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Friday, December 24, 2004

Everyone should read "The Cheese Monkeys"


Book cover designer Chip Kidd's 2001 debut novel.

- Kidd covers design, murder in 'Learners' - USA Today Books, 21 June 2004. Chip Kidd's follow up to The Cheese Monkeys is scheduled for a 2006 release. If you can't wait that long then the first seven chapters of his new work of fiction, The Learners, is available as part of USATODAY.com's Open Book series.

Posted by Nick @ 09:00 GMT
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Follow the chewing gum road



Barnet born Ben Wilson has come up with a novel approach to dealing with the the chewing gum stuck to the streets of London. Just over a month ago he began to paint pictures of faces, animals, and suns onto pieces of discarded gum stuck to the pavement at the Hadley Common end of of Barnet High Street. Working five days a week on his hands and knees, his aim is to do the same on pieces of gum all the way to the West End of London. So if you live somewhere along the Northern line and decide to walk into town then keep an eye out for his trail.

Posted by Nick @ 01:41 GMT
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Sunday, December 12, 2004

Belle de Jour has a new rival diarist as the "Original" Bridget Jones' Diary written by Ilene Powell in 1925 goes on sale at Oxfam

OXFAM - The ‘Original Bridget’ Diary - Following unprecedented international public interest, we are now exclusively publishing what has become known as the ‘real Bridget Jones’s Diary’ just days after the original was discovered in Oxfam’s specialist bookshop in Bristol. Detailing the giddy life and loves of 17-year old Ilene Powell in 1920’s Bristol, The ‘Original Bridget’ Diary, has gone on sale at all of Oxfam’s 750 shops and you can also purchase a copy online. The leather-bound journal, written in pencil by 17-year-old Ilene Powell, from Bristol. Ilene Powell - OXFAM - If sales reflect the interest we have received from the public, then The ‘Original Bridget’ Diary could become an international bestseller, and raise £1 million to help people living in poverty across the world. We are sure that Miss Powell would have been delighted to know her adventures are having such a significant impact and that her diary has become a must-have stocking filler. A dazzling urban satire of modern human relations? An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family? Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?
The 80-year-old private scribblings of a teenager dubbed the "real-life Bridget Jones" will go on sale across the country next week. The diary of 17-year-old Ilene Powell chronicles three months of her life in 1925, and reveals a twin obsession with dieting and men, much like the fictional heroine of the hit book and film series "Bridget Jones' Diary". The leather-bound pocket book was found inside a bag of books donated last month to the Oxfam charity's bookshop in Bristol, Powell's hometown. It offers a glimpse of life in Britain during the giddy "Roaring Twenties" decade and indicates that love and waistlines have been a priority for young women through the ages. Some of Powell's entries are remarkably similar to those penned by the 30-something Bridget in British author Helen Fielding's blockbuster hit.

- The Times - Ilene Powell : Goodtime girl - A teenager's jottings found in a charity shop have opened up a forgotten social revolution of 80 years ago. Hailed as an early Bridget Jones's Diary, it is also a reminder that women's liberation did not start in the 1960s.

Tallulah! : The Life and Times of a Leading Lady by Joel Lobenthal - Outrageous, outspoken, and uninhibited, Tallulah Bankhead was an actress known as much for her vices - cocaine, alcohol, hysterical tirades, and scandalous affairs with both men and women - as she was for her winning performances on stage. In 1917, a fifteen-year-old Bankhead boldly left her established Alabama political family and fled to New York City to sate her relentless need for attention and become a star. Five years later, she crossed the Atlantic, immediately taking her place as a fixture in British society and the most popular actress in London's West End. By the time she returned to America in the 1930s, she was infamous for throwing marathon parties, bedding her favorite costars, and neglecting to keep her escapades a secret from the press. At times, her notoriety distracted her audience from her formidable talent and achievements on stage and dampened the critical re-sponse to her work. As Bankhead herself put it, 'they like me to 'Tallulah,' you know -- dance and sing and romp and fluff my hair and play reckless parts.' Still, her reputation as a wild, witty, over-the-top leading lady persisted until the end of her life at the age of sixty-six.

- Tallulah Bankhead - The definitive hard-partying girl-about-town and one of the best known West End actresses and celebrities of the 1920s who famously said, "only good girls keep diaries and bad girls haven't the time?"

