Essays
How Many and How Much? Remembering Brian Johns
‘Anyone in the publishing department, or indeed the whole company, could put forward a publishing idea. Brian would always ask, “How many and how much?”. While Penguin always had very efficient marketing and sales departments, an essential for a successful publishing machine, Brian through his vast network of contacts could not only tap into potential authors but also do his own very personal brand of marketing by “talking his books up” in influential places.’ Bruce Sims on Brian Johns.
Dirty Realism’s Other Face
‘Here, nothing is sacred; everything is corruptible.’ The term ‘dirty realism’ was coined by critic Bill Buford in 1983, in reference to the short fiction of what he thought of as ‘a new generation of American authors.’ The dirty realist canon, now encompasses a diverse range of cultures and languages, including the Hispanophone world. Alice Whitmore on Guillermo Fadanelli and the rise of realismo sucio.
Wide Sargasso Sea, fifty years on
‘Re-reading Wide Sargasso Sea now in this, the fiftieth anniversary year of its first publication in 1966, I can’t help feeling that the novel remains just as groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Perhaps we are finally catching up with Jean Rhys and celebrating – with her, despite her – the unequivocal achievement of Wide Sargasso Sea.’
A Letter to a Student
‘A student’s complaint about what is disparagingly called “rote learning” touched off some preoccupations that seem to go quite some way back with me. For some reason the topic of memory has always been centrally important to any thinking I have done about culture, politics, and society.’
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part Five
‘Mike has worked with enough Westerners to know to get blunt. “‘Matt, if you cannot get military protection, don’t go to Jolo. Do you understand? You are a marked man. The only white civilians in Jolo are hostages in pits.”’ The final instalment of Matthew C. Thompson’s reportage from the Sulu Archipelago
Don’t Go To Jolo – Part Four
‘Henry, the policeman with the invisible support squad of jinns, wants to help expose me to the views of Muslims during my stay in this protected enclave. Indeed, he expresses the hope that I will embrace Islam, the way of the Sunni, and convert.’ Matthew Thompson meets the Mufti of Basilan as he tries to broker a trip to the troubled island of Jolo in the Sulu Archipelago.
Gerald Murnane: An Idiot in the Greek Sense
‘The question will arise: did I live this imaginative life because I didn’t find my real life satisfactory? That’s a question that I can’t answer, that no one else can answer. You can’t answer these questions definitively. In some respects I was immensely satisfied by my real life, and yet, by the evidence of my writing, I wasn’t. Some people have terrible lives. I didn’t have a life like that, yet, on the evidence of my writing, my life wasn’t enough for me, and I had to have this other life. There’s no answer to these questions. It’s just a wonderful part of the mystery of being human.’ Gerald Murnane speaks with Shannon Burns