Victor Hugo famously claimed the invention of the printing press destroyed the edifice of the gothic cathedral. Others fear the internet age will eventually destroy the novel. But guess what? It won’t.
James Bond and Pussy Galore: Sean Connery and Honor Blackman film a scene for Goldfinger.
PA Archive
The popular neurologist revealed earlier this year that he only has months to live – a statement which casts his recently-released memoir, On the Move: A Life, in a new light.
Watch The Shining after reading this and you may find that the Czech author haunts The Overlook Hotel just as much, if not more, than any of its regular spectral figures.
Ben Okri’s The Age of Magic expresses dissatisfaction with the careless bustle of our everyday lives.
Metsavend
“We need something by which to judge, by which to navigate our journey through the stars, which is to say our journey through time.” Ben Okri discusses his new novel The Age of Magic and our busy lives.
Should we be upset that some of our favourite authors don’t actually exist?
Mark Nye
Modernism – and western culture generally since the late 18th century – taught us that books were written in solitary creative frenzies. But ghostwriters are increasingly challenging that assumption.
Arthur Conan Doyle himself was also poisoned by heartbreak grass – but this was self-inflicted, and not fatal.
There’s much that Perepilichny could have learned from Arthur Conan Doyle, and him in turn from an ancient king called Mithradates.
The earliest sources, including Paul’s letters, show very little interest in the mythological details of heavenly existence.
Wikimedia Commons/ Probably Valentin de Boulogne: Saint Paul Writing His Epistles.
Interpretations of Paul the apostle’s texts provided the basic fund of imagery that continues to inform popular opinion about what Christians mean when they talk about “heaven”, or “hell”.
The pantheon of the Bard’s plays is now larger by one – or so the headlines would have you believe.
George
You’d be forgiven for thinking Double Falsehood was recently “found” and confirmed as being by Shakespeare. But that’s not what the researchers behind the computational tests actually said. So what’s up?
Zannoni’s 1771 Map of the British Isles shows the heart of the “civilised” world – at least according to Adam Smith when he was writing The Wealth of Nations.
Wikimedia Commons/Geographicus Rare Antique Maps
To burnish the virtues of “civilised” Europe, Adam Smith relies on a barrage of racial insults. Where did his information about the so-called “savage peoples” come from in the first place?
Captain Kidd in New York Harbor, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1920.
Though Kazuo Ishiguro makes us wonder whether remembering is really better than forgetting, he also makes it clear that the answer is irrelevant. Remembering is our fate.
Despite what the industry thinks, you shouldn’t judge a book by the size of its print run.
Amelia Schmidt Follow
Publishing is frequently a small-scale venture, comprising one or a handful of people with a vision for particular books they want to see published. Is it time to embrace ‘organic’ publishing?
An opera based on David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter opens in Sydney this weekend.
Carriageworks/Toby Burrows
Sydney Chamber Opera’s production of David Malouf’s 1982 novel Fly Away Peter opens this weekend. It’s not the first opera adaptation of Australian literature – and there are reasons to hope it’s not the last.
Discovering the other is in the Albert Hall?
freenerd/flickr
Emily Bitto has won the 2015 Stella Prize for her debut novel, The Strays. The prize is now in its third year and was established to redress the way in which women writers were typically overlooked for major literary prizes