A perfect addition to spooky Halloween festivities that children will love, you could even add spider decorations to this cheesecake for a full spider-web effect. Read more…
By Jeff VanderMeer.
Like many readers, I’m extremely curious to read iconic film director David Cronenberg’s first novel, Consumed. How will that imagination be expressed solely through the written word? How might his expertise in movies create unique approaches to literary technique? Especially considering how broad and deep that film oeuvre has become.
If there were a Horror Literature Hall of Fame (or should that be Haunted Mansion of Fame?), the faces on the gilded portraits bearing down from its walls would doubtless look awfully similar. The sallow, sunken features of Edgar Allen Poe, the monumental, Moai-esque head of H.P. Lovecraft, the thin-lipped visage of Stephen King – the public faces of the genre have been overbearingly male since the teenage Mary Shelley had her name omitted from the first publication of Frankenstein. Read more…
A few months ago, we interviewed Laline Paull for a podcast, which can be heard here. Beautiful, touching and highly educational, here are the very best bits for your eyes, rather than your ears.
It’s such a unique story: how did you come to the idea in the first place?
It was a gift from a friend of mine who was a beekeeper and dying of cancer, although I didn’t realise that until she’d gone. One of the last things she ever said to me was that she hoped there’d be a flowering of creativity when she’d gone. I hope that now I know what she meant by that, because in the immediate aftermath of her death I started to read about the honeybees which she loved so much and which she called her “girls”. Read more…
Discovering Lena Dunham’s hit TV series Girls was a light-bulb moment for me. It was as if somebody had taken my disastrous early twenties, transported them to New York City, cast them in a mellow, instagrammed hue, added an achingly-cool soundtrack and committed them to screen. I was elated, I raised my frustrated fists to the sky and shouted ‘yessss!’ Read more…
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Katherine Heiny, author of the forthcoming ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow‘ explains why she relates to one of fiction’s most famous heroines…
‘She’s a murderer — but that’s not why I’m in awe of her.
She’s a rebel and a feminist and courageous and resourceful — but that’s not why I admire her.
She’s charming and seductive and irresistible to men — but that’s not why I want to be like her. (Well, that’s not the whole reason, anyway.)
She’s vain and selfish and manipulative — but that’s not why she fascinates me.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Judith Claire Mitchell, author of the forthcoming ‘A Reunion of Ghosts’ celebrates the indefatigable Madame Manec from Anthony Doerr’s ‘All The Light We Cannot See’…
‘I live in a world that has little use for elderly women, and yet, if I’m lucky, an elderly woman is what I will someday be. I think about this from time to time. It’s not that I’m horrified by the thought of ageing. I’m actually intrigued by it. I’m a novelist, after all. I’m interested in how stories unfold, how they twist and turn, how they conclude. This applies to my own story as well.
What disturbs me is the culture’s dismissal of women who have the temerity to grow old, and the way that, at a certain point, a cloak of invisibility falls upon women, a cloak that is heavy and hard to shrug off and can even, I fear, come to feel comfortable.
In honour of Lena Dunham’s admirable frankness about her own sex life, 4th Estate brings you some of our very favourite, very alternative sex scenes:
