Penguin in the Doghouse?

Thanks William Shaw for sending me a link to his post re the kerfuffle over the Dubai Festival.

Not all is as it first seemed.

According to Isobel Abulhoul the decision to cancel the launch of the book was communicated to Ms Badell in September ... so why was it only brought to public attention this month?

Margaret Atwood now apparently regrets her decision to withdraw and has :

... come around to Isobel Aboulhou’s view that this was as much a controversy stirred up by Bedell’s publishers as anything to do with censorship. ... On speaking to , the festival’s director, however, she was told that this was not the case, she writes. Rather, the festival director had sent a “candid” and somewhat naive email of rejection, which “was carefully guarded by someone - who? - until now, when it was hurled into the press with great publicity effect, easily stampeding people like me.” Atwood, upset that her principled stance was taken under what she now sees as false pretences, and protective of the “first-time festivalite” Abulhoul, says her “head is spinning” as a result of the controversy.

I think our heads are spinning too. And I must make a note to be a bit more of a sceptic ...

Postscript (24/2/09) :

Margaret Atwood is to take part in the debate on censorhsip via video link.

Penguin Australia Goes Retro Orange

This picture (left) made me feel quite nostalgic for those old-fashioned Penguins with the orange and white covers and the happy memories of reads gone by.

Penguin Australia brought out a budget collection of 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction titles in the Penguin Popular series, and the sales have exceeded all expectations, Tom Reilly in the Age reports.

The Brits (and remember that Penguin is a British company) were more cautious and rejected the idea ... and are most probably kicking themselves after bad sales over Christmas.

The low-price philosophy goes back to the whole ethos on which Allen Lane based his business more than 70 years ago - each book is cheaper than a packet of cigarettes.

I don't know whether we will get to see these copies here, but they are certainly Penguins I would want to pick up!

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

Chet sent me this link to Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel Award which :

... brings together talented writers, reviewers and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction.

It goes on to say :

If you're an author with an unpublished novel waiting to be discovered, visit CreateSpace to learn more about the next Breakthrough Novel Award and sign up for regular updates on the contest. Open submissions for manuscripts begin in February 2009.

Malaysian authors are among the nationals of 20 countries eligible to take part. The grand prize winner gets a full publishing contest with Penguin and US$25,000 advance against royalties, and a trip to Seattle for each of the three finalists.

See the website for rules and FAQ's.

Digital Fictions

A couple of months ago, I put up a post on digital fiction which provoked a fair bit of discussion. Now there are some beautiful examples of how such stories might work on the Penguin website.
Over the last six weeks top authors have been putting their work on line at We Tell Stories. Each tale pays homage to one of the novels in the Penguin Classics series and shows the possibilities of the medium.

Charles Cumming's 21 Steps of course echoes John Buchan's 39 Steps, and is designed for Google maps. Toby Litt revisits M.R. James classic ghost story The Haunted Doll's House. Litt's Slice is told through blog entries and Twitter messages.

Kevin Brooks offers you an interactive fairy story. Husband and wife team Nicci French actually wrote Your Place or Mine live online in real time. (How brave is that?)

Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton write an updated Hard Times for teenagers in the information age, while Mohsin Hamid draws on 1001 Nights for inspiration for his The (Former) General in his Labyrinth.

Just a little footnote. Over the past few weeks I've been back in teacher education watching trainee teachers doing microteaching (a simulation lesson using their classmates to roleplay their class). I have been so pleasantly surprised by the confidence with which the trainees have integrated internet and computer technology into their lessons ... and really jealous that none of this was available to me when I was an English teacher!

As I read these digital fictions, I was imagining what great use could be made of them in the language classroom. And I think it would be fun to write interactive stories too.

(Thanks to friends who dropped by to nudge me to blog about this. Sorry I took so long!)

Theroux by Train

As you read travel books, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them, to smell them. Some of it is painful, but travel - its very motion - ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; its indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travellers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that optimism.

