Authors Electric

Gone are the days when the haunting of second-hand bookshops was one of my chiefest pleasures. Many of them have gone out of business, often because of the pandemic, and those that remain are so much more trouble than searching on AbeBooks. Besides, although we have bookshelves in practically every room of the house, they are all full. My wife is agitating for a “one-in, one-out” rule, as is already in force for my T-shirts. Old-fashioned books of paper and ink are still around me all the time, but rarely get a look-in, even the ones I really want to read. However, there is (obviously) no question of getting rid of them, and new ones do still occasionally reach the house by some kind of osmosis. A crisis may be brewing.  Most of the reading I do nowadays is on my Kindle, and the changes to my reading habits are more profound than I would have expected. For one thing, I regularly have about twelve books on the go at once. I would never have done this with physical books. To have a ...

The other day I was re-reading an old online review of a book by Olga Tokarczuk, in which I encouraged new readers to start instead with my favourite book of hers, Primeval and Other Times . When I checked on Amazon, I found it was now out of print - a second-hand copy was available for about £75 - and the Kindle edition had vanished completely. How is it possible for the best book (IMHO) by a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to disappear like this? And how can it be possible for an e-book to go out of print? And why is it that so many of the books I want to recommend to people are now available only at silly prices, or not at all? Is it just me?  My current literary enthusiasm - my wife might say obsession   - is for José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola and writes in Portuguese. The first novel of his that I read was A General Theory of Oblivion , which was shortlisted for the International Booker in 2016. Ever since, I have been reading everything by...

Poetry isn’t like fiction, even in the world of snail publishing (if that’s the phrase I’m looking for). It’s a form of writing that in recent times has flourished mainly in small magazines, whose editors dream, usually in vain, of finding a few subscribers who don’t want their own poems published - for poetry is a commodity for which supply massively exceeds demand. New poetry in book form is published mainly by a small number of specialist publishers, such as Bloodaxe, Carcanet and Enitharmon, with one or two general publishers continuing to do their bit, notably Faber.           Few poets can have any realistic hope of being published by any of the big boys. Some years ago when I still had delusions I checked them out, and found that one - it may have been Bloodaxe - had announced that they would definitely not be taking on any new poets for at least three years. The others were little more encouraging. The number of living poets whos...