Tag: books
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Want a brief escape from the gaudy mirth of Christmas? Fancy a tinsel-free zone? For this second of a short series on the relations between photography and fiction, I take you into the shadow-filled, melancholic world of W.G. Sebald’s fiction, and show how his powerful use of photographs draws on wider, deeper links between photography…
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This is the first of a planned short series of blogs on the relationship between fiction and photography. My interest in this topic is creative rather than merely antiquarian or academic – hopefully, these blogs will provide reflections that could be useful for anyone, like me, interested in the possibilities of combining the two forms.…
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Fiction’s distinctive magic lies in its ability to transport the reader seamlessly from the external action of the story into the most private and intimate thoughts and feelings of a character, sidestepping the clunkiness of filmic voiceover or dramatic Shakespearean soliloquy. Take the following passage from Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) – it comes at a…
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As any bona fide bookworm will confirm, deciding what to pack for holiday reading is the most painful of First-World dilemmas. This year, the decision was in part made for me, because I was already halfway through Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. And there was no way I wasn’t going to finish it. As for what…
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In my book, writers have a responsibility to be a bit precious about words. This doesn’t necessarily mean fusty traditionalism, or a King Canute-like resistance to the fluid, ever-changing nature of our language – it just means a certain hygiene and clarity. Think of it like linguistic flossing. . . The word “conversation” is everywhere…
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June has hunted me down and found me in a poetry mood. . . Here are two (fairly) recent ones: Liberation My friend Michael #sciencefictionpoet #manusupporter #messiaenlover Caught by an algorithm On the Upper West Side Transported to Jiangxi To live a different life Free of illusions Now he whorls slyly In a waterfall of…
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This month we enter the twilight zone where reality, dream and fiction join hands and dance together. . . To start with the familiar world of everyday “reality”: dreams are an integral and universal part of human experience – men and women have always dreamed, whether they like it or not. We’re not concerned here…
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The other day, I came across this entertaining passage, from Paul Theroux’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Paul Bowles’s celebrated novel The Sheltering Sky. Theroux reproduces an extract from his notebook, written in a café in Tangier right after meeting Bowles: He seems to me a man who masks all feelings: he has a…
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Head jumping (or “head hopping”) occurs when a novel jumps, within a particular scene or stretch of narrative, from one character’s internal thoughts and perspective to those of another. The “within a particular scene” qualification is important, to distinguish head jumping from the kind of multi-perspective novel in which switches of point-of-view are clearly delineated…
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Imagine an elevator-pitch along these lines: The Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in the car crash in the Paris underpass was not the real Diana Spencer, but a clone manufactured in a secret facility with the connivance of rogue elements in British Secret Intelligence. The real Diana Spencer lives on, seeing out her twilight…
Adam Lively: Writer - Literary Mentoring and Coaching 