Polish show digs into Andy Warhol’s Slovakian roots

From: theartnewspaper.com

Exhibition in Krakow puts Pop artist’s work in context with his central European background

By Katarzyna Jagodzińska. Web only
Published online: 17 January 2013

"Andy Warhol: Contexts"at the International Cultural Centre, Krakow. Photo: Paweł Wodnicki 

 

Andy Warhol supposedly once said, “I am from nowhere.” The king of Pop art is remembered today as an icon and champion of the American dream—a celebrity rejoicing in the company of stars, a lover of glitter and glamour. But he was also an introvert hiding behind a wig and a camera. In his art, he combined the sacred with the profane, raising repetitiveness and superficiality to the level of high art.

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh but his roots go back to what is today Slovakia. His parents emigrated to America from the Miková village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and arrived in the industrial belt of the US. It was there that Andy Warhola (he later dropped the final “a”) grew up, the youngest of three children.

 He was raised in the moral traditions of the Ruthenians, based on the Greek-Catholic religion. He spoke with his mother Julia, to whom he was particularly attached, in Slovak. In New York, where his career began, he led the life of a celebrity, but he shared his apartment (a multi-storey building) with his mother and her memories of the Old World.

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Open Call: Sozopol Fiction Seminars 2013

http://www.ekf.bg/sozopol/apply/

 

Sozopol Fiction Seminars (23-26 May 2013)

The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation offers its sixth annual summer fiction writing seminar in the ancient town of Sozopol, Bulgaria. The seminar program consists of intensive daily fiction workshops, roundtable discussions, guest lectures and literary readings by faculty and participants. Fiction writers from Bulgaria and fiction writers from English-speaking countries, including but not limited to the U.K. and the U.S., are invited to apply. A total number of ten applicants will be selected for participation and funding.

SCHOLARSHIPS:

Five participants writing in English and five writing in Bulgarian language will receive scholarships. A scholarship covers tuition, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses.

PROGRAM AND FACULTY:

Morning workshops will be led in English by Elizabeth Kostova (US), author of the best-selling novels The Historian (2005) and The Swan Thieves (2010), and in Bulgarian by Vladimir Levchev (BG), author of nineteen poetry collections (four published in the U.S.) and the novels Krali Marko: The Balkan Prince (2006),2084 (2009) and The Man and the Shadow (2012).
Guest lectures will be provided by Richard Russo (US), a writer and a screenwriter, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the novel Empire Falls (2002), author of the filmed novel Nobody’s Fool (1994), and Vladislav Todorov (BG/US), a writer and a screenwriter, author of the filmed novels Zift (2010) and Zincograph(2010).The program in Sozopol, Bulgaria, includes also roundtable discussions, meetings with distinguished international and Bulgarian editors, publishers, translators, as well as literary readings.

Follow-up events, organized as part of the long-term program of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation CapitaLiterature, will take place on 28 and 29 May 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

APPLICATION DEADLINE:

• BG Applicants: 15 March 2013 (UTC + 2:00, EET);
• NES Applicants: 15 March 2013 (UTC – 04:00, EDT).

APPLICATION PROCESS:

In order to apply, the applicants must complete an online submission form. Please note that only online applications will be accepted!
For detailed requirements and instructions on how to apply, please visit our website:

• BG Applicants: http://www.ekf.bg/sozopol/bg/apply;
• NES Applicants: http://www.ekf.bg/sozopol/apply.

For more information visit http://www.ekf.bg/sozopol/

Contemporary Italian Literature

From http://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/mon/prj/lie/inf/ita/en4921369.htm

A foreign reader who wants to better understand the contemporary Italian literary landscape is much like an explorer who decides to explore a tropical forest. Just like in a large forest, an explorer can discover ancient trees that still stand vigorously beside younger plants that produce new flowers. On rough lands, uncommon plants also grow, hybrid creatures that are defined as “unidentified narrative objects”.

The '30s/'40s' generation

We begin by taking a look at the ancient trees. Most of the Italian writers who established themselves as successful writers during the '80s are still very prolific. Just think about world-renowned novelists such as Umberto Eco (1937-) and Antonio Tabucchi (1943-). After the release of Il nome della rosa (1980), Umberto Eco wrote four more novels, of which the last one (La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana) was published in 2004. At the same time, Antonio Tabucchi wrote his last novel, Tristano muore. Other very important writers are Andrea Camilleri, Gianni Celati and Dacia Maraini.

The '50s/'60s generation

A very productive literary generation is formed by writers who were born during the '50s/'60s. The first characteristic shared by all these authors is that they are all true novelists; the novel, at that time, was predominant in the literary universe. The abandon of avant-garde forms in favour of more traditional narrative structures is the distinguishing feature of this generation of authors (who have been defined as ‘young narrators’). This generation is also known for its preference for the “novel sub-genre”: historical novels, educational novels, detective stories and graphic novels.

