Bookgeeks goes to the movies – with STUDIO Magazine
Bookgeeks is pleased to announce that more people than ever will soon be reading our reviews – courtesy of the new digital magazine STUDIO. Set to launch this summer is STUDIO, Britain’s first film magazine aimed at a female audience. Packed with witty editorial and Hollywood news, this monthly digital title is aimed at women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and aspires towards fulfilling the needs of women who are enthusiastic about Hollywood film and entertainment who are overlooked and dissatisfied by current titles.
An innovative and new monthly digital publication, STUDIO will be available for readers to buy, search inside, read, and save its digital content worldwide; and can be accessed on a variety of devices, including both PC and Mac desktop computers, iPads, iPhones and other Android tablets.
STUDIO will be launching on 12 August 2011 featuring an exclusive interview with its very first covergirl – Anne Hathaway. Initially aimed at the UK market, developments are planned to make it appealing to English speaking countries worldwide; and will be hosted and distributed by Zinio – the world’s largest digital newsstand.
STUDIO regular sections comprise:
- Hollywood Happenings – a light-hearted look at what is happening in Hollywood.
- First Look – a sneak peek into what films will be hitting our screens.
- Style Spy – front row on the red carpet at the latest premiere and award ceremony.
- Steal That Style – exclusive interviews with Hollywood’s top make-up artists to the stars.
- Plus exclusive interviews, reviews and articles on topical events within the film and entertainment industry.
Bookgeeks’ contingent of women reviewers will be providing the contents of the book review pages, focusing on books that have been or will be making it to the silver screen.
Find out more at www.studiomagonline.com and you can buy issue one here.
The Poems of Czeslaw Milosz, read by Stephen Fry
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
–Ezra Pound
Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry reflects equally the hidden, quiet, corners of everyday life and the glaring spotlight of world events. It shows its readers the power found in memory and the delicacy found in the finest sort of storytelling. It takes some of the most brutal events in history and holds them up to the light, demanding that they be remembered, asking that we begin to live as our better selves.
This collection is part of the “I, Culture” celebration, a world-wide event where Poland marks its EU presidency in cities across the world with celebrations of Polish culture. This part, in particular, follows on from the celebrations of the centenary of Milosz’s birth on June 30th and features the captivating voice of Stephen Fry.
The poems are selected from books written throughout Milosz’s life and allow the listeners into a collection that ranges from fond memories to terrifying warnings. Early on, “Campo Dei Fiori” gives us a glimpse into the poet as an advocate and living memory for the horror that mankind inflicts on itself. The Campo Dei Fiori is a place where daily life seems light and happy, full of “baskets of olives and lemons/cobbles spattered with wine”, but Milosz refuses to let the gloss of everyday life cover up the reality that, once, not all that long ago, “On this same square/they burned Giordano Bruno”. Here, at least, history haunts a place, no matter how firmly its current residents cling to the pleasures of everyday life. But in a darker place, in the Warsaw of the Nazi occupation and the ghetto, people lived their everyday lives alongside the death, and the terror:
At times wind from the burning
Would drift dark kites along
And riders on the carousel
Caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
Blew open the skirts of the girls
And the crowds were laughing
On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
A Summer of Drowning, by John Burnside
This is an ethereal, eerie and quirky book, much because it is set in Kvaloya, a small North Norway island in the Arctic Circle, exposed to white nights and a captivating spectral atmosphere. It follows the reflections of Liv, now 28 years old, retelling her memories from the summer 10 years ago, when two male classmates drowned in curious circumstances, followed by the strange disappearance of three other islanders.
Intertwined into this is the folklore of Hulda, a wild spirit associated with tempting, beguiling and luring susceptible men to their death; thus interposing a supernatural element to the story. Read more
The Story of Beautiful Girl, by Rachel Simon
The twentieth century was not a kind one for Americans with any sort of disability that could be perceived as affecting their mental capacity. Rachel Simon’s Story of Beautiful Girl explores this damning past and manages to expose its darkest sides without robbing its victims of dignity and honour.
Lynnie isn’t quite all there, and her family caved to society’s pressure to commit her to one of the institutions that dotted America during the first few decades across which this ambitious novel spans. Here, she has become exposed to the seedy underbelly of humanity, but she has also found the love of a deaf man whose illiteracy has cost him everything – but also led him to her.
