What sets Glastonbury apart from other music festivals? Apart from the size it has a variety of political and social messages to listen to, with this in mind I ventured to the Left Field and the Socialist Bookshop… Continue reading »
Enough of society. Summer is the time for freedom—woods and meadows, the ocean, the river or the road. Continue reading »
While rocking in my wellies at Glastonbury, I was fortunate to see some very special Shakespeare performed… Continue reading »
It’s called ‘Books’, the tent it’s in isn’t very big, but it does deliver a good read or two. I caught up with the Glastonbury Festival’s oldest bookshop in an interview unexpectedly cut short… Continue reading »
Earlier this year, HarperCollins asked readers to design a cover for Sean Dixon’s The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal - and found a winner. Sean’s top ten moments?
1) First thrill of seeing submissions. (Look! There’s my name! Look at all the pretty pictures!)
2) Look there’s my name take two: discovering comment postings by someone pretending to be me (Sixon), pompously explaining why I like or do not like a particular submission. It was all I could do not to defend myself, as I felt that would open the floodgates (‘I’m Brian’, ‘No I’m Brian’, ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife.’) I also worried that the same thing was happening to some of the artists. Continue reading »
The Fifth Estate Tent is here. More over at our special Glastonbury blog.
Last night at supper a novelist friend said that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s one failure. The problem being that the reader falls in love with the Crawfords and simply can’t get on with the high moral tone of the “hero” and “heroine” Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price. They are too fine, too grave, hopelessly old-fashioned, no fun. We’d all rather flirt with the wit, the charm, the risqué sophistication and personal beauty of Henry and Mary Crawford, and, nowadays, none of us would fear the consequences. Continue reading »
I went to see Persepolis last night, a truly wonderful animated film based on the graphic novel of the same name. It was so wonderful that I made a mental note to buy a copy of the book as soon as I could, something I have never done before. Continue reading »
We’re going to Glastonbury Festival! And it’s time we unveiled our little side project - 5th Estate Blog Glastonbury…
It was inevitable that when The Friday Project became part of HarperCollins, there would be much hand-wringing in the trade, as well as both negative and positive comments from those who stood to lose most from it, but, from the perspective of one on the inside of the behemoth that is a large corporate publisher, I wanted to offer a different take on what it might mean, and represent, both for us and for the small company that has just become part of our operation. Continue reading »
During the current Doctor Who story, The Doctor and Catherine Tate have ended up in the biggest library in the universe. “People never really stopped liking books,” The Doctor comments, giving an optimistic point-of-view for publishers everywhere. However, reading Pan Macmillan’s ‘Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century‘ it would seem that the book is as dead as the Dodo and no amount of DNA jiggerypokery will bring it back to life. Sara Lloyd’s piece is an interesting, if wordy (it’s heavy on the 2.0 marketing lingo) wake-up-and-smell-the-digital-coffee call for publishers everywhere. Continue reading »
Be sure to check out our Hay gallery! Lots of pics from Louise and a few from me. In the meantime, here’s my experience of my second day at Hay… Continue reading »
Rain, basically. What is it about me and festivals? I act like some sort of precipitation magnet. Clouds seem to gather without warning, winds whip up in all directions wherever I walk, rain from some vengeful event-hating god lashes my back. It can only be a party in British Summertime. Continue reading »
Ah, the great British summer. It’s a permanent tease. One minute we’re lunching in the park getting gently sunburnt, the next we’re soaked to the bone wishing we’d kept that umbrella in our bag (especially if you were in a flooded Hay last weekend). Continue reading »
Rejoice! The Fifth Estate Sampler has arrived, straight from our brains to your eyes… Continue reading »
Do bring sunglasses and wellies
On Saturday afternoon, the garden of deckchairs was full of Guardian-reading festival-goers, licking icecreams, drinking fizz and shading their eyes from the sun. But the wind whipping through the colourful flags around the site was a warning…on the midnight news on Radio 4 the announcer forecast 60mm of rain… Continue reading »
Those of us who work in literary fiction are used to hearing, and moaning, that it is increasingly difficult to sell any books without winning a prize – but every so often there is a book that catches a wave and manages to sell through nothing more tangible than buzz and word of mouth.
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The biggest literary festival in the UK is now on and for a few days and Fifth Estate is going to be there.
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Book-crossing, swapping, erm, book-swinging? The idea of exchanging your books for others has been around for a while, however I’ve yet to see it done in as straightforward a way as Bookmooch.com…
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Can you really stop the global fight against spam AND help to publish books online? Yes, using a nifty website called reCAPTCHA…
Jane Austen and who? You may not be familiar with the eighteenth-century Chinese master, but if you are intrigued by adolescents striving to discover their emotional and sexual affinities in a society which aims to marry them off before they learn too much about themselves or one another, then I recommend you spend May and June reading Mansfield Park and Dream of the Red Chamber. Continue reading »
As an unpublished writer, one of my biggest fears was that I’d never get a novel published. Then, once I knew I was getting a novel published, one of my biggest fears was that my first novel would be published without anyone actually realising it was out there.
This is why I was so keen for Broken to be involved in Amazon’s Project Vine, a scheme where pre-publication copies of selected novels are made available to Amazon’s most consistent reviewers in the hope they’ll post positive reviews and create a word of mouth buzz. Continue reading »
Despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, the Great Bard’s life is still a dense thicket of myths and traditions.
Even Bill Bryson - travel writer, polymath and a master of research - found the world’s most famous writer a rather slippery character: in his new biography Shakespeare: The World as a Stage he declares him at once “the best known and least known of figures”. Continue reading »
“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife…”
So begins Rivka Galchen’s funny, moving and mind-bending new book Atmospheric Disturbances. The story of Doppler radar, doppelgangers, climate manipulation and secret organisations that control the weather, the book centres around Leo, a psychiatrist who believes his wife Rema has been replaced with a identical replica. Continue reading »
Last week I rounded off my visit to the Oxford Literary Festival (more pics here) with a talk given by Richard Fortey about the story behind the work of the Natural History Museum. Continue reading »
