October 2009

Alexandra Siy’s new book CARS ON MARS: Roving the Red Planet came out this summer and has earned starred reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal. “Book for Books” is her promotion for schools who book their 2009-10 author visit before the end of November. Receive a free box of books containing each of her titles when you schedule your visit.
Siy’s book SNEEZE! won the 2008 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. She accepted the prize last July in Ann Arbor, MI at the annual meeting of physics teachers.

This is the foreword to the Greek edition of Ballard’s Miracles of Life, due to be published by Oxy in November 2009.
In 2006 I interviewed Jim Ballard. I was nervous at the thought of matching wits with this towering figure but my anxiety was quickly banished, for he was a charming and generous conversationalist. Although taxed from the recent discovery of the cancer that would claim him, he applied his blowtorch intelligence to everything from CSI and the ‘soft fascism’ of consumer culture to the surreality of having an English queen as an Australian head of state, weaving such cultural flashpoints in among the warps and wefts of a philosophy that has sustained his writing across 19 novels and around 100 short stories. Performing a similar function, but in reverse, his wonderful memoir contextualises some of the darkest and strangest corners of his fiction – as elements hotwired into his life.
It was never easy, perhaps not even possible for Ballard to separate his life from his work. Nominally English, he was born in Shanghai and lived in the expatriate...

NEHST STUDIOS Inks Production Deal with Little, Brown Co Publishing
Popular Matt Christopher Book Series to Hit the Big Screen
(May 13, 2009) – Larry Meistrich helmed NEHST Studios, a film production, financing and distribution company, has acquired production rights to the popular Matt Christopher sports book series.  Meistrich plans to start by developing films based on the books, beginning with “The Kid Who Only Hit Homers” and “The Basket Counts.”
Nehst signed the book rights agreement with Little, Brown and Company Publishing.  Little, Brown inked similar deals with their successful book series “Gossip Girl” and Twilight.”   The Matt Christopher Sports books have been printed in more than 30 countries and sold more than 36 million copies world-wide.  These books feature athletics as a vehicle to tell morality and character-building stories.
Ari Friedman and Larry Meistrich will produce the films.  Wayne Chesler has been tapped to direct and pen the screenplays.  Chesler has produced and directed both sports and children’s programming for 15 years.
“My favorite books as a kid were the Matt Christopher sports books.  Thirty years later, my fourth grade son, came home with a book and a smile, telling me ho...

A group biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and George V by
Miranda Carter shows that Queen Victoria's descendants were spineless, says
Anthony Howard

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Image: JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).
by David Cunningham
There are few concepts in contemporary social and cultural theory whose meaning is so apparently nebulous, and whose historical novelty (or even reality) is so disputed, as that of ‘globalisation’. Yet, for better or worse, the questions that it serves to frame are ones that increasingly work to define a trans-disciplinary problematic across all the humanities and social sciences, as attested to by a range of celebrated publications in the last few years. In the case of the critical analysis of cultural and artistic production, perhaps of utmost importance has been the issue of the historical transformations being undergone by ‘local’ forms and practices in the face of the global generalization of capitalist relations of production and exchange; an issue which, for literary theory and criticism, goes beyond, and in some sense historically sublates, the specific problematic of post-colonialism.[1] As such, what is customarily thought to be at stake here might, in its broadest terms, be summarised i...

Dan Coxon
You have to give Jessica Anthony credit: in this current climate of MFA-educated clones it’s unusual to come across a truly unique narrator. We’ve all read plenty of Holden Caulfield rip-offs, or various takes on the Kerouac drifter-philosopher, the William Burroughs educated-junky, or the Paul Bowles traveller-adventurer. There haven’t been too many Hungarian meat-selling dwarves who live in an abandoned bus in a Pennsylvanian field, though.
In case that makes Anthony’s The Convalescent sound like a freakish novelty, we should point out that she’s an outstanding young talent, and was the inaugural winner of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award in 2004. While there will undoubtedly be plenty of copies of her debut novel sold on the basis of its eccentric subject matter, it has far more going for it than simply cheap laughs and a handful of meat anecdotes. There are echoes of Grass and Gogol in its embracing of the ridiculous and the sublime in equal measure, and you can’t help feeling that Jessica Anthony must have lived in Eastern Europe in a previous life.
The convalescent of the title is Rovar Pfleigman, a mute dwarf descended from a peculiar line of Hungarian misfits and failures. Interspersed with his story ...

The travails of Bill Clinton                                             
Morag Fraser savours two new accounts of Bill Clinton’s fraught presidency of the United States, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President by Taylor Branch and The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr by Ken Gormley.
 Read the full review
                                                                                                                                                             
‘Courage in your own’
Jill Jolliffe admires Shirley Shackleton’s conviction in The Circle of Silence, a personal telling of the ‘Balibo Five’ killings, while identifying partisan flaws in her testimony.