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Independent Book of the Month
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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.
Unconventional model Isobella Jade talks about the process of writing her memoir, Almost 5′ 4″, especially for her readers in the UK, and reads an extract from the book.
Click here to purchase a copy of Almost 5′ 4″.
Click here to read Isobella’s article: 5 modeling jobs where height doesn’t matter.
© Isobella Jade
On September 3rd, Gary Kemp’s brilliant memoir, I Know This Much: from Soho to Spandau was published by Fourth Estate. One of the most well-written autobiographies to appear in years, I Know This Much is packed full of vivid anecdotes and great stories. In the following clip, Gary reads a wonderful passage describing Spandau’s arrival at Band Aid:
Gary recently recorded a great Q&A, posted here as a podcast:
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”.
In this short extract from the book, Bill begins his quest for the Bard by tracking down the only three existing (and contested) portraits of the great man – and examines what these few uncertain images can tell us about a life.
Click the arrow above to play – and you can download the entire audiobook over at audible.com…
I was pretty surprised to run into Dragon’s Den winner (and forthcoming Collins author) Levi Roots at an event with Dragon Peter Jones – and even more surprised to find them deep in conversation with legendary four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister. Things have clearly moved quickly for the musician, entrepreneur and now celebrity chef since the dragons bought into his Reggae Reggae Sauce…
While Roger disappeared (at speed) I dragged Levi into the Green Room for a chat about his million selling sauce, his new book and the forthcoming Reggae Reggae Car – click the button to listen in. Rastafari Bless!
Daniel’s debut novel, Broken, chronicles the havoc wrought on one British housing estate by a single uncontrollable family. Narrated by eleven year old Skunk Cunningham – trapped deep inside a coma – Daniel’s tragic comedy follows one community’s reaction to the neighbours from hell…
But how exactly can you pull off a novel that dares to cross the humour of Shameless with the emotion of To Kill a Mockingbird? Daniel’s been posting regularly on Fifth Estate in the run up to Broken’s release this month – last week I dragged him into the Filing Cupboard for a rather cramped discussion about the book, and about his own decade-long path to publication…
Rudolph Delson’s debut novel, Maynard and Jennica, has provoked strong reactions since it was released late last year – just check out the fimo if you need any convincing.
Packed with a cast of eccentric characters, not to mention the peculiar voices of more than thirty different narrators, Maynard and Jennica is a very modern New York love story. Rudy’s been a regular contributor to Fifth Estate: when he passed through London last week I dragged him into the filing cupboard for a conversation, and for what must be one of our most unusual readings…
Along with a reading from fictional rap star ‘Puppy’ Jones, Rudy explained the appeal of living with so wide a cast of characters. We also discussed the challenges of using 9/11 in fiction – the final third of the book sees the attack on the Twin Towers weave it’s way into the lives of all the characters. And while Maynard and Jennica may be Rudolph’s first published novel, it’s actually his third completed book: I asked how rejected writers find the strength to keep going…
I’m a big fan of J.G. Ballard’s atmospheric and unsettling novels. His first book The Drowned World, describes a London transformed into tropical swampland – in later works like Crash and Kingdom Come, the transformation is more subtle, featuring quiet British surburbs that seethe with hidden violence.
It’s always tempting to pin a writer’s themes on their own personal histories – but critics have long assumed that Ballard’s curious themes would have found their beginning in his childhood in occupied Shanghai, and subsequent internment in the Lunghua Concentration Camp.
In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard speaks plainly about the experiences only fictionally described in Empire of the Sun. In this short extract from the book, read by Tim Piggot-Smith, Ballard describes the immediate aftermath of the Chinese defeat in 1937 – while bodies rot in the city’s verges, the international community continues its daily round of parties and daytrips. And in a scene recognisable to anyone familiar with his autobiographical novel, the young J.G. discovers an old, battered fighter plane…
Our Fifth Estate filing cupboard may not hold quite the same influence as a seat on Judy’s sofa, but when Patrick was up from Cornwall last week we could hardly miss the opportunity for a chat.
OR CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
Patrick’s thirteen novels have long enjoyed critical acclaim, and since Notes from an Exhibition was featured on Channel 4’s TV book club this tale of the life and death of a prodigiously talented artist has become a regular sight on the nation’s tubes, trains and buses.
Publishing Director Paul Baggaley talked to Patrick about the book, discussing some of its strongest themes: family, art, depression and the vivid Cornish setting. Patrick also reads two extracts from Notes, including a fictional encounter with the famous Cornish sculptor Barbara Hepworth.