I'm a little slow posting a link to Paul Theroux's excellent piece on reinventing travel writing in the Guardian the other day (so thanks Uma for the nudge). Some of Theroux's best books have been based on long train journeys, and two of them The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, have just been reissued in the Penguin Modern Classics series.

I've read almost all of Theroux's travel writing over the years (the exception being Dark Star Safari which is on my to-be-read shelf).

He is, though, something of a grouchy travel companion at times. I did get a bit cross with him in The Great Railway Bazaar which describes a journey across Asia. When he got to the part of the trip I was most anticipating, the Trans-Siberian leg, the author was so pissed off with travelling that he offered really jaundiced descriptions of the great snowy wastes of Russia. It's still a journey I'd love to make one day.

And I've never forgiven him for his rather negative descriptions of Britain in Kingdom by the Sea. perhaps he sees us Brits as we really are, but that's not an excuse to tell the whole world.

The Lost World of Ladybird

Do you remember Ladybird books? Robert Elms reminisces about them in today's Independent :

The covers alone do it for me. One glance at Sir Walter Raleigh proffering his cape or Florence Nightingale swinging her lamp and I am immediately transported back to my tiny bedroom in our north-London council house, snuggling between other covers with a series of heroes. Ladybird books, those little hardback, brightly coloured epics, were such a vital part of my youth that their appeal still resonates to this day.

I know exactly the illustrations he's referring to, because the same books were very much part of my childhood too and thinking about them transports me back. Every alternate Saturday we used to drive from our house in to visit my mother's parents in Melton Mowbray. And at the end of every visit my grandparents would give me the princely sum of half-a-crown, two shillings and sixpence in a shiny silver coin. It was exactly the price of a Ladybird book, and already a bookworm before I was five, I always asked my parents to stop at a newsagents on the way home where I could buy another for my collection.

The books were produced in my home town, Loughborough, Leicestershire and the plant only closed in 1999 when the company was taken over by Penguin.

The books I loved most were the beautifully illustrated nature books of Series 536, and I think I collected the whole lot of them. I don't know what happened to those copies, but suppose they got passed on to some jumble sale or another when my mum thought we had grown out of them.

If you fancy embarking on the Ladybird nostalgia trip yourself, do check out the The Wee Wee website which is a one stop guide to everything you might want to know about the books. Also enjoyable is Libby Purves earlier article about Ladybird from the Times.

(The picture shows a Ladybird books in a 1950's shop window and comes from The Wee Wee.)

Man Asian Teething Problems

Starmag invited Nury Vittachi to write about the Man Asian prize and I think he has done a great job of filling in the background for readers and waving the flag of encouragment for Asian writers.

He also highlights some of the teething problems the prize has faced:

Getting the funds and the green light from Man Group Plc took several years. Internal boardroom battles among the organisers changed the leadership of the prize, leaving a widespread feeling that it had become controlled by Western expatriates.

There is continuing controversy over the choice of countries allowed to submit. Malaysia was accidentally omitted, but then reinstated. Other countries, such as Mongolia, are still missing from the list.

(The omission of Malaysia from the list was a small hiccup, rectified in hours; the omission of Mongolia much more serious.)

And then there is the new controversy that has sprung up since the announcement of the winner:

Critics have pointed out that while the prize was intended for authors unpublished in the West, the organisers actually handed it to a wildly successful and very wealthy writer who already has massive publishing contracts around the world.

“Jiang Rong is quite possibly the very last author in Asia who needs what the prize offers,” said an academic at the unofficial support website, themanasianliteraryprize.com. Another online literary commentator, The Literary Saloon said the prize “was created in order to facilitate publishing and translation of Asian literature in and into English – so, of course, the first time they hand out the award, they give it to the one title that has already gotten heaps of international press and been sold for large advances!”

The book has already sold two million copies ... and there's the possiblity that penguin deliberately held back the publication of the English edition of the book so that it could be entered for the prize.

