Here are some literary events to pencil in your calendar this week.
To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.
Two famed authors, Martin Amis and Jeffrey Eugenides, will headline an evening of “Selected Shorts” readings. Hear them on Wednesday, February 25th at Symphony Space starting 7:30 p.m. (New York, NY)
Chef Angelo Sosa and radio personality Angie Martinez will sit for a discussion about their new cookbook. See them on Thursday, February 26th at Barnes & Noble (Tribeca) starting 6 p.m. (New York, NY)
Three young adult writers, Gayle Forman, E. Lockhart, and Libba Bray, will come together for a launch party. Join in on Friday, February 27th at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)
Our second most-viewed post is also the one which attracted the most media attention, and also attracted what I suspect is a record-breaking 66 comments on the site.
Martin Amis's throwaway remark to the effect that he'd have to suffer brain damage before he'd consider writing a children's book may have drawn Lucy's ire, but it also drew forth a provocative and intelligent response from her, and a sparkling debate from our readership:
And for those of you who just can't wait to find out what our most-viewed post of all time so far is... I'm afraid you'll have to. But only for an hour. See you back here at 6.00pm!
Lotso hotso news today, folks. I hardly know where to begin. Let’s start with the big news that the illustrious editor Margaret K. McElderry passed away recently. I had mentioned The McElderry Book of Greek Myths in my Valentine’s Day post earlier this week. Maybe she was on my mind. In any case, there’s a great New York Times piece from 1997 on her. I’m fond of it, not least because Eden Ross Lispon mentions four books McElderry edited right off the bat and they are ”The Borrowers”, ”Ginger Pye”, ”The Dark Is Rising”, and ”The Changeover.” The Changevoer!! The book I keep hoping will be reprinted soon so as to leap on the Twilight train while there’s still time! In any case, I was unaware that Ms. McElderry worked in my own children’s room for years. Good to know. Fellow librarian and novelist Sara Ryan offers her own remembrance of Ms. McElderry and The New York Times wrote up one as well. Dunno that they needed to include the idea that We’re Going on a Bear Hunt is “un-P.C.” Um . . . maybe if you’re Stephen Colbert, but what precisely is “un-P.C.” about that book again? It’s not like Oxenbury depicted the kids packing heat, after all.
- In other news the Cybils Awards (the only awards awarded by bloggers) for children’s and YA literature were announced this week. The Cybils strive to balance great writing with child-friendliness. With those in mind I think their selections were top notch. You can see all the winners here. This year none of the books I nominated made the final cut, but I see that frequent commenter on this blog Eric Carpenter got TWO of his books on there! Well played, Eric. Well played indeed.
- I like it when my favorite folks end up linking to one another. I couldn’t have been more shocked, though, with a recent posting by Kate Beaton. She was writing a comic about Ada Lovelace (and where is the children’s biography on the fact that the first computer programmer was a woman, by the way?) and then mentioned in her notes that there were some Jules Verne illustrations out there that were “definitely worth a look”. I love me my Verne, and lo and behold who did Kate link to but none other than Ward Jenkins, he of this season’s Chicks Run Wild (by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen). Ward speaks of Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented the Future by Franz Born, illustrated by Peter P. Plasencia circa 1964. Worth your time.
- Carbon dating jackets with headless girls and cupcakes. The book that proves that kids will buy a hardcover to infinity if they like it (and no, it’s not Wimpy Kid).
Lucy Coats has already blogged (Wednesday, 9th Feb) about the remarks that Martin Amis made when he was interviewed by Sebastian Faulks for the BBC 2 programme, Faulks on Fiction. Her blog has attracted 60 comments and the outrage felt has resonated as far as the national press and the Huffington Post. Martin Amis, as the Guardian on Saturday pointed out, is no stranger to controversy.
I, too, saw the programme and after the first dropping of the jaw, I thought that he actually had a point. Just in case anybody doesn't know, or does not want to scroll down the page and see his words in purple 18 point type, he said:
'People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say: "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book."'
So far, so insulting. He then went on to say:
'The idea of being conscious of who you are directing the story to is anathema to me because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.'
Once I heard that, I could see where he was coming from. I did not think he was saying 'all children's writers have half a brain', that would be false logic. He was just explaining his own writing stance and he is entitled to do that. He writes literary fiction for adults, as such he sees it as his task to write to the top of his register and would not, could not accept any restraints on that.
The disregard for the reader that Amis expresses is just not possible when one is writing for children. Children's writers, and I include writers of Young Adult fiction, are ALWAYS aware of what their readers will and will not tolerate, or will or will not understand. Anyone who denies this is being disingenuous. Quite apart from the target readers themselves, there are other agencies involved. We have to worry about things that would not trouble writers of adult fiction in the least - see Leslie Wilson's blog below. How many writers for adults would feel the need to explain and justify their use of swear words or the incidence of sex in a novel? How much we take these factors into consideration, how much we allow them to limit our fiction, is up to us, but those limitations are there. We do not use our full palate, as Patrick Ness would say. How can we? We have to write at a lower register because we are adults and our readers are children.