A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
It’s a mark of how long GRRM makes his fans wait that this website was not even conceived of when I read this book’s predecessor – but the long hiatus aside, the question must be, was it worth that wait? The answer: an emphatic, resounding, roaring YES!
My appetites awoken by the televisual feast that was HBO’s Game of Thrones, the time was ripe to pick up this 1,000 page monster tome, and it does not disappoint. For those who need reminding, this is effectively the second part of one massive book, following on from previous book A Feast for Crows. That volume dealt with events in Westeros, while this one handles those on the periphery: at the Wall, in the Free Cities, in the Iron Isles, and so on – so some characters have not actually been encountered since A Storm of Swords (published in the year 2000!). By the end Martin has unified these two streams of action, with some Westerosi events and characters, and future volumes will not be divided in this way (which is no bad thing).
Forgetting Zoe, by Ray Robinson
Following two previous award winning books, Ray Robinson’s third novel will not disappoint. It features the abduction, capture, cruel and manipulative treatment of a young girl, which he describes as a story inspired by real events.
Thurman Hayes has led a disconnected and tormented childhood. Following the death of his parents and in particular upon escaping the wrath of his father, he is left in an isolated ranch in Arizona, complete with nuclear bunker. Zoe Nelson is an independent, headstrong, intelligent (if sometimes a detached) 10 year old, living with her mother, a loving but flawed character on the previously Nordic island of Unnr, North Canada. Read more
Prison Writing, by Margie Orford
In 1990 Nelson Mandela emerged, like a genie from a bottle, from Victor Verster prison. He went on to work his political magic, fashioning a rainbow nation that arcs, at times, above the murk of South Africa’s history. Seventeen years after Mandela’s release, years that I had spent trying to fathom the criminal violence that blights our democracy, I returned to that same prison. I was one of a group of writers invited by the Franschhoek literary festival to attend a prize-giving ceremony for poetry written by inmates and to spend an hour with them. At the end of the event, a shy young murderer asked me if I would come back. I said I would. It was quickly organised and I did, returning every Friday to teach creative writing to a group of 15 maximum-security prisoners.
The first time I drive out to the prison I am afraid. Afraid of what it will mean to work so intimately with the men who fill our newspapers with broken bodies and turn our dreams into nightmares. The guard waves me through the prison gates and I drive past the lawns, the beds of roses; the public face of the prison.
It is only when I turn past a stand of blue gums that I see the prison itself. It is made of mesh, a giant aviary, three storeys suspended between metal poles. There is bedding hanging from the steel bars. Thin brown hands extend through the bars rattling spoons against the mesh.
A gate opens and a group of men in orange surge towards me through a tunnel of razor wire.
“Your guys from maximum,” says the education officer who has made this mad scheme possible. They are tattooed and hard-bodied, bigger and tougher than the denim-clad juveniles coming towards me from the opposite direction.
I follow them into the gym. There are weights at one end, basketball hoops at the other. I have been allocated a corner and the 15 men I will be working with cluster desks around me. Other men – 50 or more, all in orange – file in after me. They pick up weights, watch me, ask the men with me what we are doing; only drifting off when the wardens insist.
Where to start unravelling the threads that twinned these men with me?
Childhood seems like the time in their lives that we can manage together. Glimpses of the boys they once were emerge in anecdotes of casual deprivation. A beating with a belt; a fishing trip on a boat with a father briefly sober; angry mothers with blackened eyes and too many children; school attempted and failed. For one man, though, there was a blue-and-yellow bike for his ninth birthday.
It is hard not to touch an arm here, a hand. Touch is a language that comes easily to me, but how does one speak it in a men’s prison? A headache pulses, twisting and lumping the muscles on my scalp, knotting my shoulders. I do not have a way to integrate the humanity of these men, what we share, with what they did that brought them to this place.
We take a break halfway through the three hours. I need the loo but there are no facilities for women. An armed warder leads me to a bathroom. He searches it. There is nobody hiding, but the door does not lock so he stands guard outside. In that moment, silence falls in the gym.
The workshops settle into a rhythm. I go out every Friday, we talk, we work, we write. We read poetry together. “My Papa’s Waltz”, a clean-lined beauty by Theodore Roethke, is about fatherhood and fear and yearning. For these men, there is an umbilical connection of form and subject matter. For the first time most of the men read their poems about absent, or feared, or longed-for fathers.
