The Guardian is quick to report the winner of the annual Bad Sex Award, which was handed out in London this evening. The gong goes to Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones. The novel was first published in French and won France’s Prix Goncourt, that country’s highest literary honour. So the judges will have brought Littrell down to earth with a resounding thump.
Do you bring a book along with you to the ballpark? Do you love the sexy sports-jersey look, but hate the game it represents? To put it another way, as the excellent online retailer Novel-T does:
What if your heroes are found in the bookstore instead of the ballpark?
To solve the dilemma, Novel-T has created The Word Series, a team-full of tees bearing the names of authors and literary characters on the back and clever symbols on the front (field view of the complete roster above). Emoji Dickers, take note of my favorite:
And this one, I think, is good for the boys:
The shirts are $24.95 a pop: stocking-stuffers for nine of your favorite bookworms, perhaps?
The best thing about writing historical fiction, for
me, is the history. There is no substitute for hitting on some obscure fact or
figure and realizing in this crackling flash that all the problems I was having
with Chapter 17 are banished, and better still, the novel will be more fun for history
buffs in the bargain. Considering the vast expanse of the historical record,
passing up the real world for a completely fictional creation is a somewhat
baffling choice to me.
The worst thing about writing historical fiction,
for me, is the history (if you didn’t see that one coming you need to get out
more). There is nothing more frustrating than realizing the fine plot threads I
meticulously wove together into a tapestry of wit in Chapter 18 need to be
completely unraveled because I skimped on researching the finer points of 14th
century fishing boat schematics or confused Pope Urban V with that chump Urban IV.
Looking at the teetering stack of library books I have to get through to make
Chapter 18 work again, I am somewhat baffled by my decision to work with real
history instead of a wholly fictional, “second world” counterpart.
Not that I think creating a believable, nuanced
world from scratch is easy. On the contrary, I have enough problems rendering a
believable, nuanced facsimile of our own world with all of human history and
learning at my disposal, so forget about my trying to invent a world any more
than I already do. By which I mean that recreating a historical setting in a
work of fiction does involve a great
deal of invention, at least to render your world in such a way that is accurate
and unobtrusive but still detailed enough for the casual reader who hasn’t
spent far too much time reading up on Medieval fashion and politics.
The main reason I write fiction set in our
historical past is that it appeals to me. Not a very illuminating answer, I
know, but it’s the simplest one I’ve got. Writing fiction set in a fictional
world wholly removed from ours, or a contemporary, parallel universe, or our
species’ theoretical future, doesn’t get my brain humming the way inventing
stories set in our past does, although I’ve read and loved many a work of
second world fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, or whatever we’re
labeling any given text at any given time. So no hating on so-called genre
titles or non-genre speculative fiction titles, if there really is a difference
between them—don’t ask me to define the fundamental distinctions between
Margaret Atwood’s
fictional futures and Ray Bradbury’s
other than the usual differences you find between disparate authors; on my
shelf she’s under A, he’s under B, and that’s about it.
In talking about historical fiction as opposed to
other genres, and genre in general, I seem to have left out a rather important
aspect of my own writing, which is that while at present I’m describing what I
do as historical fiction not everyone would agree with me. The reason is that
my work contains fantastical elements, and rather strong ones at that. Part of
my motivation for incorporating the supernatural in my historical-set work is
that many of the individuals living in said eras believed in monsters and
witches, but that is far from the only reason I include patently impossible
characters and creatures. A short answer would be similar to my reasoning for
writing historical fiction in the first place, that I simply enjoy fantasy and
horror and thus use both fairly heavily in my work, but even that doesn’t
completely cover it.
