This month’s blog theme is ‘Wish You Were Here’ – we’re jetting around the literary world to explore the concept of travel in fiction. We’ve asked some of our authors to tell us about their ideal literary holidays: here Claire Lowdon heads to the land of magic realism to experience one of the most vivid voyages in literature.
What journey is more important than the one that we take in our own minds? Maybe the commute to work, sure, but when you’re somehow squashed up against seven people AND you have a pole in your back but are still managing to read a book, these are the stories that transport us to the minds of others; the minds that are being transported. HOW VERY META.
This month’s blog theme is ‘Wish You Were Here’ – we’re jetting around the literary world to explore the concept of travel in fiction. We’ve asked some of our authors to tell us about their ideal literary holidays – to start us off, here’s Seni Glaister on John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire:
This month sees the publishing of many a 4th Estate book on the exploration and conquering of new pastures. The Museum of Things Left Behind by Seni Glaister takes us to Vallerosa: A place lost in time you’ll never have heard of before, while screenwriter Antonio Manzini’s international hit Black Run is set in the Italian Alps where what seems to be a slightly higher than usual mound of snow is in fact a corpse. Enter Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone, a man stuck in a backwards Alpine town after getting on the wrong side of the wrong people. Read more…
This has literally been the most glamorous and exotic book tour imaginable; London, Oxford, Norwich. I was hoping Fourth Estate would also send me out to Tanzanah in Africah, but apparently the number of extra books I could sell out thah ‘wouldn’t warrant the cost’ of sending me. I was as surprised as anyone, but then I was told people could just get a signed book in the UK and then bring it out on their gap yah. These publishers think of everything. Besides, I had just come back from Tanzanah anyway (went there on my gap yah – rentals footed the bill…) so I probs didn’t need to go again. In fact, I’d been to most places in the world, recently – Australiah, Africah, South Americah, South East Asiah, Indyah, basically, like, everywah. So maybe it was time I did some exploring, but not in the foreign, in the UK.
