25

This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.

Space is at a premium in Paris, and one of the early challenges Professor F faced upon arriving in the city was lack of it. As the newly appointed director of the Department of Cognitive Studies at one of France’s most prestigious centres of higher learning, he knew that his young and expanding unit would soon outgrow the 250 square metres that had been allocated to it, and that it was his job to find room for the overspill.

Continue reading »

Due to unprecedented demand (!) we’ve decided to reveal the names of the remaining ANONthology authors in this post.

It means that anyone looking for the answers will easily locate them here.

Who wrote what

Continue reading »

This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.

He was at the age that people would not think as young any more, but he was a young man to them, grandmothers or at least mothers-in-law now, with plenty of reasons to feel neglected by their married children and grandchildren. Before they had discovered him—or he them—they had gathered at the pavilion for other reasons, exchanging gossip, complaining about husbands and unpleasant in-laws, and reminiscing about their youth, but all those reasons seemed trivial now that they had him.

Continue reading »

This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.

The Political Obligations of the Lover

If you live under a repressive regime, you may have the duty to die for love. Go to the capital, stand in the central square, distribute pamphlets urging a general strike and compose a revolutionary song with the refrain: “I am loyal to nothing but love!” The imperial guardsmen will then shoot you dead. Be assured that it is better to die young and ecstatic than to suffer impotence, irrelevance and bureaucracy—the humiliations of old men who conform to oppression.
If you live under a regime that is not repressive but is merely corrupt, the guardsmen may not kill you. You may have to hold public orgies in order to be shot. I have never attended a public orgy, but I certainly would organize one if I lived under the graft and negligence of a puritanical petty tyrant. Make certain that if you are not shot dead but merely jailed for life, then your friends are prepared to break you out. Tell them: “It is only fair that you help me escape, given that I invited you to my public orgy.”

Continue reading »

Well, it’s been an exciting few months since we launched our anonymous anniversary publication, the ANONthology, and asked you to guess who wrote what.

Since then, the ANONthology has been read over 10,000  times. We have in part to thank this brilliant plug on Springwise.com for the wave of recent digital attention.

The competition is now closed and the time has come to reveal the authors. We’ll be doing this right here, week by week, starting today with piece one: ‘Do’.  In fact, not only will we reveal the author’s name but also provide the full text of the story, for you to read at leisure. Look out for the next post when the author is revealed…

If you haven’t had a chance yet to read our Anonthology, the magazine we published to celebrate 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary in May, you’ve only got one week left until the anonymity is lifted and the writers’ names are revealed.  We’ve decided to extend the competition deadline until next Friday, so if you’d like to have a go at guessing who wrote what,  to potentially win some classic, limited edition books, get on over to Anonthology, asap.

Alternatively, if you’d just like to read the magazine, click on the graphic to read it in fullscreen.

Also, this week only, the first five people who leave a comment with their email address below will get a printed copy of the Anonthology in the post.

Don’t forget to come back here over the next few weeks, when we will be posting up each of the stories – with the author’s names attached!

Charlotte Roche talks about her controversial book ‘Wetlands’

In the concluding part of our interview with Jonathan Franzen, the author talks about why he writes long novels, not short stories, and his worries about the threat to writing posed by cultural entropy.