Take fifteen minutes with Patrick and Paul – and find out what the fuss is all about…
Since we first blogged about Ishmael Beah some twelve months ago, A Long Way Gone – his shocking memoir of his years as a child soldier – has stunned readers far outside his native Sierra Leone.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
Over the last year Ishmael’s story has taken him around Europe and around the world. Last week we were lucky enough to host him in London – Editor and Publicity Manager Robin Harvie invited him into the filing cupboard for a short reading, and asked him about his remarkable experiences.
London’s enormous Natural History Museum is one of the city’s most famous attractions – and one of it’s most impressive sights. Yet more than half of its mammoth floor space remains permanently closed to the public. So what really goes on behind the bones, birds and beetles?
Last week Richard Fortey, author of Dry Store Room No 1 and until recently one of the museum’s top experts took Radio 4’s Today programme on a tour behind the scenes – and admitted that a life lived amongst the drawers, racks and store rooms can be a fertile breeding ground for eccentricities of all kinds…
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW (7 mins – and you’ll need Realplayer)
On Monday I posted the first part of an interview with Marianne Faithful – here, for your listening pleasure, is the second and final installment.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
After living the high life with the Rolling Stones and a whole cast of 60s celebrities, the ‘come down’ of the 1970s hit Marianne hard. Here she talks about her junky years living ‘on a wall’ on the streets of London’s Soho, an anorexic and heroin addict.
She also talks about her own music career, which was revived with 1979s Broken English and continues today. Just as she was renowned for moving with some of the most influential performers of the 60s scene, she has continued to work with some of the finest British talent in the years since, collaborating with Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Beck and many other contemporary artists.
If you’ve enjoyed these podcasts all these stories and more can be found in Memories, Dreams and Reflections – a look back on her forty years in the public eye.
Not many rock stars have passed through the Filing Cupboard’s small and grubby doors (well, none in fact): so I could only jump at the chance to post up this two-part interview with the legendary Marianne Faithful.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
Setting out to be an actress, Marianne was swept into the 1960s British music scene – and as Mick Jagger’s lover witnessed first hand some of the most famous events of the decade.
But as the sixties ended and her relationship fell apart, Marianne descended into heroin addiction and anorexia, spending two years homeless on the streets of Soho before the release of Broken English relaunched her musical career. Now 60, Marianne continues to work prolifically as both actress and musician.
In this first recording, Marianne talks about her new book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, which comes more than a decade after her acclaimed autobiography, Faithless. The book collects many more stories from Marianne’s life, from her unconventional childhood in her father’s orgiastic literary commune to the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs – and to her own very recent battle with breast cancer.
Here she also discusses her life in the sixties; the excitement of those times – and her huge disapointment at how little of that decade’s revolutionary fervour seems to have lasted into the 21st Century.
I’ll post up the second part of the interview – in which Marianne discusses her drug addiction, her music career and her future – later on this week.
Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer prize winning author of Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis and Teacher Man
came in to see the Press Books team this week – and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pose some questions of my own in the Filing Cupboard.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
After a life spent teaching in New York, Frank was sixty-six when he finally completed a memoir of his Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes, which scooped the Pulitzer and went on to sell more than four million copies worldwide.
After two further biographies, Frank’s new book Angela and the Baby Jesus now presents another true story from the McCourt family: a christmas tale for adults and children in two editions, both beautifully illustrated by two very different artists.
We sat down straight from a mammoth book signing to talk about the books and about his new efforts in fiction; about why it took fifty years for his writing ambitions to be realised in such dramatic fashion; and about what it’s really like for a first time writer to be catapulted straight into America’s literary elite…
Great news this week for psychologist and depression-expert Dorothy Rowe, who’s been included in a list of the world’s top 100 living geniuses.
The list – which includes such names as Steven Hawking, Gary Kasparov and inventor of the internet Sir Tim Berners Lee – was whittled down from more than a thousand figures nominated in a national survey.
A panel of six scored each nominee on a range of factors: paradigm shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. You can see the full list here.
Author of the seminal Beyond Fear, Dorothy’s been studying depression for some 40 years, and her work has changed the lives of many thousands of people.
She’s also a friend of Fifth Estate – twice dropping into the Filing Cupboard with Kate to record two of the best podcasts we’ve published. Click here to listen to her discussing Beyond Fear, and here to listen to her conversation with poet and writer Gwyneth Lewis.
