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Peter Ackroyd: 'Retire? Only if my arms are chopped off first'

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Early in our interview Peter Ackroyd, he of the immense brain, the prodigious output and the legendary lack of patience with dumb-ass newspaper interviewers, assures me that he has never met a person he found boring. "People are much more interesting than people realise." He chuckles. "There's a word for that construction... But no, I don't think people are boring at all. I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about."

Musical animals and talking vegetables: The best new children's picture books

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Written and illustrated by the American artist Laura Vaccaro Seeger, the prize-winning First the Egg (Frances Lincoln, £10.99) shows, in a series of before and after pictures, how various tiny beginnings (tadpoles, seeds and caterpillars as well as eggs) result in something larger. Glowing colours and a clever use of cut-out spaces make this book an exciting as well as charming voyage of discovery for the very young. Far less respectable, but bursting with energy, Emily Gravett's Dogs (Macmillan, £10.99; pictured right) devotes each page to a different member of this species. No one is as funny as Gravett in this sort of form, and her canine rogues' gallery should have everyone laughing. So, too, should Peas! (Puffin, £5.99), written by Andy Cullen and illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Its story about Pete and Penelope Pea is stuffed with puns, and ends up with the slogan "Give peas a chance!" Huge pictures and unpredictable text make this jolly picture book a winner.

'The Year That It Rained Cows': The silly, strange and fascinating world of books for the under-12s

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

This being the silly season, we should perhaps begin with a very silly book. Philip Ardagh writes funny like he can't help it, and in his new Grubtown Tales series for younger readers (Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky and The Year That It Rained Cows, both Faber, £4.99) we meet ludicrous characters with preposterous names (our young hero is a boy called Mango Claptrap) to whom outrageous things happen. Silly, silly, silly. Young readers will love them. (Old readers, too...)

Take me to a happy place: Time-travel and a trip to the moon feature in the latest children's audio books

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

"Childhood is not from birth to a certain age," wrote Edna St Vincent Millais. "Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies." Breaking Dawn (read by Ilyana Kadushin and Matt Walters, Hachette, £24.47), the last volume of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, opens with this comforting thought, but it is a bit of a con. Bella, the feisty heroine, has reached 17 – surely getting close to the upper limits of childhood – and by marrying Edward, her beautiful, eternally youthful vampire, chooses to stay there forever, forfeiting mortality and human ambitions to join him in that happy state. These are not nasty vampires. Because they feed on animal blood, they are described as vegetarians. (Clearly, carrot juice would not cut the mustard.) Teenagers love this series for the clever plotting and the surreal other-life they describe. And many identify with Bella herself, who goes, in her mind, to a "happy place" when times are hard.

Teenage runaways: Escape into the summer's best new novels for young adults

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Escaping from danger – real, imagined, physical, mental, social or scientific – seems to be the main theme running through the current crop of books for teenagers. Angela McAllister's The Runaway (Orion, £6.99) is a spooky, atmospheric tale set in the earliest years of the 19th century, against a distant backdrop of fear of Napoleonic invasion. Megan, riddled with guilt about the death of her adored younger brother, has run away from home and eventually finds herself housekeeping for a strange, otherworldly blind woman, Marguerite, who has a sinister secret in her past and a pair of malevolent, omniscient white owls as guards.

Katy Guest: Chastity and Futility, the book launch twins

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

We were eating smoked salmon and melted vodka jelly in a boiling central London restaurant recently when Glen David Gold said to Sarah Waters, "We need to talk about futility." Or rather he said, "We need to talk about Futility," because both authors had just read William Gerhardie's out-of-print 1922 novel and turned out to be eloquent admirers of it. At that moment I almost wished Gold were less well-mannered than he clearly is and had not drawn me charmingly into the conversation; I could have sat back and selfishly listened to the two writers talk all evening.

Karen Fossum: 'I knew a murderer; I knew the victim too'

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Along the 19th-century boulevard beside the offices of Karin Fossum's publisher is a long aspect rolling out to the Oslofjord. The morning light glints off its surface. It's a sight of calmness and yet a little melancholy. This is Norway's appeal: a combination of widescreen beauty and sorrow. This might be the home of the midnight sun, but conversely it is plunged into a soul-sapping gloom for the long winter months. It's the land of Edvard Munch and Henrik Ibsen, of high suicide rates and soaring taxation. But, oh, those views. Those vistas of silver birch and mirror-smooth fjords. It's these stark contrasts that Fossum captures in her bestselling Inspector Sejer crime series, the ninth of which, The Water's Edge, is published in Britain this month.

Toby Young: Tom Shone takes on the all-powerful cult of Alcoholics Anonymous

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Over the past 10 years, the recovery movement has emerged as one of the staples of contemporary literature. Indeed, no misery memoir is complete without a description of the author's drug or alcohol addiction and his or her subsequent involvement in a 12-step programme. As a general rule, organisations such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous are treated with great reverence – without them, the authors wouldn't be alive today, etc, etc.

Cultural Life: Kamila Shamsie, author

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Boyd Tonkin: Listen to all the voices of Africa

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It can can take quite a time for outsiders to appreciate the good things that come out of Africa. This spring's National Theatre production of Death and the King's Horseman by Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka proved a revelation. Some 35 years after the play's composition, London theatre-goers at last had the chance to savour its spectacular blend of Greek tragedy, Yoruba tradition, psychological enquiry and political satire. Somehow, Soyinka had passed – as, to a degree, did his contemporaries Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o – from maverick to monument. This transition can skip the stage at which large audiences enjoy the full flavour of a writer's work.