My experience of daily life, even hourly life, is one of constant conflict and division. Of simultaneously being never fewer than two and often as many as four or five different people. And I very much suspect that I will never succeed in writing a book with a single point of view, a single character who carries the whole thing. I consider this a technical failure of mine, and I’ve wasted many years of my writing life trying, in a macho way, to write novels that have a strong, single, Philip Roth-like coordinating subjectivity. It never works. The novel to me is the venue for sympathy. In terms of leading my actual life, being a divided and conflict-riddled person is unpleasant. ‘Disaster’ would be too strong a word, but it’s definitely no fun. At the same time, my psychic splinteredness does mean that there are few impulses in human beings that I don’t have some way of connecting with. The novel to me is the art form that allows scope for my impulse to turn things around and look at them from another perspective. So that’s part of it.
It takes me a very long time to develop a character. I’m usually frustrated with what I can do in 30 pages. Characters need space in which to reveal their complexity. Even though they’re always simplified and cartoonish in comparison to a real person’s character, they still have their own complexity. You need to give them time to really be themselves, and maybe also to be some other kind of self as their life starts closing in on them. This, again, takes space. Plus I don’t develop a really good character every day or every month or even every year. It’s like making strudel dough. You stretch it out, you fold it over, you stretch it out, you fold it over. You do that about thirty times. It’s a long process, and a character who’s developed in this way doesn’t really fit into a story. And then, having taken the time to develop four or five characters like that, you don’t want to just burn them up in 20 pages. And, beyond that, I can’t seem to write well about characters I don’t love. Sometimes it seems to me my defect as an American fiction writer that I tend to be monogamous and form strong, loyal attachments. I don’t want just a two-week quickie with the character. I want to get into a five-year relationship.
To me [one of the biggest problems facing fiction] is cultural entropy — Levi-Strauss’s notion of the disappearance of difference, the rise of global homogenization. A world in which people’s public lives were very different from their private lives has been replaced by public spaces filled with intimate things and by intimate private realms filled with the generic and the public. This is a disaster for the fiction writer and needs to be opposed on that basis alone. Fiction writers spend a lot of time trying to track down that fugitive sense of difference. Things are neither Midwestern nor American anymore; it’s all sort of mush. Things are neither urban nor rural, it’s all exurban mush. Things are neither high art nor pop, it’s all middle-brow po-mo mush. And so on down the line.
And the thing is, some of this entropy is politically healthy and good. If you’re too pro-difference, you can end up sounding anti-miscegenist. Or sexist, or classist — the poor should know their place and the wealthy should know their place, etcetera. Suddenly, if you’re not careful, you’re back in a Shakespearean world order. And yet, part of the nostalgia that the artist feels is ‘Wow, look what Shakespeare was able to accomplish back when all those distinctions were really hard and firm!’  There’s something very unattractive in the artist who wants to break all those boundaries and fluidly pass between them, but wants the boundaries to keep existing for everyone else, so that it’s only the artist who gets to play with them, excitingly. If I take a close look at my reasons for rejecting the unwholesome mixing of public and private, I see things that may be politically rather unattractive in me. It’s interesting that critics on both the right and the left decry the same cultural entropy. You know, ‘It was Madonna Studies that broke down blah blah blah’, say the people on the right. And, ‘No it’s Fox News and Rupert Murdoch that are breaking down the blah blah blah’, say the people on the left. We always locate the problem on the other side. But in fact everyone is conspiring in it. This is why the term ‘cultural entropy is such a brilliant formulation — because the process has an inevitable, thermodynamic feel to it. As we globalize and as communication systems and transportation and population all expand, how could it not happen?
The fact that I myself think in thermodynamic terms, as if the process is autonomous and unstoppable, is an example of the difficulty of bringing politics into the discussion. Politics itself has been excluded, because the whole notion of the political, in contrast to the eternal or the apolitical, is another one of those distinctions that have been muddied. What serious political thinkers have in mind when they say the word politics is one of those pure quantities that, like all the other pure quantities, is under increasing assault. And as I say this I can hear myself proving to myself that I am not Marxist in my bones, because I’m proposing that politics is not the last instance. It itself is a phenomenon; it’s not the driving force.
We would like to thank the interviewer Chris Connery, and the magazine boundary 2, where this interview was first published, as well as, of course, Jonathan himself.

