21 MAY, 2012 by Maria Popova “Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster.” In 1939, Gertrude Stein penned her first children’s book, The World Is Round, whose dramatic story was featured in this two-part omnibus of obscure children’s books by famous authors of “adult” literature. The following year, Stein wrote an intended follow-up, titled To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays — a fine addition to my well-documented obsession with unusual alphabet books. But publisher after publisher rejected the manuscript as too complex for children. (One must wonder what Maurice Sendak might have said to that.) The book was never published in Stein’s lifetime. In 1957, more than ... Continue reading →

This evening, the New Yorker Fiction Department (@NYerFiction) will start tweeting Jennifer Egan’s new story “Black Box,” which will appear in its entirety in the Science Fiction Issue, out on Monday. We asked Egan what inspired her to structure her story in paragraphs of a hundred and forty characters or fewer. Several of my long-standing fictional interests converged in the writing of “Black Box.” One involves fiction that takes the form of lists; stories that appear to be told inadvertently, using a narrator’s notes to him or herself. My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned,” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from descriptions ... Continue reading →

Visual poetics … Alison Bechdel's graphic novel If any kind of human relationship can be called typically baroque, it's that between a woman and her mother. Prudent men regard the intricacies of this terrain with awe. Even in fairly tranquil mother-daughter bonds there are flourishes of longing, resentment and tenderness that no sensible person would ever try to chart. Alison Bechdel is not a sensible person, as her alter egos – first in her comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, more recently in her celebrated graphic memoir Fun Home and this sequel, Are You My Mother? – demonstrate. The cartoon version of Bechdel is boyish and fretful, a sort of lesbian Woody Allen, equally prone to seizure by doubt or by the giddy, centrifugal ... Continue reading →

When you consider that, at the last count, 118,000 books were published in 2011 alone, of which 21,000 were adult fiction, that’s slim pickings indeed. (Authors who published their work decades or even centuries ago aren’t counted.) Within this modern bestselling elite there is an even more exclusive club – those who have sold more than one million copies of more than one book. There are only nine authors who have achieved this: Rowling (eight books have topped a million sales), Dan Brown (five), Stephenie Meyer (four), Stieg Larsson and Philip Pullman (both three), Julia Donaldson, Khaled Hosseini and Fielding (both two). It is perhaps unsurprising that all of these authors have had film adaptations made of their books. Lucy Luck, literary agent of Lucy ... Continue reading →

Street celebrations in Bucharest after Ceausescu's fall in 1989. Photograph: Bernard Bisson/Sygma/Corbis "The news from Bucharest is that the regime is crumbling/ the way the rocks on the shore erode – by seeming not to." The lines are from Patrick McGuinness's 2010 collection, Jilted City, in what claimed to be a translation from the work of Liviu Campanu, a Romanian poet. In fact they were by McGuinness, who edited Campanu into the history of the Ceausescu regime, reversing the absurd process by which its real dissident authors were edited out. The invented voice gave McGuinness licence to reflect on the end of Romania's communist era but it also enriched the book's meditation on other endings, looking back to earlier poems about the loss of a ... Continue reading →

The town in Grace McCleen's first novel is ruled by the steelworks. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters Judith McPherson is 10. She lives with her father John in a mountain valley, in a town of "broken windows and men with broken teeth". While the town is ruled by the steelworks, the McPhersons are ruled by the Bible. They belong to a sect, the Brothers, who study it daily and carry its warnings of imminent apocalypse from door to unwelcoming door. In her bedroom, where her father never sets foot, Judith has built a better world, with papier-mâché mountains and clingfilm rivers, fields of brown corduroy and a mirror for the sea. "An acorn cup becomes a bowl, toothpaste caps funnels for ocean liners, twigs knees for an ... Continue reading →

Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk Not much ever happens to Harold Fry, a former brewery manager who lives in comfortable retirement in a neat little suburb on the south coast. It takes an unexpected letter to spur him out of his chair. Queenie Hennessy, an old colleague whom he has not thought about in years, has written from a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed to explain that she has cancer and has little time to live. Disturbed by the news, Harold composes a brief, sympathetic response and sets out to deliver it – by hand. And on foot. For most avid hikers, an 87-day trek the length of the country would require air-cushioned soles, sturdy camping equipment and multiple layers of high-tech waterproof clothing. Harold does it in ... Continue reading →