There are other pressures on us, too. Pressures that have nothing to do with our writing but everything to do with the market place. In a squeezed market, there is more and more demand from publishers for novels that will sell. Books that fit into an obvious, popular genre - action, dark romance, whatever. A book that is perceived as 'too literary' is seen as problematic. The equivalent of the literary novel is a rare beast, and becoming more endangered by the minute. If one or two do sneak through, they usually turn out to have been written for adults in the first place and tweaked a bit in a bid to capture that holy grail, the crossover market.
In an interview in the Observer Review (13th February, 2011)) Nicole Krauss attests that the comment she heard most frequently on a U.S. book tour for her novel, The History of Love, was: 'this book is difficult'. Krauss worries that 'we are moving towards the end of effort'. Readers don't want to have to think too hard, it appears, whatever their age. That is the spectre that frightens me. In the hope of keeping that at bay, I actually want Martin Amis to write to the limit
On Saturday night Martin Amis was talking about his antihero, John Self, on the BBC's new book programme,
Faulks on Fiction. During his piece to camera, apropos of nothing the interviewer had said or indicated, he laid into children's books:
"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book,' but [here he shakes his head] the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable."Now, Amis is entitled to his opinion, (we live in a democracy after all) and he was, of course, speaking only for himself. However, I too am entitled to an opinion, and my thoughts when I heard Amis spouting this arrogant twaddle from the rarefied upper reaches of his ivory tower are unprintable here. No doubt he would consider that to be an intolerable restraint. However, for the moment, I'm going to ignore the implicit insult to those of us who do write children's books (and, as far as I know, none of us have serious brain injuries, though I have often been told I am off my rocker) and concentrate on the last part of his sentence, because it made me ask myself some questions about how I write.
Am I conscious of who I am directing my story to? No. At least not in the sense of 'writing down' to an audience that is obviously, by its very nature, younger than I am. Children are astute observers of tone--they loathe adults who patronise them with a passion, adults who somehow assume they are not sentient beings because they are children. When I write fiction, I research and plan just as (I assume) Amis does. Then I sit down and let what comes, come. The story generally tells itself without any inner voice saying 'oh, but you're writing for children--you mustn't say this, or--oh goodness, certainly not that!' Amis says of the process of writing Self that, "I was writing about his subconscious thought--nothing he could have written down for himself...he's an ignorant brute." Well, goodness. Writing subconscious thought? Does that never happen in children's fiction? We are all the amanuensis for our characters--and yes, often we do use language they never consciously would. It's not a feat of the writer's art exclusive to highbrow literary fiction. When I write, I think about langu
Martin Amis, the bad boy of British fiction, has returned to form and his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is reminiscent of his brilliant debut novel, The Rachel Papers, that put him on the map.
The time is the early 1970s and sexual revolution is in full bloom. Keith Nearing is a 20 year old poet and university student. His girlfriend Lily has just gotten back together with him after taking a break, so she can “act like a boy.” Lilly’s beautiful friend and former ugly ducking Scheherazade has invited them to her castle in a mountain town in Italy.
Keith is of course obsessed with Scheherazade and lost interest in his girlfriend. It’s his summer goal to sleep with her and read dreary English classic novels. The story is told by Keith from the present day, who tells us that this particular summer wrecks his life, so the book pulls you in from page one.
The story features a large cast of characters (like a 30 year old gay American and his Muslim boyfriend) including some based on Amis’ real life counter parts like Christopher Hitchens and Tina Brown. Amis is probably one of the best writers and it’s just fun to see him work.
By: Rebecca,
on 6/23/2009
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Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster with an interest in the cultural and political 
dimensions of modern history. Having started writing A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, he is now a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium. A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the Britain through the unexpected prism of everyday life in East London. Below is an excerpt about London Fields. If you will be in London this summer, perhaps you should pick up a copy of Wright’s book and read about your surroundings as you travel.
Hackney was once a place of pastures and market gardens. Samuel Pepys practised archery here. Even today there is a public park in the borough known as London Fields. It is a place of modest attractions: some fine old plane trees, a new community centre, an open-air lido that, were it not for local objectors, the council would already have demolished. In the early morning, before the dogs come out, it is often full of seagulls.
Trains rattle by overhead. London Fields borders on the Cambridge line, and it’s not a bad spot from which to observe passing academics. They stare back glumly, thanking their lucky stars for Grantchester Meadows and mistaking the figures on the ground for woebegone residents of the Victorian East End. It’s easy to imagine them adding those contemporary asides that keep turning up in scholarly studies of Dickens, Dore, or life as it was in outcast London: ‘Even today, one only has to take the train from Liverpool Street Station…’.
London Fields certainly has its dismal aspect. There have been vicious assaults. Huge and unattended dogs run free. Young children from the nearby travellers’ site invade the infants’ playground in a terrifying and unbelievably foul-mouthed pack (not for them the clip on the ear with which Richard North once hoped to improve the area). As I walked out on Sunday afternoon I came across a Ford Cortina parked up against the railings: it was emitting grunts and rocking.
