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Modern comic genius: the graphic art that's not just for geeks

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Walk into the ICA this weekend and you won't find the usual contemporary art installations. For the next three weeks it's all about art with a cool comic-book twist. At the sixth Comica festival, the annual London gathering of some of the biggest international comic and graphic novel writers and artists around, hip twentysomethings will be watching their heroes drawing a collaborative comic strip live on to the wall and being projected into the bar next door. There will be the latest comic anthologies for sale, DJs, film screenings and talks by some of the biggest names in the comic-book business, including the co-founder of the Forbidden Planet shops, Mike Lake, and Bryan Talbot, author of the first British graphic novel, giving an illustrated lecture on his new steampunk detective thriller Grandville.

Modern comic genius: not just for geeks

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

The Word On: Penguin's twitterature

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Twitterature: The World's Greatest books Retold Through Twitter, is an irreverent, profane and sometimes brilliant collection...The Tweets of (authors) Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman combine the knowledge of an English major with the snarky shorthand of a teenager's text message"

One Minute With: Marian Keyes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Jeanette Winterson: 'You shouldn't grow up in public, it's a really bad idea'

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Jeanette Winterson's children's books involve travelling in time, and visiting her in her London flat is like doing precisely that. She lives over Verde's, a quaint, characterful caf/deli in Spitalfields, in a 1780s building she painstakingly restored from roofless dereliction. She declined a very lucrative offer from a coffee shop chain to rent the downstairs, because she "didn't like the coffee and didn't like the politics", and came to an arrangement with chef, Harvey Cabanis, trained by Fergus Henderson of St John's, who now serves wild rabbit soup and suckling pig to local bankers a menu so up-to-the-minute it seems like 18th-century cuisine. Upstairs, we talk in a room with rust-red walls, grey-green wooden panelling and a roaring fire that feels like Dr Johnson's house; it turns out that the next room has floorboards from a coffee house he and Boswell used to frequent.

The Diary: Paul Auster; Jerry Moffat; Punch magazine; Penny Woolcock

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Arifa Akbar: Why always write in a room of one's own?

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Are writers born or do they emerge after a year of being 'workshopped' on a creative writing course? There is evidence either way Dickens didn't sit through an MA in the fens, yet the starry alumni graduating from Iowa's Writers' Worshop and the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing MA hint at the fact that writing fiction is not a given birthright, but a learned art.

David Walliams: Roald Dahl and me

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Before I started writing my first children's novel, The Boy in the Dress, I made a big mistake. I decided to re-read some of the books I had loved as a child. I wanted to try to gauge the right tone for a book for children, after years of co-writing an adult comedy show. I devoured Stig of the Dump, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and – my absolute favourite – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This last one instantly made me want to give up writing. It was perfect.

Holmes sweet Holmes: Literature's greatest sleuth

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:33 GMT

Along with Santa Claus and Mickey Mouse, he is one of the three best-known personalities on the planet. Orson Welles called him "the world's most famous man who never was", though to millions across the globe he was as real as their family doctor. To a surprising number, he still is.

Marian Keyes: The chick-lit author discusses depression, alcoholism and rape

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

When Marian Keyes announces part way through our interview that she has had it up to here "with this cupcake malarkey", it's hard not to be a little taken aback. A chick-lit queen who doesn't like cupcakes? The covers of her books are regularly decorated in all things sweet and girlie. Even her London flat, where we're talking now, is perched above an actual patisserie.

Forgotten authors No. 41: Julia O'Faolain

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

It would have been more surprising if Julia O'Faolain hadn't become a writer. Born in 1932, she was the daughter of two successful authors. Her father was Sean O'Faolain, an Irish short-story writer who fought for the Republicans during the Irish civil war, and made bombs which her mother smuggled for the IRA. He was also made the Saoi of Aosdána, the highest honour in Ireland for the Arts.

Bundoran Shore: A new ghost story by John Walsh

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

I begged him to haunt me. Just do it, darling, I said. Come to me in the night. I won't mind. You have my complete permission.

One Minute With: John O'Farrell

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Boyd Tonkin: Islands of love in a sea of suspicion

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Sometimes the flesh-creeping power of punditry in Britain far outstrips any stunt that you may meet on Halloween. The media fright-masks came out in force this week. Furious columnists gave the bruised Nick Griffin a get-well-soon present in the shape of claims that crafty ministers and their shadowy advisers had conspired to foist a multi-cultural society on Britain. The government responded with appeasing blather about keeping people out. As it happens, I spent my Saturday at the Imperial War Museum. Its special exhibition, "From War to Windrush", shows how thousands of Caribbean men and women crossed oceans and moved mountains to persuade ministers that they should be allowed to fight, and die, for this country in both world wars. Which, of course, they did.