Then a tattooed gangster stands up and reads aloud for the first time. I suggest that he sends his poem home. Some weeks later, he tells me, his ex-girlfriend brought his six-year-old son to visit.
“I held him,” he points to his chest. “I can feel him in my heart.”
I think of that little boy who has a poem from his father telling him how he wanted to be a father to him, even if he failed; telling him that he loved him even if he did not know how. It is more than many boys have. It was more than the 15 men I worked with had.
One dropped stitch caught, perhaps, in an unravelling social fabric.
At the end of the year I had piles of handwritten stories and poetry on my desk. The paper carries with it the unique smell of the prison: a dusty grey hopelessness of lives turned to ash. It turns the stomach, but working with these men has helped me understand why South Africa is so violent. It also taught me to find a connection between those we discard through fear, through revulsion at what they have done, the families they have shattered, the violence they perpetrate.
The only path open to many township boys is so hard, so brutal that it annihilates the young and vulnerable self, the “bud” self, if I can call it that, that desires community, family and love.
Rashied Wewers, the oldest man in the class, wrote this for me as a farewell note:
I am
A book with a damaged cover, but what is
Written between the lines could save a country
From a disaster.
Margie Orford is an award-winning journalist, photographer, film director, author and Fulbright scholar. Born in London, she grew up in southern Africa. She was detained as a student activist during the State of Emergency in 1985 and wrote her finals in prison. She lives in Cape Town with her husband and three daughters. Her novel Daddy’s Girl will be published this month.
Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear
Greg Bear used to be one of my favourite SF authors, signifying a guarantee of quality. Eon (1985), Darwin’s Radio (1999) and Blood Music (1985) are in my all-time favourites list. However, 2008’s City at the End of Time left me cold and disappointed. I picked up Bear’s latest with low expectations, especially as the blurb informed me the novel was “edge of your seat thriller”. I can’t imagine why the publisher’s thought that would appeal to Bear’s fans, or hard SF fans in general. Maybe they thought they might mislead a more contemporary readership into picking up the book.
The trope is a familiar one. A protagonist wakes up in a mystery location with no memory of who he is or how he came to be there. This time, however, the man is in a space shape apparently lost and damaged. He is torn from a dream of a newly colonised planet. He is naked, wet and freezing. The purpose and destination of the ship are unknown. The design of the vessel is curious at best and the remaining crew are a mixed bag of creatures and people, none of whom appear to have any answers. There are even monsters roaming the corridors. Throughout the course of the novel, our protagonist must discover who he is, and the purpose of the mission. He must make alliances with characters who are not all they initially appear to be. He must decode the meaning of the dream he recalls more and more.
Thomas Enger
Thomas Enger (b. 1973) previously worked as a journalist. Burned is his first novel. As well as writing, he also composes music. He lives in Oslo and is currently at work on Pierced, the next novel in the Henning Juul Series.
Smokeheads, by Doug Johnstone
Doug Johnstone has a PhD in Nuclear Physics. However, it’s conceivable he knows far less about the properties of the atom than he does about whisky. As a real ale lover myself, I stand in awe of Johnstone’s knowledge of Scotch, discussed at great length in his new book, Smokeheads.
Smokeheads is the tale of a quartet of old university friends, gathered together for a weekend on the island of Islay for the purposes of whisky appreciation and high-grade cocaine abuse. Their trip, however, is ill-starred in the extreme, and soon descends into the realm of nightmare.
Eisenhorn (Eisenhorn Omnibus), by Dan Abnett
Gregor Eisenhorn is an Inquisitor; a roaming free agent belonging to an enormous galaxy-spanning network tasked with protecting the Imperium of Man from the deadly threats of the alien, the mutant and the heretic.
Eisenhorn might then present a daunting prospect: a sci-fi epic comprising seven hundred and fifty pages of densely packed text in three novels and two linking short stories, set in the deep and almost impenetrable mythos of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k.
White Oleander, by Janet Fitch
I first read White Oleander in 2004, and was completely consumed by it. Seven years later, with limited memory of the details of the story, I have just re-read it, and found myself easily and eagerly drawn in once again.