But despite the malevolence that sometimes drifts across it, London Fields also clings to an understated respectability. On most days of the year, it is an uneventful and slightly melancholy place. If it has a message for the world it is no longer the progressive Victorian one about the uplifting and civilizing effect of open spaces-green lungs as they used to be called-on the nation’s most down-trodden souls. These days the park promises nothing so ambitious. It merely points out that people can be poor without always being beastly; that, no matter what writers like Tom Wolfe may suggest, the inhabitants of the inner city can get by without raping, mugging and insulting each other at every encounter.
The park remains uncelebrated, but its name is too good to be true. ‘London Fields…’. It doesn’t take a master class in poetry to reveal the contemporary resonances of that archaic conjunction. In these ecological days ‘London Fields’ has come into its own as a prime piece of nomenclature, a movable asset that is far too good to be squandered on an obscure dog-patch in Hackney.
The estate agents were the first to act. Assisted by the usual clutch of lifestyle journalists, they went out one night in the early Eighties, levered the name up from that tired stretch of municipal ground, and humped it half a mile down the road. No longer confined to the park or the dishevelled part-industrial part-Bohemian zone around the railway arches on its east-side, ‘London Fields’ was now the new name for Mapledene-a pleasant and, as we know, relatively unbroken area of Victorian terraced housing that, through this act of renaming, was now being pulled away from the abysmal Holly Street Estate at its western edge. ‘London Fields’ was still a place of leafy respite, but it had become one that could be bought and sold: a rediscovered ‘village’ within walking distance of the city.
John Milne was the first writer to offer us London Fields, the novel. He had grown up in a council flat in the area and though his story, issued by Heinemann in 1983, was shy of highbrow presumptions, his publishers were still serious enough to adorn it with somewhat patronizing recommendations from David Lodge (Mr Milne has talent’) and Auberon Waugh (’Mr Milne seems to represent a new development in the English novel’).
Milne is good on detail, but at heart his London Fields was a conventional fable of working-class male endeavour. Its hero was determined to break away from the poverty of his circumstances: the string of wretched jobs, the dismal estates, the cruelly observed pregnant wife with her nylon dressing-gown and her stifling need for security. He turns to athleticism, and then, via an exotic inter-racial affair (’She was ebony, pure shining carved ebony’), to the underworld of drugs, black clubs and serious crime. Milne’s London Fields is a place of confinement and stunted prospects. The escape route is enticing but it leads inevitable to gaol.
Then, in 1989, Martin Amis came along with the book that swept John Milne’s effort into oblivion. By the time Amis has finished with it, London Fields isn’t a place at all. Instead it’s a monstrous condition, a post-modern pile-up at the end of another millennium. London Fields has become the immortal void where the time-expired allegories of British life go to mutate. There’s suicide and murder. There’s imminent nuclear catastrophe and a dark collapsing sky. There are gross couplings, and they’re not discreetly hidden in a Ford Cortina either. At one point in the performance, an unprecedented gale bursts into fell thirty-three million trees: all in a single stroke of the Ring Master’s hormonal, mid-Atlantic prose. People round here may well wonder what Martin Amis thinks he’s doing to their park.
The Nasty Young Man of English letters grows apocalyptic with age. These days he creeps into London Fields like repentant mugger and practises being human. He’s achieved some results through these exertions: an abstract devotion to the planet, for example, and a fatal softness for babies. Nevertheless, he’s still doing horrible things to women and children. Amis’s American narrator is less of a worry. He flew into London saying ‘I want time to go to London Fields’, but he died on the way through. He’ll never know that, despite all his millennialist huffing and puffing, the plane trees in Hackney’s park are still standing. It’s unlikely anyone in the area will miss him.
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Thank you, Betsy, for contributing to the latest StorySnoops blog post!
My husband, in his mind, named our second daughter for Ada Lovelace. In my mind, we got it from the novel Cold Mountain. Oh well, at least she’ll have two stories to tell.
And, yes, she needs a biography. Lovelace, not my daughter.
thank you! as a long-time, hardcore fan of The Changeover, where do I sign up for that campaign?
I remember entering the Margaret K. McElderry Picture Book Contest year after year in the 90’s. The winning book would get a publishing contract. I can’t seem to find much info on it now, but it kept me submitting stories.
LOVE the Verne illustrations — thanks for putting them on my radar! Also, thanks for the mention of the mentor post (fitting, really, as the whole thing was sparked by your FACTOTUM review.)
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Nathan — I entered that contest, too! (in its last year, 2002) I didn’t win the contest, but I won bigger: working on my entry gave me both an appreciation for kids’ books and also a new career. I wish I’d thought to thank Margaret herself. Thanks for another juicy post, Fuse.
Betsy, that’s a lot to digest. Thanks for all the great links! I already read COLLECTING CHILDREN’S BOOKS and PW CHILDREN’S BOOKSHELF, but I hadn’t seen the others.
Unfortunately, when I tried to click on your link to Audrey Wood’s new blog, I got a 404 error.
Blast. I shall correct immediately. Thanks for the heads up!