Name: Katherine Heiny
Book: Single, Carefree, Mellow.
What’s it about? A collection of ten exquisite stories that form a guided tour of the human heart.
To celebrate the publication of Mainlander, 4th Estate were lucky enough to sit down with its author Will Smith (screenwriter of the Thick of It, VEEP and more). We spoke about The Thick of It, VEEP, the politics of the UK versus the US, working directly under the Messiah of satire Armando Iannucci, and the novel writing process. Listen to and download what we thought might be a fairly typical author interview, but very quickly descended into a laugh-a-minute chat about creativity, the anomaly that is Jersey, and accidentally writing feminist characters. Read more…
‘So now get up’.
Last night, the television adaptation Wolf Hall became BBC2’s biggest drama series for a decade, drawing in 3.9 million views. The first episode of the six part series served as the perfect coming-to-life of a novel that is at the very heart of our imprint. We at 4th Estate watched both our screens, and our Twitter feed (#WolfHall was trending, of course), drawing delight from both. Read more…
‘I’ve been a bookseller for the last 26 years and have surrounded myself with stories for a lot longer than that. I know how lucky I am to get so much pleasure from my work – I spend each day reading books, discovering books, buying and selling books and talking about books with a vast number of people I greatly admire. But no amount of immersion in the bookselling industry could possibly have prepared me for the experience of seeing my first novel published and, however comfortable I am in the bookselling world, I know with nerve-tingling certainty, in this context, I’m a rookie once more.
‘BBC Culture, the arts section of the international BBC site, polled “several dozen” US critics to find the greatest novels written so far this century, with 156 novels in all named by experts from papers including the New York Times, Time magazine, Newsday, Kirkus Reviews and Booklist.’ On this list, we were delighted to see, are SIX 4th Estate novels.
New Loves, New Lives, New Countries and New Worlds are all explored in these four wonderful novels. Leap into 2015 with one of these reads and experience the effects they have on your life, do they make you laugh? Cry? Confuse you? Or simply make you glad to be alive- here’s to a very Happy New Year! Read more…
This month, ‘Fresh’ gives us a chance to bring you the amazing new content that we’ve got planned for the year. Not only do we want to focus on our fresh new authors, our fresh food, or our upcoming books for 2015, but we want to take a look at our new covers. For ‘Fresh Look’, we’ll be asking about the old covers that are being given new life. We spoke to cover designer Jo Walker about the re-issue of ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ by Elizabeth Smart.
‘It was suggested by the editor that we concentrate on the classic photos of Grand Central Station that are so iconic. The beauty of these images is the light and scale of the station, the people look so tiny and the station so impressive. I found some of these images and tried a few different approaches. Read more…
‘This is one of my favourite salads,’ says chef John Hardwick, ‘really fresh and light with a good kick from the dressing. It has evolved in the farm kitchens over many years, and it is the one that people most request the recipe for. It was first introduced by Kuttiya, our Thai chef, based on the classic noodle dish, pad thai, but without the noodles, and it has been endlessly played around with, changed and added to, according to what is best from the market garden. Because the whole idea is that the strips of vegetables should resemble noodles, this is one of the few dishes on the kitchen’s menu that is quite showy, since we used a Japanese turning mandolin to shred the carrots and beetroot into curls.’