A special edition of The Corrections, created to celebrate 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary, and featuring limited edition cover art by Michael Landy, is available here…

2009 was slated to be the year we finally got to see the Lamberts on screen; however reports from inside the industry increasingly suggest this to be over-optimistic. But what exactly is taking so long? The novel, first published in 2001, was optioned the same year, and said to be in pre-production the following spring. Stephen Daldry, who just directed the brilliant and award winning The Reader (also a book to film adaptation) was placed to helm it, only recently to have been replaced by Robert Zemeckis. Eight years on, and still no sign of a release date: There is no only additional information offered by IMDB, not even a rumoured casting.

One might suspect it to be the complexity of the material itself that’s causing problems; spanning almost 700 pages, the book can’t compact easily into a multiplex-friendly 120 minutes. However, this much we know: the screenplay has been written, by the excellent David Hare — also responsible for turning another of our books, Michael Cunningham’s, The Hours, which also follows separate characters through individual strands, into an Oscar winning screenplay, so presumably no problems there.

The task of a story broken up into separate strands following different characters may have seemed like a challenge a couple of decades ago, but theories in books like Everything Bad is Good for You increasingly suggest that TV and film consumers not only cope with complex storylines, but actually require them to maintain interest; having trained their brains on TV shows – even mainstream ones like 24 and LOST – to expect loose ends rather than dainty knots. Many successful recent movies, like Magnolia, Amores Perros and Crash have required viewers to follow different plots before explaining how they tie together, so the structure of The Corrections should not be the thing holding it back.

Perhaps, then, we are to assume it is the casting that is causing the delay; we have evidence to suggest this has not yet been finalised, since IMDB prides itself on posting details as soon as they’re confirmed. Of all the many things that Franzen’s book got lauded for on initial release, the close observation of characters surely ranked among the highest. While many literary novels place a greater emphasis on character than on plot, few so closely realize theirs to such an extent that you feel personally connected to them as in The Corrections. Many readers of the books felt that Enid, Alfred, Chip, Gary and Denise literally leapt of the page; more than that, they recognized them.

Quite a task, then, to find actors to portray them.

Readers of books often disagree with casting choices made by film executives, at least in pat because the distance between the written word and the imagination of the readers creates a disparity. But the close proximity of reader to character in this book might provide particular casting difficulties, and whilst movie adaptations always risk alienating a section of the original book audience, the wrong casting decisions here could risk alienating the whole.

Much has been said in recent months about the dubious wisdom of the crowds. Martin Lindstrom, in his book Buyology argued as early as the subtitle that ‘Everything we think about why we buy is wrong’ or – what is the point in market research, when we delude ourselves about our purchasing decisions? But, perhaps, if the point of a film adaptation of a book is at least in part to draw some of the crowd of the original fans, listening to their opinion in this matter wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

It is said that the internet makes an armchair critic out of everyone, and never has this been truer than in the case of movie casting. Comic book fans have been posting on forums for years about who the perfect actors for Batman or Gambit would be; IMDB is full of ‘Who would you cast posts’ and ‘it should have been X’ comments.

Official rumoured casting for The Corrections has Judi Dench as the family matriarch Enid, along with Brad Pitt, Tim Robbins, and Naomi Watts as her children, whilst on Franzen’s wish list Gene Hackman plays Alfred and Cate Blanchett Alfred’s daughter, Denise. However, on the website Imagine Casting, where fans of books or comics can place their wish lists of actors for the movie adaptations, it is Ellen Burstyn, Paul Newman, Jennifer Connelly, John Cusack (as Chip) and Tim Robbins that come out on top.

Now, ruling out Paul Newman, due to his terribly sad, recent death, I don’t think these are bad shouts. We’ve already seen Ellen Burstyn do neurotic and fussy in Requiem for a Dream, Jennifer Connelly be the driven career woman in Little Children, John Cusack as eternal college grad, job hating, commitment phobe in High Fidelity (and any number of other films) and Tim Robbins as dissatisfied in marriage and paranoid in various. The fact that Tim Robbins appears on both the rumoured official list and amongst the fan’s choices is surely fodder enough to fuel further investigation. What the fan’s cast list has also managed to do, amazingly, that adds weight to the value of the crowd sourcing phenomenon, is to pick two actors (Connelly and Cusack) that make physically convincing siblings.