One anonymous commenter on the letter page of the Man Asian Literary Prize site (the unofficial one) says:

Jiang Rong's book was purchased by Penguin in 2005 and translation work started afterwards with the book scheduled to be published in English on the Penguin 2007 list. However it was delayed until March 2008 thus becoming eligible under a technicality to be entered for this this prize for unpublished works. You can check with contacts at Penguin.

But of course, the judges can only chose the best of the novels in front of them, and even if Penguin did manipulate their timing of events, they certainly did nothing illegal.

I guess the mechanics of the award will be closely scrutinised for the future. But anyway, what is a literary prize without a little controversy?

Worth reading on the aftermath of the prize is the very well written piece by an "UK academic specializing in Asian Studies" quoted in Nury's article.

Nice of Nury by the way to mention my blog:

... one of the liveliest discussion venues in Asia for debate about the prize.

(Ahem!)

and the controversy we stirred about the Asian story arc thing. I am not finished with the topic yet (at least in my own head if not on the blog) and won't be for a while!

But it is so nice to feel that there is a wider discussion going on about Asian writing and how to grow and encourage it. I'm really glad Nury agreed to write for us and hope he will do so again.

There's also a very good review by Janet Tay of The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. Must read this.

Weekend Bookish Things

Some pictures of bookish things of the weekend.

MPH Writer's Circle focused on illustration this month and the guests were Shahril Nizam, Amir Muhammad and S. Yu who drew the delightful cartoon pictures for Eh! Wat U Talking: Chronicles of Malay Humour. Yu also has three "graffic biographies" of Malaysian politicians in the pipeline.

The shy Shahril needed a little drawing out but was fascinating as he talked about his illustrations for If Only, and he and Amir talked about how illustrations were an integral part of Politicians Say the Damndest Things. (Lovely review of the book here by Ted, by the way.)

The conversation I thought got particularly interesting when we talked about book covers which didn't scare of marginal readers. Jennifer Eileen Peters, author of Making Chatter Matter turned up for the meet, and talked about how happy she was with Shahril's art work for her cover.

It was a very comfortable and friendly discussion which I think we all enjoyed, but still ... wish the audience for these things was a bit bigger.
.In the evening I went along to Silverfish for the official opening of Raman's new shop, which is already looking like home.

Raman was launching News From Home, a compilation of the work of three of the participants of his writing programme. The brave souls (left to right Kow Shih-Li, Rumaizah Abu Bakar and Chua Kok Yee) gave a short reading (a first for all of them!) from their work and then (perhaps even more bravely!) answered a few questions from the audience. What was evident in all of them was the desire to work at their craft and their enthusiasm for writing. I really wish them all the best with the book, and thanks Raman for the review copy. Promise some feedback.

All the usual suspects were there and here's Diana Cooper, me, Daphne Lee, Peter Brown and his wife Markiza.

Got up early today to go to the Penguin/Pearson warehouse sale. Here are my spoils! Am around RM300 lighter in the pocket which I don't think at all bad for this big pile of things I really want to read.

The sale is very well worth going to with excellent bargains and a huge variety of books of all kinds. You do need to be organised though. One tip which I pass on is to take those tough supermarket shopping bags (the ones you buy so you don't need plastic bags). They are easier to carry around than clumsy boxes.

You also do need to be fit to push through the crowds and not mind the heat and chaos and thick thick dust! But where would the adventure be if it wasn't like that?

Tales from the Front Line

I haven't made it to the Penguin/Pearson Warehouse sale yet (maybe tomorrow?), so am grateful to Erna for writing about what's good to buy for all kinds of book lovers and the treasures she found.

Anyone else got a story from the front line to tell?


(Pic nicked from Erna)

Bukus on the Cheap

Does your book supply need replenishing cheaply? This weekend might be a good time to stock up!