Without getting bogged down with why we invent
monsters and what they might symbolize to different cultures at different
times, I would say that part of my desire to include fantastical elements stems
from a desire to restore the magic that went out of the world when we realized
witches were just midwives, madwomen, and charlatans, seamonsters simply whales
and seals, dragons and griffins and countless other beasts nothing more than
old dinosaur bones mixed with legend and the imagination of whoever stumbled
over them. By telling stories set in a past that is as close to ours as I am
capable of rendering, and by keeping the supernatural elements to the
hinterlands instead of the civic centers, I’m trying to bend history but not
break it, to recreate a world where the impossible was real, as opposed to
creating a new world with its own realities.
Whether the reader thinks this
means I’m a writer of fantasy or a writer of historical fiction doesn’t concern
me so long as I get to keep blending the unbelievable with the everyday, the
horrors of a hard life with the presumed horrors lurking just beyond the
firelight, the real with the never-was. Just because we’ve lost our sense of
wonder doesn’t mean we should inflict our mundane reality on our ancestors.
This week, in the midst of looking back on the year, and the decade, that are coming to a close, we’re also offering you something fresh: a debut novelist, Jesse Bullington, who will be guest-blogging at Omni all week. Jesse’s debut, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, was released this month by Orbit (with a gorgeous cover, designed by Keith Hayes and Lauren Panepinto with an illustration by Istvan Orosz, that could easily have been a contender in our Best Covers of the Year competition). Set in the plague-wracked Europe of 1364, it’s been described already as “violent, nasty, and filled with unpleasant people” (by a 5-star customer reviewer) and “Darkly funny, profane, erudite, bawdy, and wickedly original” (by our own Jeff VanderMeer, who, full disclosure, has been a fan and supporter of Mr. Bullington for a long time and first turned us on to his work). The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log calls it “one of the most original fantasy novels I’ve read in years” and finds it “immensely refreshing when someone comes along and kicks the genre up its leather britches-covered behind like this.”
Perhaps the best introduction to The Sad Tale, and to its fraternal heroes, are its own opening paragraphs (following a short and spurious preface), which remind me of nothing so much (and I mean this as high praise) as the gleefully nasty openings of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Twits:
To claim that the Brothers Grossbart were cruel and selfish brigands is to slander even the nastiest highwaymen, and to say that they were murderous swine is an insult to even the filthiest boar. They were Grossbarts through and true, and in many lands such a title still carries serious weight. While not as repugnant as their father nor as cunning as his, horrible though both men were, the Brothers proved worse. Blood can go bad in a single generation or it can be distilled down through the ages into something truly wicked, which was the case with those abominable twins, Hegel and Manfried.
Both were average of height but scrawny of trunk. Manfried possessed disproportionately large ears, while Hegel’s nose dwarfed many a turnip in size and knobbiness. Hegel’s copper hair and bushy eyebrows contrasted the matted silver of his brother’s crown, and both were pockmarked and gaunt of cheek. They had each seen only twenty-five years but possessed beards of such noteworthy length that from even a short distance they were often mistaken for old men. Whose was longest proved a constant bone of contention between the two.
Does that catch your fancy? Stay tuned all week to see if Jesse himself will be cunning, repugnant, or as pleasant as he has been in his emails with me. –Tom
I’ve always loved the red phone boxes of Britain. They are bright and cheerful and one of the most recognizable icons of the British Isles. It’s no wonder that the impending loss of such a phone box could send villagers into somewhat of a panic.
Rather than just panic, the residents of Westbury-sub-Mendip, a village in Somerset, took action. Not only was their beloved Giles Gilbert Scott K6 design phone box under threat, the mobile library was no longer servicing the 800 inhabitants. So why not kill two birds with one stone? And that’s what the villagers did – they turned the phone box into a mini-library.
With an investment of £30 (of which £1 was the purchase cost of the phone box), shelving, and books donated by residents, the local library was up and running.
Unlike other libraries, this one is open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Circulation is carefully monitored and if a book garners little or no interest, it’s donated to a charity.
Parish councillor Bob Dolby says, “It’s very pleasing that the phone box has been saved but is also being used to provide a service for the village.”
