“It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
“When I try to imagine the addresses of the houses and apartments I lived in before my grandparents kidnapped me, I can’t remember anything.”
“How rich and diverse, how complex and non-linear the history of all women is.”
“All that matters is that you are making something you love, to the best of your ability, here and now.”
The Mauritanian is a new film starring Jodie Foster, Tahar Rahim and Benedict Cumberbatch, directed by Kevin Macdonald. It’s based on Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s unflinching account of his fourteen years of detention without charge in Guantánamo Bay.
Robert Webb – author of How Not to be a Boy, star of Peep Show and statistically half of Mitchell & Webb – talks about his debut novel, Come Again, out now in paperback!
‘“I would read an excerpt in Edinburgh and the idea of Mrs Death would be met with a cheer and a ‘yay!’. And exactly the same excerpt down in Bloomsbury [would have] everyone crying, me crying, big hugs at the end … What it has got me thinking is, I wonder if there is a geography of mourning, a geography of grief.” All the reactions are welcome, though. She still thinks one of the scariest things about death is that it is so often surrounded by silence.’
Taboo-busting poet Salena Godden talks to the Guardian about her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death, missing performing and why Brits struggle to speak about her novel’s all too timely subject.
Katy Guest
Guardian
“You should read this collection at least twice. The first time, horse it into you—then study the technique.”
Naoise Dolan reviews That Old Country Music in The Stinging Fly.
The Stinging Fly
“One of the great Scottish crime writers is back”: The April Dead by Alan Parks is crime Book of the Month in The Times.
The Times
“I would think to myself, why do some people rise up and fight while others do nothing?” she said. “Are people justified in doing anything and everything possible for the sake of justice? How do we balance our desire to fight for change against our desire to protect the ones we love? These are questions the characters have to deal with. I do not have answers — I much prefer to ask questions.”
Imbolo Mbue discusses her new novel How Beautiful We Were in the New York Times.
New York Times
To celebrate the first ever Gray Day – a celebration of the life and work of Alasdair Gray on 25th February 2021 – there will be a special Gray Day Broadcast, featuring guests like Ali Smith, Yann Martel, Gemma Cairney, Irvine Welsh, Ewen Bremner and more to be announced!
[update: Now that the Broadcast has run it is still available to view.]
‘It moves at an exhilarating lick, as befits its pop culture propensities, but with highbrow sensibilities, its concerns including the Kabbalah, whether the world is made of words, the origins of the alphabet, the mythopoetic nature of the hero’s journey and what angels look like … the genius of the book is that despite it seeming like an elegant orrery, all these wheels within wheels are a carapace, a psychic armour against a grief (and it’s not the grief you were expecting). Beneath this truly beautiful astrolabe is a beating human heart’
Stuart Kelly
The Scotsman
A freewheeling investigation into the magic power locked inside the alphabet, love through the looking glass, the bond between parents and children, and, at its heart, the quest for meaning in a chaotic and untidy world. Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall is out now.
Watch Melanie Challenger introduce How to Be Animal - her radical new take on the human story and what it means for us today
‘As the early drafts of the book developed I started collecting deaths, near deaths and unmourned deaths, invisible deaths and celebrity death and writing about them. I also started testing the work out at my poetry gigs. I’d slip an excerpt of the book into my poetry shows to see how Mrs Death landed with my poetry friends and with spoken word and book festival audiences. I began to notice different responses in different cities and different counties … I’m fascinated by this and hope to examine it further: I wonder if here in the UK we exhibit grief and talk about death and mourn a little differently county by county? Do we mourn differently geographically?’
Salena Godden is featured on the Waterstones blog about writing her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, and how we respond to death across the country.
Salena Godden
Waterstones
Courttia Newland discusses astral projection, rejection, racism, Small Axe and his new novel, A River Called Time with the Guardian
‘When I was growing up I used to have these episodes where you wake up and feel like you can’t breathe, you can’t see, you’re almost having a seizure, a dreaming seizure. I’d fight it and try to wake up – but this one time, around 1997, I didn’t fight it and I had an out of body experience, like I actually rose from my body. I could see somebody in the room sitting next to the bed. The experience stuck in my head and I thought, “Let me find out what’s been happening.” I found all these books saying it was astral projection. And that was it. I knew I wanted to write about astral projection.’
Ashish Ghadiali
Guardian