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Read about some brilliant debut authors in association with NewBooks magazine!
It’s been a big week for Scott Pilgrim fans. First the official film poster artwork is revealed, and now, (arguably even bigger news) the cover and the title of the final Scott Pilgrim book have been posted up on ONI press‘ site.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.
Or, The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.
If you haven’t heard about Rentokil’s fantastically sensationalist PR story about cockroaches on public transport, then you can read my overview here or Ben Goldacre’s overview here. This article is about how badly they dealt with the negative PR storm in its wake.
So you write a press release about a new bug killing technology you’ve developed, send it out to a few journos and then follow it up with some specific figures about the number of cockroaches on train carriages. You present the figures as being real, actual figures about the number of actual cockroaches you found on an actual train (they were not) and this is printed as fact. Then a relatively well known debunker of bad science tweets you asking to see the figures from your study. Knowing full well that your figures are a massive over-estimation reached by the most absurd model and not actually ‘real’ figures at all, you ignore him.
I admit my heart sank when asked to write a blog.
I’ve never written one—and don’t read them. I’m a closet blog-o-phobe. The faddish term sums it up for me: “blob” combined with the word for dead wood, rhyming with “hog”. It promises to bore, buttonhole, and take up copious space on my crowded mental sofa.
I can’t help it. The massed global community of avid, dedicated, garrulous bloggers makes me want to be silent.
Still more cause to celebrate today, as Wolf Hall enters another prize longlist.
The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 longlist
An interesting discussion broke out on The Millions site last fortnight about the differences between UK and US covers. In a piece entitled Judging Books by their Covers. Millions editor C. Max Magee compared various jacket looks published here with those from across the pond, including those for our own Wolf Hall.
The Problem with Bad Statistics
You have to feel a little bit sorry for Rentokil. The tenacity with which Ben Goldacre (quite rightly) went after them was really something to behold (and I urge you read the whole #tagged exchange here).
If you’ve never heard of Ben Goldacre, then allow me to explain. He is the author of the blog and Guardian column ‘Bad Science’ and the book of the same name published by us, here at 4th Estate. He is a medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.
Vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath sued both Ben and the Guardian after Ben raised serious concerns over Mr. Rath’s practice of taking out adverts denouncing Aids drugs in South Africa, while at the same time promoting his own pills. Mr. Rath eventually dropped his case.
On March 11 the winners of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award were announced in New York City.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall took the fiction award, to add to her throughly deserved Booker prize win and Costa nomination, and another Fourth Estate author, Joyce Carol Oates, received the lifetime achievement award at the ceremony.
To celebrate Hilary’s amazing achievement we have reduced the Wolf Hall app by 50 % for this week only. Don’t miss out on your chance to download the full text of Wolf Hall, including the whole book, family trees and a video interview with Professor David Starkey, for the special price of £3.49.
Continuing our reading notes series, here is some additional material that we hope you’ll find useful to support your reading…
Additional author material:
On writing The Elephant Keeper
This is part two. Go to Part One.
Let me now address the issue of technique. Whatever you may have been told, there is only one safe way, which is this: to hook your legs over her back, exert strong pressure in every limb. What if she objects? you ask. My answer is: What if she does? Trust me, once you’re in, you’re in. If you are correctly positioned, it is well nigh impossible to her to throw you off.
A short story by Chris Nicholson
****
I know, I understand: it’s always tricky. Everything’s tricky. The timing of the approach, the manner of the approach; you never know how it’s going to pan out. You have to be careful, really careful.
At this very moment, for instance, over there, by the window. That’s the one. You can’t see her that clearly in the shadows, but she’s there all right. I’ve been watching for days and days, weighing up my options, sifting the possibilities. I admit, I’ve become a bit obsessed, a touch infatuated. Should I go for it or not? Might be a big mistake: she’s big, much bigger than me. Stronger than me. They always are.
Elephants are wonderful creatures to write about. It’s partly their strange, improbable appearance – those flapping ears, the piggy eyes, the ropey little tail, that twirling, muscular trunk – and partly their vast, mysterious, complex intelligence. They have paradoxical qualities: they’re big and heavy, but can move lightly and delicately; they’re very strong, but also very gentle and tender. They exhibit something like the same range and depth of emotions as humans: rage, greed, jealousy, hatred, impatience, curiosity, love. Some elephants have exuberant, extrovert personalities; some are shy and reflective. In other ways, they are unlike humans: the differences are perhaps as interesting as the similarities.