Says Dorothy:
It is a tremendous honour to be placed amongst such an outstanding group of people who have had such a profound effect on the world.
It’s also a clear recognition of the much wider understanding of the importance of psychological issues, how we interpret the world and how this, in turn, affects our ability to change things for good — or for bad
The top ranked Aussie in a list dominated by Brits and Americans, Dorothy can also now claim the unlikely title of Greatest Australian Genius – though it probably wont fit on her credit card.
Anton appeared at the festival to discuss Empire’s Children, a book and documentary series that follows six prominent Brits searching for their family roots across the Commonwealth.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
Along with his earlier book in theWho Do You Think You Are series, Anton is swift becoming a household name amongst the rising tide of amateur genealogists. But in an intensely varied twenty year writing career he’s produced more than 15 books, ranging from contemporary history to crime fiction, and including The Journey Back from Hell: which recorded the personal stories of more than 100 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.
We sat down in the Kandinsky Hotel to talk family trees, bare knuckle boxers and the Romanian secret police…
Click here to listen in.
Tonight I caught up with Sanjeev Bhaskar in the Writers Room at Cheltenham.
Sanjeev is best known as a writer and performer of the TV shows Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42, but this year has been on our screens in India, travelling back through one of the world’s fastest developing nations to find his father’s roots in Punjab.
We chatted half an hour before his appearance at the Literary Festival and talked India, festivals and why books are better than film…
It’s not all auditoriums and signing queues: on Wednesday night we hit the cider with Cheltenham’s performance poets, bringing live literature to local club Slak. We couldn’t work all the time…
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST
The live lit events come courtesy of Voices Off, Cheltenham’s ‘fringe’ programme that aims to pull the festival out of the theatres and onto the town’s streets, pubs and clubs.
Fifth Estate caught up with Sarah-Jane Arbury, Voices Off Director, to get the lowdon – and after Sarah-Jane we’ve poems from Scott Tyrell, Marvin Cheeseman and Helen Thomas (in that order). Helen’s impressively titled chap book is pictured above.
Click to listen – what better way to spend the next four minutes?
When they first met, Welsh Poet Laureate Gwyneth Lewis and psychologist Dorothy Rowe realised they had more than a publisher in common. In their recent books, Sunbathing in the Rain and Beyond Fear, respectively, they both interpret depression.
In my view, Gwyneth has penned one of the best first-person accounts of the state in Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression . The book is part memoir, part literary guide. She writes
Depression is internal snow. Black snow. The flakes whirl around like motes in the water around your personal shipwreck. The quicker you dive down to see your sorry state, the better for you in life. For above you, if only you can reach it without getting the bends, are sunshine, laughter on a yacht, the clink of plates as a lunch of steaming fish is handed round.
Dorothy, meanwhile, has worked in clinical psychology for many decades, and her now classic book Beyond Fear is one of the essential must-read titles for anyone researching or exploring this topic. (I spoke to her earlier in the year in a series of podcasts broadcast here).
They both visited the filing cupboard this week to record this conversation about living well, and how to interpret and survive darker times — one of our best podcasts yet, I think.
A fantastic resource for anyone (like me) who missed Guardian Hay Festival this year….
Here’s a selection of their biggest events captured on audio. All you need is your own deckchair and iPod.
my personal recommendations:
Genius satirist and comedian Aramando Iannucci talks to Francine Stock
our very own David Crystal on the treasures and eccentricities of English culture and language
A nice man called Chris Yates on the joys of sitting on a riverbank with rod and line
The completely brilliant Louise Rennison, teen fic writer, in conversation
What’s Left - our own Nick Cohen and Stephen Marshall examine leftism and liberalism today
Billy Bragg, Henry Porter, and Philippe Sands examine the nature of democracy in Britain
One of the best historians today, Adam Zamoyski, on chaos, corruption and sexual depravity in 1815.
A while back, renowned author and psychologist Dorothy Rowe came in to see us. It is the 20th anniversary of her landmark book, Beyond Fear.
The book, first published in 1987, has changed the lives of thousands of people. In the most recent edition, Dorothy Rowe examines the changes in the psychiatric system since 1987 in the context of showing how most of our suffering comes from our greatest fear, that of being annihilated as a person, when we shall disappear like a puff of smoke in the wind, never to have existed.
We feel this fear whenever others humiliate or belittle us, or whenever we discover a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. The greater our fear, the more desperate our defence against it, the most desperate of defences being what psychiatrists call mental disorders. Yet, by knowing ourselves we can go beyond our fear and face life with courage.
