five fractured lives Homecoming is at the heart of this haunting novel, which explores whether it is ever possible to truly return home from war, and how best to welcome back those who have been changed irrevocably by the trauma of war. Opening in London, in 1919, this excellent sequel to My Dear I Wanted...
Why did the teenage Bosnian Serb assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914? This lively account tells his story On 28 June 1914, a teenage Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting Europe on the path to a war whose impact is still felt. Yet Princip has remained an enigma, perhaps because that war's complex underlying causes...
This occasionally intimate study, inspired by three portraits the author's father painted of Dylan Thomas, fades as the poet's career takes off Title aside, Hilly Janes's engaging, accessible biography of Dylan Thomas is more a book of two lives, for it explores his short, chaotic existence and extraordinary talent through the eyes of her father, the artist Alfred Janes (called Fred throughout), a...
This fluid portrait of six literary greats combines biography, science and superb prose to illuminate the effects of alcohol on their writing It's a niche idea, this one, at first glance. Why do writers drink well, why does anyone? Why not doctors or lawyers, parents or children? And why does Laing's book (part literary criticism, part biography, part travelogue, part memoir) focus on six male, American,...