Hamish Hamilton News
RSS feedThe Consolations of Twitter 12 August 2010
Today we are especially enjoying Alain de Botton’s elegant, aphoristic tweets on life, love, religion, relationships and writing:
‘With age, you realise certain things just can’t be fixed — and start to take frivolity more seriously’
‘We want two incompatible things of our universities: that they teach us how to make a living — and teach us how to live’
‘Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny’
Follow Alain on Twitter for more.
Susan Sontag's Tour Schedule, 1989 11 August 2010
For more from the Sontag archives, check out FSG’s excellent website ‘Work in Progress’.
Hamish Hamilton at Port Eliot 10 August 2010
Our friend and Five Dials contributor, Paris-based Lauren Elkin, made the long voyage to Port Eliot by Eurostar and First Great Western and wrote this delightful diary for New York’s BOMB magazine.
We especially like her description of the festival as ‘Woodstock meets the New Yorker Festival meets Sesame Street, with the ghosts of Vita Sackville-West and Samuel Johnson looking on’.
Thank you, Lauren!
Shaped Intimacy 9 August 2010
Today we are admiring poet Rita Dove’s description of literature as ‘shaped intimacy’ in an interview in the current Smithsonian magazine. Answering the big question of the moment — ‘How will blogs, YouTube and other technology affect authors?’ — she responds:
‘The intimacy that literature affords — that feeling that you are really in the head of the characters protrayed — used to be almost the private privilege of plays, novels and poetry. Now there’s another place that has it — be it blogs, Facebook or Twitter — and it gives you second-by-second accounts. That does not diminish the power of literature, because literature is shaped intimacy.’
AfPInd 9 August 2010
Mohsin Hamid proposes a new shorthand to replace ‘AfPak’ in thinking about the war in Afghanistan. Read his article in the Washington Post here.
Hamish Hamilton Live 6 August 2010
Our publishing director guests on the first edition of this year’s Monocle Magazine Summer Series, alongside songstress Diane Birch (pictured above). Listen here.
Small But Perfectly Formed 5 August 2010
Lydia Davis has chosen her five favourite stories for Metro, who today ran a two-page interview with Lydia:
‘Dante And The Lobster’ by Samuel Beckett
‘Anything by Beckett, of course, but particularly this story for the deadly (and deadpan) precision (and accuracy) of its conclusion, “Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all”, followed by “It is not”.’
‘Wants’ by Grace Paley
‘Again, almost any story by Grace Paley because of her brilliantly dense style, her economy, her humour, the generous reach of her spirit. Wants is all of two pages, involving an ex-husband and a library fine of $32, family life and anti-war activism.’
‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ by Flannery O’Connor
‘This for its cleverness, its wry integration of the colloquial speech of its characters (the naively bigoted mother and the martyred son), its devastating humour and its deft portraiture.’
‘You Must Know Everything’ by Isaac Babel
‘In this the boy spends Saturday with his old grandmother in her stifling apartment, studying and taking his lessons under her watchful eye. The scene is presented in constantly amplified detail that brings us wholly into that afternoon.’
‘The Burrow’ by Franz Kafka
‘Because of the confident and convincing narrative voice of its obsessed narrator, who begins, “I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful”.’
Wish We Were There 4 August 2010
The Five Dials West Coast summer HQ is now open for business — as can be seen in this photograph taken by our roving Editor, Craig Taylor.
Skippy: The Movie! 3 August 2010
Variety magazine reports that Neil Jordan will adapt and direct a fim version of Paul Murray’s Man Booker-nominated Skippy Dies …
Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng Celebrate First year of Sudanese School 3 August 2010
The Guardian reports on the first year of the school in Sudan founded by Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, funded by the money raised by Dave’s book What is the What, which tells the story of Valentino’s life in Sudan and after as one of the so-called ‘Lost Boys’.
In this photograph by Greg Larson the first 85 students are pictured outside the secondary school — one of only a tiny number in a country where only 3% of people receive any secondary education at all.
In the words of Valentino: “Everything is possible, and its just the determination and faith people put into it. I know we didn’t have bulldozers, or big carriers, or even professional teachers at the time, but we could not wait and wait and wait until someone else came in and decided there was a school here. No. We needed to build it for ourselves.”
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