And if that is not enough, there's a Penguin and Pearson warehouse sale 16-21st November. (Thanks Synical for sending me the link to the ShoppingNSales blog.)

I've got an invite to the preview .... but I'm not supposed to be buying anymore books, am I? Well am I??

Another 50th Anniversary

Malaysia isn't the only one celebrating her golden jubilee this year!

It's fifty years since Jack Keroac's On the Road, was published. An immediate best-seller, it tells the story of Keroac and his friend "Dean Moriaty" (actually Neal Cassady) as they travel across the US. It was an immediate best-seller, and is the book which best defined the "Beat Generation" which challenged the conformist and materialist values of post-war America. Another Beat novelist, William S. Burroughs, once said that the book "sent countless kids on the road".

Admirers of the novel celebrated with a marathon 12 hour cover-to-cover reading in Boulder, Colorado to kick off the university's inaugural Kerouac Festival.

Keroac taped together sheets of semi-translucent paper so that the flow through his typewriter would be uninterrupted, and the resulting manuscript was 120 feet long (and written breathlessly in a single paragraph)!

Now the "scroll" on which the novel was typed (bought for $2.4 million at auction last year) has gone on show in the the author's hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, and will be displayed around the country.

And a new edition of the book has been released by Penguin classics, with all the original names restored as well as scenes that got edited out for fear of charges of obscenity. George Mouratidis in the Age describes his own involvement with the project in a piece which captures the spirit and the atmosphere of the original.

This goes on my wish list!

Authors on the Underground

Imagine this. You're on your way home from a wild night out, and you've probably had a bit to drink. You decide to take the tube (or okay, the LRT) home. As you sit waiting for your train you notice a document on the bench next to you. You pick it up and find it is in fact the manuscript of an as yet unpublished novel by your favourite author ...

Of course, such things don't happen in real life. Or do they?

Oh Those Clever Little Penguins!

The Guardian carried news yesterday that Penguin plans a wiki-novel in collaboration with Britain's De Montford University:

Based on the principles of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, the novel, called A Million Penguins, is open to anyone to join in, write and edit. None of the words, characters or plot twists will be attributed to any individual and - and this is the element of the project most likely to bruise delicate egos - participants are free to edit, chop and change other writers' work.

The big question is whether those who participate will be willing to check in their writerly egos at the door. But certainly the announcement has caused a stir: the A Million Penguins website and blog are already getting 10 hits a second!

Penguin have also apparently taken up residence in Second Life. (For the unititiated, a social community in an online 3D world.) I'd better go check it out.

(Incidentally, if you bump into a young lady with spiky blue hair, wearing microminishorts and displaying a great deal of cleavage ... you'll recognise me at once, of course. I haven't managed to find anything bookish going on in Second Life yet, maybe because I seem to spend most of my visits to the site at the bottom of the sea. CW has promised to take me on a tour of the library and when the internet connection is better, will take her up on that.)

I wanted to blog earlier in the week about another very interesting innovation from Penguin, and I even had the heading ready: Penguin Draws a Blank.

I was browsing the fiction section of Kinokuniya the other day when this cover (left) caught my eye. This is the latest packaging for classic novels, and you only know which title you're picking up from a wee sticker on the plastic wrap. The tag line for the My Penguin series is:

Books by the Greats, Covers by You

Because you see, the idea is that YOU design the cover image for the book. And then, if you want, scan and submit it to Penguin for possible display in their online gallery.

Yes, yes, Penguin are very innovative, very clever indeed. But I can go one better, if someone wants to go into business with me.

I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and sell readers books with both the cover and the pages blank so that they can write their own classics. That's one Penguin haven't thought of yet!

Astounding Auster

I have to say first that this Penguin Classic Deluxe is the of the prettiest paperback in my library - the pulpish art work by Art Spiegelman (on the cover and before each story) the quality paper with uncut edges, the whole "hand feel" of it made reading even more of a pleasure. This is how all paperbacks should be!

