May 7, 2014
In association with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Jonathan Meades will be reading from An Encyclopedia…
Hello Comrades!
This week, the lovely people at Orange are giving away a free itunes download to their customers of ‘Che: Part One’ starring Benicio Del Toro.
The film is based on Che Guevara’s ‘Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War’, publsihed by 4th Estate.
We also publish Che Guevara’s travel diary ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, documenting his escapades around South America as a twenty-three year old, and ‘The Bolivian Diary’, which was discovered after his capture and execution by the CIA backed Bolivian Army.
We’ve teamed up with the guys over at Orange Film to give 5 lucky winners the chance to win all three books. Check Orange Film for more details
To enter simply answer the following question.
Who plays Che Guevara in Che: Part One?
a) Gael Garcia Bernal
b) Diego Luna
c) Benicio Del Toro
Email the correct answer, together with your name, address and contact number to checompetition@gmail.com, putting Che in the subject field. T+Cs on the Orange webiste. Closing date September 2nd.
Hello lovely readers and welcome back to 4thestate.co.uk! Because I am a kind and benevolent website editor, I am giving away some more books.
As it’s Jonathan Franzen season on the website (to celebrate the upcoming release of Freedom in paperback) I’m going to give one lucky winner one copy of each of Jonathan’s books. So that’s a paperback copy of: The Discomfort Zone, The Twenty-Seventh City, How to be Alone, Strong Motion, The Corrections and Freedom.
But wait – what’s that? Yes, the yellow book in the picture? Well, that would be a limited edition hardback of The Corrections we produced for our 25th birthday celebrations in 2009. And yes, I’m throwing one of those in too. See, kind benevolence.
Now, I’m an English grad, so obviously my maths is appalling, but I think I can say with some degree of certainty that all those books are worth a fair bit of cash!
To enter, email 4thestate.publicity@harpercollins.co.uk before 3pm of Friday August 26th with your name, address and answer to the following question:
Q: “What is the title of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel?”
And if you can’t answer that, well, you definitely ‘ain’t winning.
Good luck
Sam Shone, August 2011.
Ps: UK and Ireland only and we won’t use your details for marketing purposes. Or give them to other people for marketing purposes. Unless they’re marketing cheese. Because we like cheese and we think you do too.
For those of you who would prefer to kick back and listen to an extract of ‘Freedom’, free from issuu widgety-things and the complications of downloading PDFs, simply click the link below and hear the first five minutes of the novel. Simples.
As we are approaching the paperback publication of ‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen (you might have noticed we’ve gone a little Franzen themed on 4thestate.co.uk) I thought I’d give you all another treat.
Using the issuu widgety-thing below (yes, that is the proper technical term…) you can either read ‘A Reader in Exile’ online, or click through to our issuu channel and download the PDF for your e-reader, computer, iphone or even to print it out (retro!).
‘A Reader in Exile’ is an essay taken from Jonathan Franzen’s collection, ‘How to be Alone’. Enjoy!
One year on and after more column inches than I could ever hope to count, 4th Estate are publishing Jonathan Franzen’s critically acclaimed ‘Freedom’ in paperback.
Actually, without wanting to blow our own trumpet too much, critically acclaimed doesn’t quite cover it. The praise for ‘Freedom’ was off the scale. On the review pages, on amazon, on twitter, in bookstores – everywhere you went last autumn someone was talking about this fantastic novel.
We waited ten years for this book and fans of Franzen and ‘The Corrections’ will not be disappointed.
I could go on about it until the cows come home but I work for the publisher so I’m bound to say all this stuff, aren’t I? Well, yes but that doesn’t make it any less true. Have a look for yourself and read the extract below.
‘Freedom’, by Jonathan Franzen, will be published in paperback – one orange and one blue paperback – on the first of September.
Make sure you stop by 4thestate.co.uk throughout September for more articles by Jonathan Franzen, interviews and news about his international tour dates.
Take a look at this animation showcasing some of the amazing quotes Freedom has received.
This animation was created by Eva Vestmann, a brilliant designer who has been working with us for the past few months.
We first met Eva when one her videos was selected for use in the enhanced e-book edition of ‘The Information’ by James Gleick. We teamed up with Central St. Martin’s College design students and tasked them to come up with some videos that captured the ideas of James’ book. You can see Eva’s here on her youtube channel
It’s that time of year again when publishers up and down the land get excited about being on the Booker Long-list.
The booker prize, as I’m sure you know, is a Pretty Big Deal. The winning books almost always go on to be huge commercial successes.
In recent years, if memory serves from the research I did when our own ‘Wolf Hall’ won, paperback editions go on to sell over 80,000 copies (at the least) and over a million in the case of ‘The Life of Pi’.
Now that’s a pretty big gap and ‘The Life of Pi’ is certainly the exception rather than the rule, but the point is that for literary publishers this level of commercial success (even at the lower ends) is difficult predict without the endorsement of a Booker prize win – which is one of the reasons why winning is a Pretty Big Deal.
We might not have anything on the long-list from 4thEstate this year, but we’re not here to criticise the judges’ decisions as we’d be here all week, suggesting our own novels and other publishers’ ones too; the fact is that everyone on the long-list deserves to be there and it’s a great accolade for which we applaud them all.
What we would like to do is to celebrate all of our past Booker listed authors, winners and short-listed alike. The Booker long- and short-lists are a great way to discover books you might otherwise have missed, so why not delve into some older novels that have also had the nod from the judges?
Over the coming days we will post extracts of some of our listed books from recent years; interviews with the authors and videos where we have them.
Yes, this is a shameless plug for our books by capitalising on the PR around the Booker prize, but forgive a shameless marketing man for giving it a go.
Keep an eye out around the site for extracts and videos of our winning and short-listed titles.
The Full Longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize is:
Continuing our Booker theme following the long-list announcement, here is an extract from Carol Shields’s 1993 short-listed novel, ‘The Stone Diaries’
First published in the UK by Collins and then moving into the Flamingo imprint, ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald is now published under 4th Estate.
Offshore won the Booker Prize in 1979 – 5 years before 4th Estate even existed. While we may not have been the original publisher, 4th Estate are proud to publish Penelope Fitzgerald and to celebrate her Booker winning novel ‘Offshore’.
Continuing our Booker theme following the long-list announcement, here is an extract from Carol Shields’s 2002 short-listed novel, ‘Unless’
For a video of Hilary reading from ‘Wolf Hall’ and being interviewed by the Guardian’s Sarah Crown, click here.
To read Part One of Philip Hensher’s 2008 shortlisted novel ‘The Northern Clemency’ click here
To read Part One of Nicola Barker’s 2007 shortlisted novel ‘Darkmans’ click here
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