I interviewed Dorothy in 5th Estate’s filing cupboard about some of the book’s messages and here’s the result.
Isn’t life more interesting when you can talk about it? Every six months publishing imprints create a catalogue of titles about to be published, aimed at the book trade.
But this season, at 4th Estate, HarperPress and Perennial imprints, we thought we’d go straight to the source, and ask editors to give to readers a sneak preview of just some favourite titles they are currently working on for this coming Autumn. After all, it’s what a great deal of publishing people will be doing over the next 3 days at London International Book Fair.
If you visit this page at 5th Estate and click on any of the book jackets that take your fancy, you will hear the relevant editor talking about the book and what appeals to them about it in the early stages of production.
If any of the books particularly take your fancy and you want to know more, drop me a line at the usual contact address, as we might have a bound early reading proof available for you.
Radio Diaries is committed to helps people produce their own oral histories. They work with people to document their own lives for public radio: teenagers, seniors, prison inmates and others whose voices are rarely heard. We help people share their stories—and their lives—in their own words, creating documentaries that are powerful, surprising, intimate and timeless.
The project trains diarists to be radio reporters and gives them a tape recorder for between three months to two years. The diarists conduct interviews, keep an audio journal, and record the sounds of daily life. Most will collect over 30 hours of raw tape. The material is then edited to produce a radio documentary for the National Public Radio show All Things Considered.
Technical Tips for producing your own radio diary
1. Get comfortable with the equipment
Play around with the recording device (minidisc recorder, DAT machine, tape recorder) on your own until you are very familiar with all the buttons and knobs. It’s important to do this before you begin; if you’re relaxed with the recorder and the microphone, the people you’re interviewing will be too.
2. Get organized
Always make sure you have enough minidiscs, DATs or cassettes and an extra set of batteries. Don’t leave long cables hanging out, or you’ll have to spend time untangling everything. Get a shoulder bag to hold everything. The more prepared you are, the more you can concentrate on the important things.
3 Do a test
Always do a test before you begin. Record a few seconds, then play it back to make sure the sound is good.
4. Label your tapes and disks
Always label everything before you start. When you’re in the field it’s easy to forget and tape over something you’ve just recorded. (It happens.) And after you’re done recording, pop out the safety tabs to make sure you don’t erase over anything.
5. Always wear your headphones
Recording without headphones is like a photographer taking pictures without looking through the viewfinder. Headphones help you focus on exactly what you’re recording. If something sounds weird, stop and check it out.
6. Beware of the pause button
When recording, make sure the tape is rolling and that you’re not in pause mode. Don’t use the pause button. It’s a very tricky little button it can make you think you are recording when you’re not.
7. Keep the microphone close
The most important thing of all: keep the microphone close to the sound source (your mouth or the mouth of the person you’re interviewing). About 5-6 inches is good, the length of your outstretched hand. If it’s any farther away you will still be able to hear what people say, but the recording will lose its power and intimacy. It’s also best to keep the microphone a little bit below the mouth to avoid the “popping P” sound.
8. Collect good sounds
Every time you record, collect all the specific sounds you can think of: dogs barking, doors slamming, the radio being turned on, the sound of your blender, or even your mum snoring. Be creative. You will use these sounds later when you produce the story.
9. Record everything
Long pauses are okay. Umms are okay. Saying stupid and embarrassing things is okay. Often the stuff you think is weird, worthless, or that you initially want to edit out, will end up being the best and most surprising parts of the story.
Taken from the oral history guide for young people, the “Teen Reporter Handbook”, published by Radio Diaries and available on its website.
Act now!
1. Listen to Thembi’s story. (23mins).
One of the most successful radio diaries is Thembi’s story. Thembi is a South African teenager. For more than a year, she kept a radio diary capturing the small details of her life that tell a larger story: her first conversation with her mother about AIDS; a visit to the township clinic to apply for life-saving drugs; facing neighbors and friends as they slowly learn her status; a moment of quiet, late-night dancing at home with her boyfriend. www.radiodiaries.org/aidsdiary
2. Become a radio diarist.
Get a recorder and create your own radio diary — of aspects of your life, such as going green, tackling obesity, setting up a band… or of how you are trying to change the world.
Here’s part 2 of John Lynch from the filing cupboard: a mesmerising reading from his book, Torn Water.
Incidentally, sorry for the delay in getting this out. (Now we know what happens when the chief editor of fifthestate gets sick for 2 weeks…!)
