Authors Electric

  The Companionship of Books: About Poetry* This chapter is all about poetry+. It begins with my stay in Broad Green Hospital when I was sixteen for an operation on a torn cartilage. I had been attempting a descent from the wall bars during a school gym lesson and had landed awkwardly, so awkwardly in fact that every time I tried to run for the morning bus my knee would lock into a fixed position and necessitate a system of contortions on the ground in order to free it. Mr Almond, who saw me in Rodney Street, just around the corner from The Liverpool Institute, took one examination and immediately booked me into Broad Green for the operation.   I arrived there to find myself in a ward full of men with their legs either covered in bandages or underneath raised frames, which allowed their legs to rest underneath, without the pressure of the bedclothes. On the ward I met Alan who was a trainee teacher. We were in adjacent beds and he talked to me about novels and poetry, particul...

Jamal Edwards, an extremely cool young music and on-line television entrepreneur, who is starring in the dramatisation of my novel, The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride , has just signed with Virgin to produce a digital business title, which will be released in six separate downloadable levels by Virgin Digital. In each level the reader works through a different stage of setting up a business. There are crunch decision points where you have to choose which path you’ll take, which might lead you to success, but might also lead you to ruin.  I’m pretty convinced that Jamal is one of the coolest men on the planet, (apart from anything else, I am reliably informed that his mother is the “Killer Queen” in “We Will Rock You”), and if he is moving into electric books that makes the rest of us equally cool by association. Faber, meanwhile, have designed an eye-catching cover for a new edition of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar and the complaints have started to fly. Literary folk who...