I was new to Auster's work (apart from his film scripts for Smoke and Blue in the Face - both of which I loved) so was blissfully unaware of what to expect before I dove in to The New York Trilogy.

The book contains three novellas initially published separately: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986).

And in them Auster takes a familiar genre - the gumshoe detective novel - and completely subverts it into something so surreal that you can never be sure of the ground beneath your feet. Each story is a variation on the same theme and contains a character who is given the task of spying on or tracking down another, and in the process having his own identity slip away from him. Oh ... and characters called Paul Auster appear now and again, fountain-pen in hand, who may or may not be the same Paul Aster who is the author. It's clever and tricksy and disturbing and 'postmodern' (a term I know by feel but couldn't start to explain to save my life). A meditation on the layers and levels of reality created by an author.

I won't tell you the plots of the stories because I don't want to give anything away. (If you insist go here but beware of spoilers.)

I suspect the stories may appeal more to the blokes ... simply because male readers seem to prefer novels of ideas and don't bother as much about emotional connection. (Sweeping statement - tell me I'm wrong someone!) Sometimes I was reminded of Murakami, at other times Poe (especially in The Locked Room).

And strangely enough ... it struck me while reading City of Glass that this would make a great graphic novel. I was quite gobsmacked when Subashini told me in the comments to a previous post that it was already published in graphic form! You can take a look at the art work here.

Having said all this ... I admired the book a lot more than I enjoyed it (if that makes sense to you). It's that damn need to care about the people I'm reading about!

Malaysian PEN?

I didn't blog about this then, but want to blog about it now, in the interest of getting something moving ...

Some weeks back, a group of local writers had a meeting with British novelist Hari Kunzru at La Bodega, Bangsar. The agenda? Setting up Malaysian PEN. (That's Hari with our Jo, left.)

It is for sure something that needs to happen ... the formation of a local chapter is long overdue in fact, and I know Malaysian writers who have joined Australian PEN and New Zealand PEN.

Okay, a bit of background for those who are scratching their heads at this point ...

PEN is the worldwide association of writers with 144 Centres in 101 Countries, and it exists to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, to fight for freedom of expression and represent the conscience of world literature.

Members of the organisation are required to sign this charter. Writers use their skill with words to help other writers across the world, monitor human rights issues and disseminate the information they get. Projects that PEN has been involved with include providing moral support for writers in prison, speaking out against censorship, promoting women's writing, and protesting human rights abuses (e.g Hari Kunzru recently protested torture, imprisonment and disappearances in the Madives). Our own writers would have the support of an international organisation should their rights be compromised ...

There is also the social side of PEN, of course, and most centres organise a lively programme of talks, set up writing competitions and provide a much needed sense of community for writers. (Wouldn't it be nice to have something like that here?)

Hari is involved with English PEN and has promised that London would act as mentors if we were to set up a branch here.

That was where we left it. And there is where it hangs.

There was a brief flurry of emailing. Jac Kee set up a wiki. But so far there's been no meet up and we need to get together to thrash out issues and discuss how we get the society registered.

Now Hari has e-mailed from London to know what's happening.

So far, Hari, nothing. Sorry.

What do I want, then?

That the writers among you give this matter some thought - would you want to be part of this organisation?

Would you be prepared to put in time and effort to make it happen?

Could you pass on the message to other writing friends and bloggers who might want to play a part?

And I will let you know what happens next soon as I know myself.

Of Fetish, Fur and Floggings

Speed read a damn strange book today in Starbucks, post-step class: Leopold Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. I had picked it up as a serendipitous-why-not-read? in Kinokuniya a few days ago, since the new Penguin Red series of classics had a generous 35% off with a voucher clipped from the Star. (I'm a sucker for a bargain.)

Didn't realise it at the time of course, but the word masochism is derived from the author's name, and this was one of the first pieces of erotic fiction to deal with dominace and submission.