Writer and actor John Lynch came in to see our paperbacks editor, Essie, a few days ago, so I asked if he wouldn’t mind nipping into the filing cupboard and having a bit of an impromptu chat with the fifthestate team.
Although it’s not a book I worked on myself, I’d read his novel, Torn Water, when 4th Estate published it in hardback in November 05, and loved it…so I had a few questions I really wanted to ask. The novel is a treat: beautifully lyrical prose, it’s the story of a boy growing up in Northern Ireland in the shadow of his lost father – and there’s a mystery to solve.
John also is the voice behind our audiobook of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and starred in the film, In the Name of the Father. There wasn’t time to cover everything, but we discussed John’s reasons for writing the novel, and some aspects of his own life.
Here’s the interview, and a reading from Torn Water. (7MB)
The second installment – another reading from Torn Water - will follow next week. The paperback, if you’re interested, is out in January, with a brand new PS section.
We’re publishing my lifetime’s collection of love poems soon (February 07). A book of poetry might well be a more original and romantic gift than a red rose for the 14th…
…though not always, as you’ll hear if you listen to my poem ‘A Blade of Grass’ on this podcast.
Anyway, I was in the office at PressBooks, and before I knew it, I’d been bundled into the filing cupboard. Here’s the result. Download it on to your MP3 player and take a walk on a crisp autumnal day to listen…or perhaps email the podcast to a lover for his/her journey to work.
The Filing Cupboard presents: Brian Patten reads from his Collected Love Poems (6.2MB)
This week — fifthestate’s first — has been a delightfully busy one. It’s also been fairly hectic for anyone working on The Taste of Britain, a newly published compendium of regional produce from the British Isles, and my personal tip off for a great Christmas present if you’re already a bit stuck.
The previous publisher of the book, Tom Jaine, has been whisked around various radio stations to record interviews on the topic of Britain’s food traditions — he even made the news on Wednesday night.
Listen again to Tom Jaine’s very entertaining appearance on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight.
Once interviewers have got over the initial shock factor of there being an identifiable British food heritage worthy of note, a question that crops up regularly is: what is our culinary tradition? Who are we?
Tom has suggested that, from a historian’s perspective, one can look to food culture as a means of broadly determining what the nation’s identity was, and perhaps still is. To nations such as France food tradition and the idea of AOC goes some distance to carving out an idea of what it has previously meant to be French. Could it be that the stuff we eat could help define the future fabric of the British Isles?
The Taste of Britain is a compendium of foods whose origins on these shores date back at least three generations. I wonder if in another three generations time, the book will look very different. Personally, I think that The Taste of Britain 2106 would be an exciting prospect. But I also suspect that it will be a far harder thing to pin down.
So, in a week that saw Jack Straw write in the Lancashire Telegraph that he’d rather women constituents lifted the veil (apparently 93% of Britons polled agree with him), the question of a common cultural identity lifts its head again — perhaps these days it never goes away.
The voices of those sceptical of multiculturalism are sounding louder — in fact, next week Michael Burleigh will post at fifthestate on the subject
The government’s predictable response to this on-going emergency is to form yet further committees of the likeminded, where the voices of anyone sceptical of multiculturalism are unrepresented…Let’s have some ‘unity’ officers, versed in what makes this country sufficiently attractive for the huge numbers of people seeking to live here.
Nevertheless, if you concur with former Labour home secretary Roy Jenkins, that integration is “not a flattening process of assimilation but equal opportunity accompanied by … an atmosphere of mutual tolerance”, you’ll join me in the hope that The Taste of Britain a hundred years hence will be able to stretch to the 27 volumes that France made on its first edition.
Many thanks to everyone who listened to my first chapter this week. We’ll keep it up here in the months running up to publication.
Last week I came in to visit everyone who is going to be working on my book at Press Books. You can listen to an interview with me here, and also hear how to get sent one of ten free advance reading copies of Crow Stone.
Last month the fiction people at HarperPress imprint acquired a debut thriller title, which will be titled ‘Crow Stone’.
The book is currently in manuscript form, and will hit the shelves in hardback in Spring 2007. In the meantime, here’s the first chapter for you to sample.
The Filing Cupboard presents the first chapter of Crow Stone, read by the author Jenni Mills.
Tristram Stuart, author of The Bloodless Revolution, gave a speech to the Nehru Centre on 13th September. He discusses radical vegetarians and discovery of India, in a talk that both challenges the idea that historically, cultural exchange between India and the West was not two-way process, and also that touches on the rationale behind abstinence from meat.