Astrid Magnussen’s mother, Ingrid, is imprisoned for the murder of her lover when Astrid is twelve years old. For the next six years, the reader is transported into a world of multiple Los Angeles foster and group homes, as Astrid struggles to find her own identity, and endure life without her dominant matriarch. While Ingrid is physically absent for a lot of the book, the reader is kept in regular contact by the letters she writes to Astrid from prison. She is a haunting presence full of perplexing contradictions. Fitch skilfully uses the poisonous beauty of the always-thriving oleander flower as a representation of Ingrid, and the reader is constantly reminded of this significance throughout the book. The influence Ingrid has over her daughter, even from behind bars, is compulsive, as Astrid’s feelings towards her mother keep shifting between loathing, longing, and a strange, twisted infatuation. Read more
A second look at Warrior of Rome: Fire in the East, by Harry Sidebottom
Preserved Killick’s distant ancestor, back in the middle of the third century AD, was a man called Calgacus. If you know what I’m talking about then you know this is a book worth reading.
For reasons unknown the Roman Emperor has selected Marcus Clodius Ballista, Knight of Rome, Duke of the Riverbanks, Barbarian warrior and incidentally murderer of the previous emperor, to take command of the imperial forces on the Syrian border and there to hold the city of Arete against assault from the Sassanids. Why choose him, a northerner with little knowledge of the East, no contacts and no experience there? Is he expected to succeed or to fail? Is this a gift horse or a poisoned chalice?
While he and his staff, including the grumbling Calgacus, journey from Italy to Arete they give us an easy lesson in the lives and times of third century Romans. Not a lesson in the events of the times but in the day to day activities and rituals and attitudes and expectations of military minds, setting the scene for the battles to come.
Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis
A depressing fact for struggling, unpublished authors; Less Than Zero was first published in 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis was just 21. While Ellis’ peer group gazed into their navels as is the wont of young writers, Ellis was busy putting together a novel USA Today described as “The Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation.” An apt description indeed; Less Than Zero examines history’s most disaffected generation, teens exposed to sex, drugs and obscene wealth, and offered virtually nothing by way of moral or ethical guidance from the over-indulgent parents who spawned them.
The book follows Clay, an 18-year old student returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas. Collected from LAX by his estranged girlfriend Blair, Clay hits the city’s party circuit, where he indulges almost incessantly in cocaine, and descends into a state of extreme apathy. Read more
The Quarry, by Johan Theorin
The Quarry is the third book by Swedish author Johan Theorin. A journalist by trade, Theorin has been richly rewarded for his novelistic exploits, winning a CWA Dagger for his debut, Echoes From the Dead, and the CWA International Award for the follow up, The Darkest Room.
The story deals with something of a part-time community in the Swedish island of Öland. Largely deserted during the winter months, Öland is populated during the summer by wealthy second home-owners. It is reminiscent of a Baltic Cornwall; steeped in the twin traditions of folklore and extractive industry. It’s residents throughout history have been superstitious folk, and nowhere are these superstitions more keenly felt than in the eponymous quarry. Now deserted, it is according to some, a place of great supernatural importance.
Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, by Signe Pike
Signe Pike had the life that high-powered girls aim towards–an editor at a prominent publishing house, living in NYC with a big apt, and a kooky, clear-eyed neighbor. Sounds like the set-up for the next Sandra Bullock/Jennifer Aniston chick-flick vehicle. Instead, rather than searching for a man, Pike gives it all up to go looking for faeries, wanting to understand where they’ve gone, and why people don’t believe in them anymore, especially in a time of so much world doom and apocalyptic gloom.
The bulk of Pike’s story focuses on her travels, first in Mexico, then England, Ireland, and Scotland over the course of one summer. Pike is thorough in her research, visiting people and places important to the world of faery believers, including the Isle of Man and Brian Froud, of The Dark Crystal and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairies. She dives into her project with the open-mind necessary for other worldly investigations, allowing herself to be led into the understand of belief. Meetings and conversations with folklorists and believers are taken as seriously as though she is discussing religion with scholars. All of her locations are picked out with informed care, Glastonbury Tor, The Fairy Bridge on the Isle of Man, Druid Mountain, and Findhorn in Scotland, and she kept detailed notes about her travels.
A Serpent Uncoiled, by Simon Spurrier
A Serpent Uncoiled is the second novel from North London’s Simon Spurrier. Spurrier, a man of many talents, is a decorated graphic novelist, screenwriter and writer of prose novels, and with this offering, invites us into a London more sordid and depraved than the worst imaginings of us mere mortals.
