booktwo.org

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel at the Frontline Club on the future of publishing. It was an interesting evening, and I spoke alongside Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller and Chris Finnamore, test editor at WIRED. The whole thing’s now online if you’re so inclined:

During the talk, one particularly vocal member of the audience took issue with ebooks in general (standard trigger question: “will they smell like real books?”) and stated that vinyl was on the way back. I countered that, well, no it wasn’t – it has a growing status among…

Read the rest of this post →

As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation.

Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower…

Read the rest of this post →

I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t:

“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.”

I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing students. They seemed nice, if mad – but in roughly the same proportions as professional writers, so probably for the good. I may stand before them again. Kureishis’s hypothesis, therefore, struck me as worth testing.

Wikipedia’s index of School Shootings lists a total…

Read the rest of this post →