Orange to withdraw sponsorship of women’s prize for fiction
Mobile services company will not be renewing its sponsorship of the book awards that have borne its name for 17 yearsIn one of the biggest upsets in literary prize history, the mobile services company Orange has announced this morning that it will not ...
Paperback Q&A: Ian Rankin on The Impossible Dead
The crime writer reveals the research underpinning his second Malcolm Fox novel – and the strict plan that yields a book a yearHow did you come to write The Impossible Dead?I was reading a newspaper and saw mention of a lawyer called William McRae. H...
Orange is not the only fruit: why book prizes, not sponsors, matter to writers
Orange's decision to withdraw its sponsorship of the women's prize for fiction is not the end of the world. What matters is not what the prize is called, but what it representsWaiting with the five other shortlisted novelists 12 years ago, as the chair...
Pass notes No 3,178: Jack Kerouac
The Beat writer's masterpiece On the Road has been made into a film. But why has it taken 55 years to get it on to the screen?Age: Died in 1969, aged 47.Appearance: Dead Beat.Who was he? A leading novelist and poet of the Beat Generation.Oh right....
Heavy hitter from left field
British readers worried that US bestselling novel The Art of Fielding is purely about baseball can allay their fears. The sport is in the book to focus on the hero's very public crisis, says the authorThe Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach's debut novel of ...
In the Making by GF Green – review
First published in the early 1950s, Green's story of developing adolescent sexuality remains a brave work of fictionSet partly in an upper-middle-class English home and partly in a boarding school, GF Green's novel describes the early youth and adolesc...
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – review
This dark, disturbing story of a wife's sudden disappearance is a contender for thriller of the yearOliver and Barbara, the toxic married couple from The Wars of the Roses, have nothing on Nick and Amy Dunne, the co-narrators of Gillian Flynn's dazzlin...
Tom Phillips and A Humument: how a novel became an oracle
New print and digital editions of the painter Tom Phillips's extraordinary work mark the artist's 75th birthdayThursday marks the 75th birthday of the artist Tom Phillips and much celebration is in order. He is best known for his ongoing project A Humu...
Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell – review
The sixth of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon series taps into a particular kind of male fantasyThis book, the sixth in Bernard Cornwell's bestselling Saxon Stories series, is set during and immediately after the death of King Alfred the Great as the Saxo...
