The lead article in the current issue of Slightly Foxed literary magazine is by our own Jonathan Law, who writes about the remarkable diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Continuing from yesterday, here is the concluding part of an expanded version of the piece, in which Sylvia meets the love (and bane) of her life, Valentine … Read More…
Literature
The lead article in the current issue of Slightly Foxed literary magazine is by our own Jonathan Law, who writes about his discovery of the remarkable diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner. Today and tomorrow we bring you an expanded version of the piece in two parts… It’s always strange to think how easily you … Read More…
Literary Britain is a very small world, argues Henry Jeffreys, it really does need more ‘diversity’ – and that means publishing books by people who don’t agree with you about everything… My three year old daughter’s nursery school has a diversity officer. On the wall in her classroom is the word … Read More…
Continuing his mind-boggling tour of Phantom Libraries, Jonathan Law discovers that the books that Samuel Taylor Coleridge didn’t write have a more powerful presence than the ones he did… Among the most tantalizing treasures of oblivion are the numerous phantom works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – works promised to friends, family, … Read More…
Having reviewed comical imaginary libraries from Swift to The Sims, Jonathan Law turns to stranger, more dreamlike worlds, for ‘large are the treasures of oblivion’… So far, this has been mostly for laughs. The libraries invented by Rabelais, Donne, Joyce, and Swift were all uproarious things, even where the humour seemed to be laced with something … Read More…
Jonathan Law continues his exploration of that curious and very funny side-alley of literature: the library of non-existent books… Victorian literature has nothing to compare with the ribald, fantastical book lists of Rabelais, Swift, or Donne. And yet the era made its own singular contribution to the history of the phantom … Read More…
Jonathan Law begins his exploration of that curiously enduring but little-discussed literary trope, the library of imaginary books… I knew it reminded me of something – that list of articles drummed out of Wikipedia for being too weird or dumb or just plain unhinged: in fact, a bunch of things I’ve read in … Read More…
The Travellers’ Library series of books published by Jonathan Cape gives a fascinating glimpse of literary fashion in the 1920s, including names that have endured, others that have been completely forgotten, and still others currently halfway to obscurity… My edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners was published in Jonathan Cape’s series The Travellers’ Library … Read More…
What’s the real minority specialist-interest genre of books – the one that bookshops just can’t shift? It’s literary fiction, says Steerforth… As a bookseller, one of the first lessons I learned when running the fiction section was that the sales of the first volume of Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps … Read More…
Andy Miller had a busy job in publishing, a growing family and no time at all for reading. Or so he kept telling himself. But, no matter how busy or tired he was, something kept niggling at him. Books. Books he’d always wanted to read. Books he’d lied about having read. Books that … Read More…