So what do you think? Who do you think has the right or the skill to pick the casts of movies? And, if you had this responsibility in the case of The Corrections, who would you cast?

In the first of our two-part interview with world renowned author, Jonathan Franzen, and to launch our 25th anniversary programme of articles on 4th Estate classic titles, the writer talks frankly about the social novel, politics and the importance of writing to maintain the integrity of personal experience in an increasingly digital world.

One of the things I talk about in the essay that I prefer to call ‘Why Bother?’ (From How to be Alone) is the relation between the supremacy of the novel in the 19th century and the fact that it had no major competitors. It’s not necessarily fair to measure our culture’s engagement with political reality by the health of the social novel, now that we have shows like The Wire and now that we have CNN.  One thing the Obama candidacy has certainly made clear is that a lot of people are still engaged with electoral politics. And yet it’s hard for me not to let my sadness about the decline of the social novel affect my judgments of the culture as a whole. There’s no question that the ambitious program of Proust, Dickens, Tolstoy, Trollope is simply not present in the same way any more. It’s been transferred to a non-literary realm, and this is a big loss, because the novel is the greatest art form when it comes to forging a connection between the intensely interior and personal and the larger social reality.

As for my own ambitions for the novel nowadays, I make fun of the ambitions I had when I was 22 and thinking, I will write the book that unmasks the terrible world, I will cause the scales to fall from the public’s eyes, and they will see how stupid the local news at 11 is, and they will realize how cliché-riddled the pages of their local newspaper are and how corrupt their elected officials are. And they won’t stand for it any more. Exactly what kind of utopia I thought would ensue was never clear.

In the 1980s, I think what I was really reacting to was my sense of isolation and loneliness and having this body of perceptions that I didn’t feel was widely shared. I was so young that I actually thought I was the only one with this particular body of perceptions. My enemy was everybody and my allies were nobody. I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways, and that my task is to reach them and to participate in the life of that segment of the population. This is what I’m writing for, for the people who want a literary experience. I’m no longer worried that nobody besides me can have that kind of experience, but I’m also not imagining that, in any conceivable twist of history, everybody will want that kind of experience. So it’s a weird and possibly selfish-seeming form of communitarianism: I’ve ceased to care much, as a writer, about people who don’t care about books. And the world of readers is thankfully still not tiny. We may lose a little more ground each year, but we’re still creating new readers who are excited about good stuff.

We may just be little specks. As a percentage of the total world population, we’re ever smaller specks, and what we are is ever more mediated by the structures we’ve created for ourselves to live in. And yet, as you go through life, you still hit these points of crisis where something genuine is happening.  A choice is being made, or a life is being destroyed, or hope is being regained, or control is being relinquished, or control is being achieved. These moments may be utterly insignificant historically, but they’re still hugely meaningful to the person experiencing them as meaningful as everything else in the world put together. To try to connect with what might formerly have been called the soul, and what I might now describe as some interior locus of privacy and reflection where moments of personal significance are experienced: this, I think, is the job of the fiction writer. As great as our various glowing screens may be at capturing vividness and complexity, you’re still always on the outside and just looking at them. You’re never within. Even if you were to construct a very fine virtual reality device, you would be literally insane if you mistook a manufactured and mass-produced experience for a moment of genuine human importance. If you could believe in the simulacrum enough to think you were having a moment of genuine personal meaning, it would mean you were insane.

