The Arthur C Clarke shortlist tend to bring some controversy and this year is no different.
The shortlist:
The Red Men
Matthew de Abaitua - Snow Books
The H-Bomb Girl
Stephen Baxter - Faber & Faber
The Carhullan Army
Sarah Hall - Faber & Faber
The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall - Canongate
The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod - Orbit
Black Man
Richard Morgan - Gollancz
John Jarrold really [...]
Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants (Amazon) is a fine novella published for the World Book Day and is a delightful little read though perhaps not his best children’s novella.
Odd is a strange child, and when his father is dies rescuing a pony, flees into the forest where he is woken up by some [...]
Neil Gaiman has a link to a downloadable chapter of his book, Odd and the Frost Giants (Amazon). It is illustrated by the excellent Mark Buckingham and concerns the oddness of Odd. He seems like a nice enough character and Gaiman sets him up as a person to whom something extraordinary is going to [...]
Olivia Laing, over athe Guardian blog site, has a great piece on the underrated Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake.
It tends to be forgotten against Titus Groan and Gormenghast but she argues that its possibly more interesting because it confronts the horrors of war directly. I found it disjointed and unfinished when I read it but [...]
Quentin Blake, the children’s illustrator, meets Hogarth Brown, a budding young artist, in this video on the Guardian site.
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Pirate fans will probably enjoy the podcast with EoinColfer on the Guardian booksite as he talks about his love of the Treasure Island.
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Notes from the Horn Book, a free online newsletter, has an interesting interview with Jon Scieszka which will resonate with any body who reads and tries to encourage others to do so.
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Crichoux, over at Bookwyrm Chrysalis, has a link to this NY Times article about James Patterson complaining that he wants his children’s books at front of store because they get lost in the children’s section. He wants parents, or at least from the article mothers / women, to pick up his kind of book for [...]
Scott Westerfeld is asking for help on Tally’s World, his guide to his Uglies series which was announced on his blog (though it seems to have a slight glitch at the time of writing). He’s trying to get :
1) Slang terms you want defined.
2) Cliques you remember from the books.
To avoid too much repetition, he [...]
PS Publishing have announced that the entire text of Jeff Vandermeer’s new novellete, The Situation, is now available for free download before the book itself appears in three weeks’ time via www.pspublishing.co.uk/thesituation. The story is about a surrealist corporate hell.
PS will be looking to see how this does in the scheme of things to see [...]