ELEPHANTS have had a strange history in Britain. For many centuries, that is, there were no elephants in the country, and yet they lived in the popular imagination as fabulous, powerful animals. They were like dragons and basiliks, half-real, half-fictional. Few people could be sure that they definitely existed, let alone be confident of knowing what it might be like to meet a real elephant. In the absence of hard facts imagination takes wing, and falsehoods about elephants abounded. In the medieval period and later it was widely believed that elephants lived for two or three hundred years, that they were frightened of mice, that they worshipped the moon, that they could write Greek.
Christopher Nicholson
‘I asked the sailor what an Elephant looked like; he replied that it was like nothing on earth.’
In the middle of the 18th century, a ship docks at Bristol with an extraordinary cargo: two young elephants. Bought by a wealthy landowner, they are taken to his estate in the English countryside. A stable boy, Tom Page, is given the task of caring for them.
Via @GalleyCat
It seems like Isabel Allende is not the only one doing good deeds today. Our friends Enhanced Editions, who helped us out with the amazing Wolf Hall app have also produced these iPhone versions of 2010’s Quick Reads books, published on World Book Day.
As part of this year’s Quick Reads and World Book Day initiatives, Enhanced Editions has partnered with a number of leading publishers to bring brilliantly written books by bestselling authors and celebrities to the iPhone.
It’s always nice to have an author on the list who is not only a great writer but also a caring person.
On Friday Fourth Estate author Isabel Allende announced that she has pledged $500,000 to “Chile ayuda a Chile,” a telethon that will be broadcast from Teatro Teletón in Santiago, Chile from March 5 to 6, 2010 to raise funds for the construction of emergency housing for those displaced by the devastating earthquake of February 27, 2010.
This is the first of the top secret iPhone projects I’ve been working on for the last few months – the result of a close collaboration between Fourth Estate and the awesome Enhanced Editions (founded by longtime 5th Estate friend and contributor, Peter Collingridge). Finally all the hard work has come to fruition, and we can announce…
WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel, out now in paperback, and on your iPhone. Choose your weapon!
Recently I had the good fortune of bumping into the brilliant Susan Fletcher, author of Eve Green, and Corrag which we published in hardback yesterday. Susan was kind of enough to let me ask her a few questions on the process of writing Corrag, the importance of landscape in her fiction, the theme of witchcraft, and what she thinks about the digital future of publishing.
With a hardback as successful as Wolf Hall was, there was a lot of pressure on our designers to come up with an awesome paperback jacket. Of course, we never doubted them, and after not much time at all they came up with not one great cover look, but two!
To celebrate the paperback release of Wolf Hall today, March 4th, 5th Estate is holding a prize draw for one copy of this amazing special edition, worth £150. The special edition is leather bound with cloth boards and a cloth slipcase, is signed by the author, and is from a limited print run of 100, commissioned to celebrate Hilary’s historic Booker win.
For the next month only you might have the good fortune of hailing a taxi, and finding it looks like this. If you happen to spot the Wolf Hall taxi driving around, send in your snaps to fifthestate@harpercollins.co.uk and we’ll post up the best ones.
Susan Fletcher, winner of the Whitbread Prize for her best-selling Eve Green, and author of the upcoming Corrag, due to be published on the 4th of this month, will be giving a talk at the awesome Topping and Company in Bath (coincidentally one of my favourite bookshops.)
A darkly comic novel about the bizarre realities of life in Israel today.
Why is everyone so paranoid in this country? Can’t dark guys get on buses with suit bags any more? Eitan Enoch – ‘Croc’ to his friends – is taking his usual bus to work in Tel Aviv one morning when a fellow passenger starts to worry about the dark-skinned man with the suit-bag sitting up at the front.
This evening at the RSA Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis will be giving a keynote speech on the Amazing Power of Social Networks.
This is the amazingly atmospheric new novel from Susan Fletcher, author of the bestselling Eve Green and Oystercatchers.