Observations: Work at the London Library continues on the quiet

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

"The true university of these days," said Thomas Carlyle, founder of the extraordinary London Library in 1841, "is a collection of books." Even if most of them are currently ensconced and partitioned off in what has become a complex Rubik's Cube of a building site in which the dusty and occasionally clangorous work of 80 tradesmen proceeds, virtually unnoticed, within feet of the library's musing members.

The Diary: Chrissie Hynde; London International Mime Festival; Marian Keyes; VOBO awards; National Portrait Gallery

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Cultural Life: Jackie collins, author

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Innocence of youth: How Paul Auster excavated his own past for his latest novel

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Paul Auster has just loped out of Sweet Melissa, an icing-sugar pink patisserie near his home in Park Slope, when the waitress who has buzzed around our table delivering bowls of soup and plates of quiche, rushes over to inquire after him. I imagine she is keen to share her views on his work - New Yorkers are fierce fans and he has a starry status in this literary square mile of Brooklyn - or admire his Gothic good looks. The most infatuated have been known to follow him across town.

Poisoned chalice: A band of brave authors has taken on the unenviable task of writing sequels to classics such as Winnie-the-Pooh

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

For the first time in decades I feel the uncertainty that I last felt in my teenage years." The Irish author Eoin Colfer isn't talking about the birth of a new child or the dawn of a new relationship, but rather tackling a book full of characters and ideas that weren't his own.

Boyd Tonkin: 'Back to the shop, Mr John': snobbery lives

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

As a rule, emotional climaxes in the cinema take place before the closing credits roll. Yet many viewers may come away from Bright Star, Jane Campion's beautiful film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, believing that none of the perfectly-pitched scenes that precede it could match the final reading of "Ode to a Nightingale" over a blank screen studded with the usual litany of Best Boys and Foley Recordists. Part of Campion's achievement is make us feel the power of Keats's verse so keenly that only his undecorated words can make sense of "the weariness, the fever and the fret" that her film portrays.

One Minute With: Kate Mosse

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Cooking up a storm: John Irving's latest saga reveals the secrets of authors and chefs alike

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

John Irving, who never gives short measure, treats the readers of his 12th novel to a double master-class in the arts of writing – and of cooking. As stuffed and spiced with the pleasures of slow-roasted plot and savoury digression as any of his books, Last Night in Twisted River (Bloomsbury, £18.99) can with equal relish argue that "rewriting was writing" against the purveyors of "first-draft gibberish" and disclose the secret ingredient for perfect pizza. It's honey. "I made pizza dough for years and years, and honey was a late discovery," says the creator of generously-portioned bestsellers, whose prowess in the wrestling ring has until now overshadowed his gourmet side.

Cultural Life: Audrey Niffenegger, author

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Forgotten authors No.40: BS Johnson

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:00:54 GMT

We had to reach him sooner or later. BS Johnson is the ultimate forgotten author, born in 1933, dead at 40, beloved by critics, overlooked by the public. He didn’t write much – seven slender novels of increasing peculiarity, a handful of plays and short stories – but enough to set him at the forefront of the British avant-garde. He was an unashamed experimentalist frustrated by linear storytelling, who rejected the Dickensian limitations of the novel, earning the gratitude of Anthony Burgess and the enmity of Peter Ayckroyd. Perhaps he was born too early; how he would have loved the playfulness of the internet.

Life in a cold climate: How Sara Wheeler is shaking up Arctic exploration

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Adjusting a daringly short black velvet dress and looking down at the girlie pink socks she has folded over her black boots, Sara Wheeler pronounces, "I don't do any sledge-pulling and I'm not interested in sledge-pulling." For the glamorous polar travel writer, whose grey pixie hair, kohled eyes and shocking-pink lipstick make her look a million miles from her Gore-Tex-clad contemporaries, sledge-pulling is a distraction from the real business of describing the world's extremities. "I think that to a certain extent we've got used to using the Arctic and the Antarctic as testing grounds," she explains. "Once upon a time, they had to be, because we didn't know what was there, but now those times have gone and we've got to look for something else. I find most of today's frozen-beard endeavours quite stunt-ish."