Tag: #bookchat

Review | Green Lion, Henrietta Rose-Innes | Book of the Week

In the popular imagination, Africa is one great big game reserve where man can hunt to his heart’s content, relishing the thrill of the dangerous chase. Theodore Roosevelt, and Ernest ernest hemingway big game hunterHemingway (that hackneyed darling of writing course instructors), recounted testosterone-fuelled tales of derring-do as they pursued their prey across the vast “uncivilized” plains of Africa. Roosevelt returned to the US with thousands of specimens – lions, elephants, rhinoceros – duly donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Disney’s film The Lion King is the second-highest-grossing Disney film of all time. It depicts all kinds of animals frolicking across great, untamed African landscapes devoid of human beings – whereas the reality is more likely to be that Africa becomes a great landscape empty of animals.

Green Lion is a deftly-executed novel about man and beast and extinction; about bereavement, animal magic and the human desire for connection. It opens with the mauling of volunteer zoo keeper, Mark Carolissen, who ends up in hospital in a coma. He was looking after a rare black-maned Cape Lion, Dmitri, kept in kept in captivity for breeding with lioness, Sekhmet. Visitors gawp in thrilling terror at the kings of the animal world, safe behind glass. Continue reading Review | Green Lion, Henrietta Rose-Innes | Book of the Week

Review | Travels in a Dervish Cloak, Isambard Wilkinson | Book of the Week

“The next morning, standing in the doorway to see me off on my way to the north of Punjab, to the capital, Islamabad, the Begum strained with both hands to raise a heavy old leather-bound Koran under which I ducked to receive divine protection. She resembled a classical figure holding up a torch so that I might see the good in her country.”

Two great matriarchs loom over this memoir which flies over Pakistan like a magical flying carpet: Isambard Wilkinson’s grandmother, and her friend, Sajida Ali Khan a.k.a. the Begum, from Lahore in the Punjab. As a small boy visiting the Irish family home that is suffused with a “heady, dusty fragrance” and chock-full of Anglo-Indian mementoes dating back to the 19th century, a warm and intoxicating vision of another world offered an antidote to the cold austerity of boarding school. His first actual visit to Pakistan was with his grandmother in 1990, to attend a wedding of one of the Begum’s children; and then in 2006 as foreign correspondent. His desire to explore the country and live there eventually was cut short by kidney failure, dialysis and successful surgery when his brother gave him a kidney. Travels in a Dervish Cloak has been seven years in the making. Continue reading Review | Travels in a Dervish Cloak, Isambard Wilkinson | Book of the Week

Interview | The Directors of Eland Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
ROSE: No, but there were books around. I was quite a lonely child and books were a marvellous escape and provided adventure, friends and role models – Noel Streatfield, E. Nesbit, Johanna Spyri, L. L. Montgomery, Louisa M. Alcott and Lucy M. Boston. Just remembering makes me want to get back under the sheets and counterpane with a pile of them.
BARNABY: No, I can remember them both being rather concerned that I was reading “yet another book” instead of riding a pony, or playing with the dogs.  There were many books in the tiny, dark Tudor cottage in which I was brought up, but they were mostly all inherited.  They included a vast shelf of bound Punch magazines and a full set of Jorrocks. At a young age I used my pocket money to acquire the Ladybird history books but before the age of seven I had graduated to Jackdaws – fascinating folders of facsimile historic documents and maps.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
ROSE: No. I was in the film business at first, but I married a bookaholic, and books took over our lives.
BARNABY: No, I had imagined I would either be a Naval Officer like my father and grandfather, or in the cavalry like my other grandfather, which would be combined in old age by brewing beer, or becoming a clergyman like my ancestors. Continue reading Interview | The Directors of Eland Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

Good writing and good ideas of all kinds make the world go round! Since we first began our celebration of independent publishing in February 2015, seasonal newsletters rounding up our exclusive interviews and curated eclectic reads have been emailed to friends in the publishing and media industries in the UK, US and France. All the wonderful feedback  received over the years has been sustaining and heartening. For readers who have missed out on our latest activity, here’s a taste of what’s been happening . . .

“To define is to limit” ― Oscar Wilde 

Dandy at Dusk published by Head of Zeus on 5 October, is hailed as a “future classic” by Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and founder of the London-based interior design firm, NH Studio Ltd. Meet the author, Philip Mann, to whom we asked, “Why do you write?” . . . “Because I inexplicably missed out on being a film star.” He writes about Soho Bohemia, in his exclusive guest feature: “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns“. Our other guest writer this month, freelance writer, journalist and cultural historian C.J. Schüler, writes about all things dandy.
 Continue reading BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

BookBlast® France | Top 5 French Reads September, 2017

La rentrée littéraire is a curious phenomenon: hundreds of new books of all genres flood French bookshops and the review pages of the literary press between the end of August and the beginning of November. It is a way for publishers to capitalize on the awards season, and at Frankfurt Book Fair in October – at which France is the guest of honour this year – as well building up a buzz leading into the Christmas period when the most books are sold.

