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’s Lauren Holmes on a liberating retreat rife with free love, narcotic experimentation, body odour and yams…
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:
“’Tis a soft day,” shouted my father to the Dutchman across the narrow space that separated our pitch from his. The rain was coming down in pillows, thumping against the taut canvas of the awning and the aluminium of the caravan.
I’d never heard this phrase before. Later my father told me what it meant and I realised it was typical of him to say such a thing. Other times he’d say to some foreigner, “In Ireland, we say…” and as he was saying whatever it was that people in Ireland are meant to say I’d look up from his gesticulating hands and his face would be contracted in an impression of native Irish passion. Read more…
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…