The protagonist is Dan Shaper, ex-underworld enforcer turned private eye (a term he loathes). Plagued by a sickness stemming from guilt at his misdeeds, he spends his days self-medicating with an arsenal of drugs that would shame Keith Moon. Building up a tolerance to the drugs, Shaper is forced into regular periods of nightmarish detox in order to sustain their long-term effectiveness. It is on the cusp of one such detox that Shaper is called upon by a enigmatic quasi-guru by the name of George Glass, and tasked with protecting him from his impending murder.
The Watchers, by Jon Steele
Three lives. One purpose. Save what’s left of paradise before all hell breaks lose
Three unlikely individuals are fated to fight an unimaginable evil. If they succeed they’ll safe the world as we know it, if they fail, literally all will be lost.
Marc Rochat is a young man living in the bell tower of the cathedral in Lausanne where he guards the bells and inhabits a world not quite like ours while he waits for the angel he was told would come. An angel he will have to save and send home.
Katherine, a beautiful high-class prostitute is convinced that her life is as good as it can get and completely unaware that she is in mortal danger. Jay Michael Harper is a private investigator who has no memories prior to the moment when he woke up in London and was summoned to Lausanne to find a disgraced Russian Olympic athlete. When these three individuals get together in the cathedral the final showdown is about to begin, and their chances are not looking good.
House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles, by Evelyn Juers
“The best writing occurs on a narrow ledge between fact and fiction”, states Evelyn Juers midway through The House of Exile. “That uneasy place the poet Wallace Stevens calls the metaphysical streets of the physical town”. She would say that, really. The House of Exile is described as a ‘collective biography’ but in reality it inhabits just such a street in just such a town. In his 2010 book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto David Shields called on contemporary artists to shake off the hackneyed garb of fictional plot and imaginative flight and bring art and reality together in their work. The House of Exile is precisely the sort of work that Shields’ book prophesies – a genre-blurring confluence of novelistic prose and historical documentation, primary sources mixed with fictional techniques and unashamed departures into the realm of speculation, amplifying the element of fiction contained within any biography.
Despite its novelistic style and fictional elements, The House of Exile is founded on biographical practice. It follows the Mann family – primarily Heinrich, the left-wing German novelist, activist and anti-fascist campaigner, and Thomas Mann, his more illustrious but less sympathetically portrayed younger brother – as they are forced to flee their homeland by the rise of the Nazis, and eventually driven across the Atlantic by the outbreak of WW2. However, though devoting plenty of time to reconstructing their personas out of historical detritus – their novels, diaries, pieces of correspondence, newspaper reports, testimonies of friends and associates – Juers’ vision is more panoramic than that of the conventional biographer. She assembles a loosely connected cast of peripatetic artists and intellectuals that encompasses some of the most important names in modern European letters: Musil, Doblin, Kafka, Benjamin, Brecht, Woolf, Joyce, Roth, Bloch. For anyone with an interest in continental modernism this is wonderfully rich material, yet the book’s narrative pacing and elegant design are such that it can be enjoyed without too much prior knowledge.
Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane
Amanda McCready has been kidnapped once before; in Gone Baby Gone Patrick Kenzie and his partner, Angela Gennaro, tracked her down when she was kidnapped at the age of four. Now sixteen, she has disappeared once again and the only person who appears to care is her aunt, Beatrix McCready, who approaches Kenzie and asks him for his help. But as he begins to dig into the case, a perplexing set of contradictions and a large amount of firepower conspire to confuse matters and attempt to put him off the scent. Will he untangle this web and find her, and will he be able to protect his own family in the process?
I’ve read every single book in Lehane’s Kenzie & Gennaro series, chronicling their adventures from A Drink Before the War to Prayers for Rain, and it fast became my favourite book series because of its stark adherence to a grey reality. The simplicity of the writing was carefully crafted and did nothing to detract from the complexity of the storylines but, instead, enhanced it and helped it shine. So when I picked up Moonlight Mile, the latest and last installment in this fabulous series, I looked forward to another foray into the Boston of Lehane’s imagination and the respect and clarity with which he describes aspects of the world that most people prefer to ignore or, worse, mock and trivialise.
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Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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