There’s still more than three months to go before the release of Salman Rushdie’s new book Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights described as “wildly surreal” but The New Yorker has just published a long extract from the story the Duniazat which is taken from the novel. Here’s a taster: In…
Fabulous line-up of new titles for 2014
2014 promises to be as rich a literary year as 2013 with new books due out from authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates (February), Emma Donoghue (April), Haruki Murakami and possibly Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the third part of her Wolf…
The things they say … about books
Some things people said about books in newspapers around the world at the weekend.
“Well, I didn’t want to write 600 pages of getting even. I thought I would try to be as understanding as possible to everybody else and as rough as possible on myself. I decided not to varnish stuff.” Salman Rushdie talking to Stuart Jefferies in The Guardian about why he decided to write his memoir, called Joseph Anton, the pseudonym he adopted after the fatwa was taken out against him in 1989.
“Today, many towns have no bookshops. If they also have no library, where are children to find books? Is it a surprise that we are always reading horrifying statistics about the number of homes without books? If children don’t discover what books they like, they are unlikely to become life-long readers, and we are therefore heading for a less literate society. Illiteracy leads to lower skills, greater social problems, higher crime rates, and a country less able to prosper in the global jobs market. Cutting libraries is a false economy. They are the best literacy resource that we have. “ Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, commenting on far-reaching cuts funding for UK Libraries.