Posted by Nick @ 14:28 GMT
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Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami is the Book Club's chosen book for the coming month

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past. I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me. She showed me her room, isn’t it good, norwegian wood? She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere, So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair. I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine. We talked until two and then she said, 'it’s time for bed'. She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh. I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath. And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown. So I lit a fire, isn’t it good, norwegian wood. 'When I was in my first year of high school, I had to have an egg fryer - a long, narrow pan for making this dashimaki style of fried egg we're eating. I bought it with money I was supposed to use for a new bra. For three months I had to live with one bra. Can you believe it? I'd wash my bra at night, go crazy trying to dry it, and wear it the next day. And if it didn't dry right, I had a tragedy to deal with. The saddest thing in the world is wearing a damp bra. I'd walk around with tears pouring from my eyes. To think I was suffering this for an egg fryer!' 'I see what you mean,' I said with a laugh. 'I know I shouldn't say this, but actually it was kind of a relief to me when my mother died. I could run the family budget my way. I could buy what I liked. So now I've got a relatively complete set of cooking utensils. My father doesn't know a thing about the budget.' It has to be one of the most beautifully designed novels ever to be published, the crowning achievement of eminent book designer Chip Kidd's career and a package that displays an impressive commitment to deep quality on the part of much-maligned corporate publishers. on seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful april morning, a story by haruki murakami

- Norwegian Wood: The Complete Review

- murakami.ch is an unofficial site about Haruki Murakami - a treasure trove of all things Murakami.

- Birthday Honour - Haruki Murakami on discovering that he shares his birthday - January 12 - with Jack London and one of the Spice Girls. (An edited extract from the introduction to 'Birthday Stories,' a collection of stories by writers including Paul Theroux and William Trevor, edited by Haruki Murakami, published by Harvill.)

- the outsider, THE SALON INTERVIEW HARUKI MURAKAMI: Haruki Murakami on the darkness of the subconscious, the aum cult subway gas attack and being an individualist in Japan.

- Tunnel Vision - Guardian review of 'Norwegian Wood' and Murakami's first work of non-fiction 'Underground,' which consists of edited transcripts of interviews conducted with survivors or relatives of victims of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin nerve gas attack by Aum cult members.

- Chip Kidd - Novelist and Graphic Designer Extraordinaire talks with Robert Birnbaum (Robert Birnbaum's biography). Chip Kidd designed Alfred Knopf's hardback edition of Murakami's 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle' pictured above.

- identitytheory.com - a literary website, sort of - featuring the narrative thread interviews and author portraits by Robert Birnbaum

Posted by Nick @ 13:58 GMT
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Monday, December 06, 2004

A timely reappearance



For anyone with a continuing interest in such matters, it has been drawn to my attention that Lisa Hilton will be reviewing the UK's top 6 spots to spend a dirty weekend in the forthcoming Observer Travel magazine, due out 30th January 2005. Why 6 and not 5 or 10, well probably as in Nicola Six innit. Needless to say, we'll probably be hearing a little more from Lisa in the run up to the publication of her forthcoming second book - no, not that one - Mistress Peachum's Pleasure: A Biography of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton.

I wonder if she'll be reviewing Belle's diary for the Observer too.

Posted by Nick @ 18:45 GMT
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Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

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Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Senhor Jose is an official in a registry office, with a passion for unearthing every detail and reconstructing people's lives from the bare data in the archive documents. One file in particular challenges him: a woman's date and place of birth are missing, and so he begins his research in earnest.

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

A panoramic vision of America at the beginning of the 21st century, seen through the turbulent lives of the Lambert family. This novel is a moving family drama and a dissection of American society in an age of greed and globalism.

A collection of poems from a tenderly observant poet who writes about what all of us can understand. The title poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London, using the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech and focusing on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alledged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves.

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as

Koestler's story, first published in 1940, of an old-guard communist who falls victim to Stalin's purges, yet attains a personal freedom in his destruction.

This novel opens with the narrator in hospital after a serious car crash in which he killed a doctor's husband. When he leaves hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the doctor. They begin an affair which involves sexual experiments on London motorways.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognizes herself. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past. a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker...

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious Third Force. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

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