Authors Electric

I have written in previous blogs about my personal problems with Spring, and so here I am, in London (the UK one), facing, yet again, the horrors of a daylight which, like a fractious toddler, will be less and less inclined to sleep, plus the weather which can, as the mood takes it, veer from idyllic sunshine and pretty blossoms to icy wetness, and indeed, as has been recently forecast, even snow. I would choose, instead, to live in a perpetual Autumn - days full of dazzling colours followed by the quiet and introverted comfort blanket of early evening. I'm still, reluctantly, impressed, though, by all those amazing things coming out of the ground in my garden, and love the sleepy bumble bees - so strokeable (if you dare) but I welcome not the return of the house flies. I spent a profitable hour late this afternoon in conversation with author (and friend) Rosalie Warren, who also regularly blogs here. Ros is the author of a futuristic novel: LENA'S NEST, with its hypnotic c...

A strange thing has been happening recently. The bookish blogosphere has been talking about literary fiction. This is a fire it would be perverse of me not to stoke, so here is a little light mix of oxygen and fuel. It started with an excellent piece by Roz Morris about why literary novels can’t just be churned out. As if to prove her point, this coincided almost to the day with the announcement that after years of writing, arguably our greatest living literary novelist, Vikram Seth, had just missed the deadline for his follow up to A Suitable Boy, A Suitable Girl, and was being pursued for his seven figure advance. Now Roz’s piece was balanced and thought-out, and made no disparaging comments about genre fiction. Nonetheless it caused a considerable flurry of ruffled feathers. This in turn led to a superb piece from Porter Anderson in which he made some excellent points about genre-paranoia and the oppression of the “business-is-business” mentality. Yesterday one of m...