Anglophile French friends in Paris send recommendations. And then there are wonderful talk shows about books like La grande librairie (France 5) or Jérôme Garcin’s Le Masque et la Plume (France Inter) and of course, radio France Culture – all are streamed on the web.

So here is our first curated top 5 list of five books in French for those of you looking for some French teasers from across the Channel . . . Continue reading BookBlast® France | Top 5 French Reads September, 2017

Guest Review | C. J. Schüler | The Dandy at Dusk, Philip Mann

What makes a dandy? In the popular imagination, the dandy is a peacock, eccentrically and eye-catchingly dressed. Nothing, however, could be further from the precepts of that original dandy Beau Brummell, who rejected the pink and blue silks of the eighteenth century in favour of a sober, well-tailored suit. “If John Bull turns round to look at you,” he declared, “you are not well dressed.”

In this erudite, wide-ranging and appropriately elegant book, the German-born writer Philip Mann examines six personalities who embody different aspects of dandyism in the 20th century: the Austrian architect Adolf Loos; Edward, Duke of Windsor; the courtier and couturier Bunny Roger; the writer and raconteur Quentin Crisp; the French film director Jean-Pierre Melville; and, somewhat surprisingly, his leather-jacketed German counterpart Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Continue reading Guest Review | C. J. Schüler | The Dandy at Dusk, Philip Mann

Guest Feature | Philip Mann, “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns”

Soho Bohemia

“Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be,” the hypochondriac Mr. Wodehouse says in Jane Austen’s Emma. Proverbially never healthy was Jeffrey Bernard, whose weekly column in the Spectator was frequently substituted with the notice: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.” What began as a euphemism for the fact that Bernard was too drunk to write his column or even – which happened a few times – to resubmit an old column in the hope that it had been forgotten, in later years became a bitter truth. His Low-Life column which he had been writing since 1978 and which was generally held to be a suicide note in instalments, ended with Bernard’s death in 1997 after he had willingly stopped the dialysis necessary for his survival. That he had his own ideas about life, he had already made apparent earlier: Asked to write his autobiography he promptly put a small ad in the New Statesman, enquiring whether anybody knew what his movements between 1960 and 1970 had been. Continue reading Guest Feature | Philip Mann, “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns”

Interview | Philip Mann, author

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Hanover the capital of Lower-Saxony, but grew up in West Berlin by the wall.

What sorts of books were in your family home? Who were early formative influences?
My mother has always been an avid reader and my late stepfather was a fairly influential intellectual so there always were enormous amounts of books: the classics from Chekov to Turgenev, from Mann to Musil as well as Benjamin, Jünger, Gramsci etc. The earliest literary memories I have are my mother reading me first Pippi Longstocking, and then Tom Sawyer.  In opposition to this I myself only read comic books until I was about eight or nine. Those with an all-consuming passion though. The only book I can remember reading – three times at least – was Edgar Rice Bourroughs’ Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.

Why do you write?
Because I inexplicably missed out on being a film star.

Continue reading Interview | Philip Mann, author

BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | September 2017

Our monthly round up of deliciously eclectic, mind-altering reads to see us into the Autumn now that summer is over.

Uncovering a Parisian Life

The Madeleine Project by Clara Beaudoux, translated by Alison Anderson (New Vessel Press) buy here

A young woman moves into a Paris apartment and discovers a storage room filled with the belongings of the previous owner, a certain Madeleine who died in her late nineties, and whose treasured possessions nobody seems to want. In an audacious act of journalism driven by personal curiosity and humane tenderness, Clara Beaudoux embarks on The Madeleine Project, documenting what she finds on Twitter with text and photographs, introducing the world to an unsung 20th century figure. Along the way, she uncovers a Parisian life indelibly marked by European history. This is a graphic novel for the Twitter age, a true story that encapsulates one woman’s attempt to live a life of love and meaning together with a contemporary quest to prevent that existence from slipping into oblivion. Through it all, The Madeleine Project movingly chronicles, and allows us to reconstruct, intimate memories of a bygone era.

The BookBlast® Diary will be running a review and an exclusive interview with the Author at the end of the month.

Continue reading BookBlasts® | Top 10 Reads for Independent Minds | September 2017

Interview | Julia Marshall, Gecko Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
Everyone reads in my family: we are omnivores, and eclectic. At 86, my father still alternates a thriller with something more substantial. When I grew up on the farm we used to rush back to our books to read at lunch, and we often ate dinner on our knees, with our books. My mother says she would do that differently if she could do it again, and have us all up at the table.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I did. There wasn’t a publishing course in New Zealand at the time, so I became a journalist instead. I wanted to work with books right from when I was at school. Continue reading Interview | Julia Marshall, Gecko Press | Indie Publisher of the Week