One Minute With: Patrick Neate

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Carol Ann Duffy : 'I was told to get a proper job'

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Last time Carol Ann Duffy met the Queen, she told her that Kipling was "exceedingly good". Let me get this straight. Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Defender of the Faith, Duchess of Edinburgh, Sovereign of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, etc, etc, better known for her interest in livery than literature, made a pronouncement to a bisexual single mother about poetry. Now the bisexual single mother is her poet laureate, perhaps she'll quip about "Queen Kong". Or maybe "Queen Herod", or maybe "Mrs Midas", or maybe one of the other witty reimaginings of myth and history that peopled Duffy's bestselling poetry collection, The World's Wife. If the Queen likes Kipling, she'll love The World's Wife.

Know your Fielding from your Faulks? Take part in our novel contest...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Thirty eight of the finest writers working today have contributed short stories to Ox-Tales, a collection of four volumes loosely themed around the elements of air, earth, fire and water. Published by Profile Books every copy sold raises at least 50p for Oxfam.

Byron Rogers: Confessions of an accidental philanderer

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:00:25 GMT

The letter came at just after 11am, which was the time the mail came round in the offices of the Telegraph Magazine, then just off Fleet Street.

Byron Rogers: My life as a lothario

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:00:25 GMT

The letter came at just after 11am, which was the time the mail came round in the offices of the Telegraph Magazine, then just off Fleet Street.

The art of book cover design

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The Big Question: What is the Codex Sinaiticus, and what does it reveal about the Bible?

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Laura Dockrill: A poet for the iPod generation

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Neither ugly nor shy, Laura Dockrill is "loving life" and, if you'll pardon the rhyme, it's easy to see why. A headline act at this month's Latitude festival, the young poet will this weekend launch her first novel and second book with a "magical afternoon of poetry, music and stories" at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, where she will be supported by her best friend, the singer Kate Nash.

Larry Ryan: Writing like the birds sing - revisiting 'The Great Gatsby'

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:39:09 GMT

If, like me, you can return to F Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby over and over again, then US writer Kurt Anderson's show Studio 360 on Public Radio International, makes for good listening

Ox-Tales: The Desert Torso

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:01:54 GMT

A man walks through the desert carrying a stone torso. It is all ribs and a swooping concaveness of stomach, a network of veins running web-like across the taut skin.

Wendy Perriam: How grief drove the author to writing a new collection of haunting short stories

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

We're perched in a coffee shop in central London waiting for the photographer, who has just phoned to say he is five minutes away. "Don't you think we ought to buy something?" Wendy Perriam asks, glancing nervously towards the staff at the counter. "They might not like us taking up their seats and not buying anything." It is a line that one of her characters could so easily have spoken. For the past quarter of a century, Perriam has been humorously chronicling the lives and inhibitions of those who habitually feel anxious, disappointed, sidelined or embittered. After 15 novels, including Cuckoo, Born of a Woman and Bird Inside, the woman who used to describe herself as "Surbiton's only living writer" (it finally got too much even for her and she has now decamped to a flat in central London) has turned her attention to short stories and is this month publishing her sixth collection, The Queen's Margarine.

Forgotten authors No.37: Kathleen Winsor

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Authors are prone to notoriety. Any printed display of opinion is bound to raise questions, and then there's the matter of censorship. In this case, censorship in America – something Kathleen Winsor (1919-2003) discovered the hard way. Winsor was a smart, energetic sports columnist who subsequently became fascinated by the Restoration period. After years of research, she produced a sprawling fifth draft of a novel around 2,500 pages long. Her publishers hacked it down to a more manageable size, just under 1,000 pages, and it appeared in 1944 as Forever Amber. The epic was a love letter to London, a bodice-ripping romp through plague and fire, taking in the society chatter and politics of the times. There were a few mildly titillating passages, and the book was generally well received by critics, who saw parallels between the enduring Restoration wives and their wartime counterparts. It didn't hurt that the attractive author, then 24, was seductively photographed for her press releases.

The Word On: Chris Anderson

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

"It will be interesting to see if the author gives his book (entitled Free) away for free. It seems to work pretty well for Cory Doctorow for his great sci-fi novels. A book like Free is probably even more appropriate for this model since having the author come to speak about the concepts behind the book and getting onto speaking panels is a substantial market opportunity, especially in an economic downturn."

Boyd Tonkin: A feast of stories for a planet in want

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Charity anthologies have, to be frank, a less than glorious name in the publishing business. Too often, the literary great and good respond to the pricking of their conscience by finding – to car-crash metaphors – a damp squib in the bottom drawer. If good causes enlist bad stories (or poems, or essays), who benefits – or cares? One would expect more punch and panache from any project that merged the stature and talents of Oxfam and Profile Books under the direction of Rough Guides founder, and Profile editor, Mark Ellingham. And so, given the very rare forgettable misfire, it proves with the four volumes of Ox-Tales (Profile, £5 each).

One Minute With: Lesley Lokko

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:00:01 GMT