Only written media, and maybe to some extent live theatre, can break down the wall between in and out. You’re not looking at your feeling from within. An Alice Munro story rushes you along in about 25 minutes to a point where you’re imaginatively going through a moment of deep crisis and significance in another person’s life. I know I’m expressing this in very vague terms, but I think these epiphanic moments have a social and political valence as well, because they’re what we mean when we talk about being a person, about being an individual, about having an identity. Identity is precisely not what consumer culture says it is. It’s not the playlist on your iPod. It’s not your personal preference in denim washes. The moment you become an individual is the moment when all that consumer stuff falls away and you’re left with the narrativity of your own life. All the things that would become impossible politically, emotionally, culturally, psychologically if people ever were to become simply the sum of their consumer choices: this is, indirectly, what the novel is trying to preserve and fight in favour of.

We would like to thank the interviewer Chris Connery, and the magazine boundary 2, where this interview is published in full, as well as, of course, Jonathan himself. Come back in a fortnight for the concluding part of our Jonathan Franzen interview, and keep checking back for The Corrections themed posts in the interim.

A special edition of The Corrections, created to celebrate our 25th, and featuring limited edition cover art by Michael Landy, is available here.

2009 sees the 25th anniversary of 4th Estate’s publishing.

In the summer of 2008, 4th Estate asked my company, Apt Studio, to create ’something stunning’ that would help them celebrate this anniversary, as well as celebrating books and their own ground-breaking, international, literary agenda.

Apt has worked with 4th Estate, and parent company HarperCollins, since 2002. Over the years, we’ve made a few films for them and also built the Fifth Estate blog that you’re reading this article on, as well as some other webby and creative projects – such as the recent Golden Notebook project for Doris Lessing.

Given this history we had a pretty open brief – just that whatever we did would touch on 4th Estate’s own history, as well as the sheer joy of books and the world they create.

We pitched a crazy, beautiful, and ambitious 3-minute animation to 4th Estate’s managing director, John Bond, and marketing director Ben Hurd. The animation would take place in a city made – literally – out of books, and we would pass through the city like a bird flying down the streets, witnessing scenes from these books taking place in lots of different districts over the course of an afternoon, evening and early morning.

Each district would loosely represent part of their publishing programme – from ‘Museum District’ made up of non-fiction, to the ‘edgy fiction’ part of town (Soho and the red light district) to the European cafe district in the early morning referencing work in translation.

All of the buildings and people would be made out of books, and the pages of those books, influenced in part by artists Thomas Allen and Su Blackwell.

For an added twist, the animation would feature only 4th Estate titles, and be shot ‘stop motion‘ – like Morph – at 15 frames per second. At three minutes long, that means we would have to set up and shoot 180 x 15 = 2700 separate photographs…

Luckily, 4th Estate loved the pitch and we teamed up with our mates at Asylum Films to put the film together. Over two weeks, more than twenty animators and model-makers worked with over 1,000 books to build a world, and an everycity made from the world’s literature. (You can see more production stills over at our blog, Times Emit.)

The film (’25th Estate’) incorporates works from many of 4th Estate’s acclaimed authors: Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fay Weldon, Simon Singh, Dava Sobel, Nigel Slater, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alaa Al Aswany, Giorgio Locatelli, Robert Fisk, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Francis Wheen, Alexander Masters, Joan Didion, Michael Chabon and many others.

My personal favourite moments are those of almost hidden detail: zebra crossings made from the paperback jacket of The Corrections; the Imperial War Museum modelled from Robert Fisk; the Greenwich Observatory made out of Longitude; the cinema made out of all the film tie-in editions, and the homage to The Corrections when the father falls out of the boat. The film is stuffed full of these references, and whilst they were a labour of love, they are (to me) what makes the film sing.

If you visit the site we’ve set up for the film you can also see a load of production stills, and time-lapse films of the animations being shot. And furthermore, it’s all been shot in glorious high definition.

Let us know what you think.

‘25th Estate – This is Where We Live’ – 4th Estate’s 25th Anniversary

Next year we see 25 years of 4th Estate publishing and we’re going to be celebrating…

We have lots of special surprises planned and we’ll be kicking off early in December. So keep watching this space for news of 25 years of 4th Estate.