We’ve joined Mastodon
In response to everything that’s happening on Twitter, we’ve set up our own account on Mastodon, and you can follow us there: we’re @canongatebooks@bookish.community.
In fact, we set up a whole instance on Mastodon, and we’ve invited some of our indie publishing and bookseller friends to join us there. So if you’re on Mastodon (or thinking of joining), why not follow not just us, but our friends @mrbsemporium, @severnhouse, @SerpentsTail, @ViperBooks, @FaberBooks, @DauntBooksPub, @ProfileBooks and @Indies_Alliance (and hopefully more joining us soon!).
If you want to join Mastodon, here are some possible places to start. Not sure what Mastodon is? Here’s an explainer!
Where to start with Sylvia Plath
On the 90th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s birth, Elin Cullhed shares this insightful guide to the great writer’s work, from The Bell Jar, to the poems, to essays, journals and short fiction. (Elin’s wonderful novel Euphoria is an imaginative portrayal of the last year of Plath’s life.)
Elin Cullhed
Guardian
Emma Thompson’s tribute to her friend Alan Rickman, at an event at the BFI marking the publication of his diaries.
“Women grow because sometimes rage can only be mollified by digging until the sweat trickles down their backs. Women grow because it offers them control in a world determined to rid them of it”
Gray: Beyond the Horizon
Gray: Beyond the Horizon is an interactive, multimedia journey through, round and about Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, from the extremely clever people at the Alasdair Gray Archive, with writer and digital designer Rachel Loughran.
“Songs are little dangerous bombs of truth”
Read an extract in the Observer from Faith, Hope and Carnage, the new book by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan – a meditation on faith, art, music, grief and much more.
Observer
“The truest thing I’ve read in a long time”
A wonderful review of Amy Liptrot’s The Instant in the New York Times:
“It feels revelatory to read serious, thoughtful writing on the sorts of experiences that so rarely receive it. The book is particularly sharp on the agony of a relationship’s aftermath in a digital age. At one point, Liptrot refers to the German word Fernweh (distance pain), which describes a reverse homesickness that makes you long for somewhere else. The Instant is the most elegant examination of the internet’s distance pain I have ever read.”
Evie Wyld
New York Times
“From the very first sentence, I already knew what the last sentence would be”
It’s almost 20 years since the evening Yann Martel’s Life of Pi won the Booker Prize: read this exclusive interview with Martel about the (rigorous!) process of researching and writing the novel, as well as about religious belief, and the relationship between facts and storytelling.
The Booker Prizes
Guardian Homelands review
“Our sense of home explored through the story of a journalist’s friendship with a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor… It is a cliché to describe a book as achingly beautiful, but those are the words I reach for: Homelands is both beautiful and, at times, left me with an ache I struggled to name.”
Aamna Mohdin
Guardian