The hero, Severin has a fetish for women dressed in fur, and dreams of being the abject slave of the woman he loves. He isn't prepared though for how far she decides to take his fantasy ...

(Some things are better kept in your head, mate!)

If sexual power-play is your thing (and it isn't my cup of latte) you will probably be fascinated by this. But don't expect a racy read, as we don't get much further than kisses and a heaving bosom and poor old Severin slapped about and abused every way the lady can devise.

The novel is based on Sacher-Masoch's real-life exploits and the drama is entirely in the head-games. Kathryn Gross in her excellent essay Venus in Furs: The Story of a Real-life Masochist says:

You have to decide for yourself if it is sex, pathology, mind games or to some degree an exaggerated reflection of life at that time and place.

I felt the writing, or at least the translation by Joachim Neugroschel, seemed at times clunky and I thought this reader's quote on Amazon was pretty apt:

To regard this as a "classic" in literary terms is a mistake. It is a historical oddity and one best read in a period translation rather than one which - however inadvertently - smooths and modernises it.

If all this has grabbed your attention and you'd like to read the book, you can actually download it for free from Project Guttenburg.

Now then, where did I leave my whip?

Books in Custody

The competition of find Britain's best reading group was recently won by a inmates of a prison. The Penguin/Orange Prize was awarded to the "book loving fools" of High Down Prison reading group, Surrey.

Loved the reaction from the one-male member of our group Fiction&Friends when I forwarded an article about the finalists:

"Am laughing out loud at the fact that the only all-male book club consists of a bunch of convicts. So that's how you get men to read. Take them out of the general population and lock them up!"

Why is it that women love to meet and talk books but men not?

Postscript:

Read about Nick Hornby's prison visit.

Happy Birthday Penguin

There should be a law against it, putting this kind of temptation in people's way. Shouldn't MPH know better?

A rack of dinky mini-books. Seventy of them. One for each year that Penguin has been in business. Cover designs that just make you want to pick the books up. Bite sized nibbles of longer, succulent feasts.

This is how Penguin books began:

"Returning to London from a weekend at the Devon home of the crime writer Agatha Christie in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane scoured Exeter Station for something to read. All he could find were reprints of 19th century novels and Lane decided to found a publishing house to produce good quality paperbacks sold at sixpence each, the same price as a packet of cigarettes."

Penguin probably did more to encourage the ordinary man in the street to read than any other publisher by making great books cheaply and widely available.

Anyway, this morning, I tried (initially) to resist the pull.

Gave way. Bought not just for me, but for a friend's birthday.

Got too a free t-shirt to add to my literary wardrobe.

And here are the books I bought (though still aching for the ones left behind - tie me up least I heed the siren call another day!).

First, the expand-your-mind-books: Forgetting Things by Sigmund Freud (because I'd forget my own head if it wasn't nailed on), Hotheads by Steven Pinker (because I still feel guilty that I haven't read How the Mind Works), Eric Schlosser's Cogs in the Great Machine (because I wish I'd read Fast Food Nation).

(I remember how I fell in love with one of my favourite writers, Steven J. Gould, after buying a Penguin mini-book several years ago.)

Then the fiction. P.D. James Innocent House (shock horror - I haven't read her yet!). James Kellman Where Was I?; Anton Chekhov The Kiss; Noise by Hari Kunzru; Ali Smith's Supersonic 70's (all short fiction, all must-haves).


And Dave Eggers Short Short Stories because I love short shorts and have read Egger's stuff on The Guardian website.

Also In Defence of English Cooking by George Orwell (not only because someone needs to defend English cooking - but also because Orwell is one of my favourite writers and I want to read his essays)

Finally, The State of Poetry by Roger McGough (a total total delight. Give this to anyone who says they don't like poetry. Instant conversion!)



If you want to find out more, do go visit the Penguin website because it's great fun. There's even a literary quiz. (I scored 8/10, but you will not doubt get full marks.)

Thanks Penguin, for letting us all celebrate your 70th birthday with you.