If it were possible to name only one author among the most well-known authors of graphic novels, it would have to be Stefano Benni. However, how could we choose only one name among Carlo Lucarelli, Marcello Fois, Massimo Carlotto and Giancarlo di Cataldo, just to mention a few of the most important contemporary authors of detective stories? The four writers cited use the lies and the secrets of the official history, usually contemporary Italian history, as the focus of their intrigues.

What is interesting to note is that Carlotto and Di Cataldo began to write as a way to explore their own personal experiences with the law: the former as prisoner and the last as judicial officer. Even though we can’t properly consider Due di due of Andrea de Carlo (1989), Jack frusciante è uscito dal gruppo of Enrico Brizzi (1994) or Tu, mio of Erri de Luca (1999) as educational novels, they nevertheless attest to the writers’ new interest in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Some examples of this stream are the books for teenagers of Federico Moccia (the most famous is Tre metri sopra il cielo, published in 2004¹ ) that have been very successful with adolescents.

Concerning historical novels, contemporary Italian authors have abandoned the genre introduced by Manzoni, “verism”, or the genres introduced by Vasco Pratolini and Beppe Fenoglio. Many contemporary writers, even if well documented, seem to enjoy ‘playing’ with history. This is obvious in the example of « uchronies », a novel genre based on the principle of re-writing the history starting from changing a specific event that happened in the past. The novels of the collective from Bologna, Wu Ming (L'occhio di Carafa, 1999; 54, 2002; Manituana, 2007), and the novel of Giuseppe Genna, Hitler(2008), are valid examples of this new stream of historical novel. Among this ‘young narrators’ that were born in the '50s, we cannot forget to mention Alessandro Baricco, whose novels have been translated everywhere in Europe, Asia and America.

Conclusion : hybrid creatures and amphibious creatures

To complete this brief introduction to the contemporary Italian literary landscape, I would like to stress the hybrid and multiform nature of most contemporary novels and their authors.

Among the best books published in the last fifteen years, there are some that are hard to define simply as novels. One of the writers of the collective Wu Ming coined the phrase “unidentified narrative objects” to define this category of pseudo-novels. These books cannot be properly considered novels because the stories they tell are not strictly fiction. Just think about Gomorra of Roberto Saviano, defined by critics as an “investigation-novel” or a “non-fictitious novel”. Furthermore, “unidentified narrative objects” are characterized by a mixed form that lies between fiction and essay. An interesting example of this is Magris' work Microcosmi (1997).

Besides these chameleons, there exist other kinds of creatures that adapt themselves to every habitat. As we have already mentioned, an example of these writers is Giancarlo di Cataldo, author ofRomanzo criminale (2006), who is at the same time a writer, scriptwriter and judicial officer. Another novelist who has a double identity is Andrea Camilleri, also director of a TV show inspired by his novels, Il commissario Montalbano. One more composer of detective stories is Carlo Lucarelli, who is also a host, a television screenwriter, and a journalist.

¹ The book was initially published in 2002 but only in 2004 became a successful best seller.

Interview with Author T.H.E. Hill on his Upcoming Book Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin

By Lou Novacheck, BLOGCRITICS.ORG

The interview was initially published on Blogcritics.org: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/interview-with-author-the-hill-on1/

 

Today I'm talking with T.H.E. Hill, the award-winning author of two novels about Berlin. Hill's first novel-Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary-is ostensibly about an Army Security Agency Russian linguist working the Berlin Spy Tunnel in the mid-1950s, but, according to Wikipedia, it is closer in reality to the mid-1970s. His second novel-The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It?-is based on a "legend" that was still current among U.S. Army soldiers in Berlin in the mid-1970s. According to the legend, we had advance knowledge of the Berlin Wall, and we knew that the East-German troops who were going to build it had been told to halt construction if the Americans were to take aggressive action to stop them.

Hill's forthcoming new novel-Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin-is also about Berlin.

Novacheck: Why this fascination with Berlin?

Hill: Berlin was the epicenter of the Cold War, and the Cold War and I grew up together. I was born during the Berlin Airlift, and came of age in a U.S. Army uniform inside the confines of the Berlin Wall. Now, Berlin is the capital of the "new," reunited Germany, and the epicenter of the Eurozone Crisis. It's a city that captures your imagination and won't let go.

And it's not just me. Berlin is the scene of the stories that German authors and screenwriters who are distilling the literary truth of German Reunification. Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin, Thomas Brussig's Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (On the Shorter End of Sun Avenue), and the Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Picture of 2007, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck are all set in Berlin. They are thought provoking, poignant literary and cinematographic treatments of German reunification from the German perspective.

So, while there is lots of competition to tell the story of German Reunificationfrom the German perspective, an American perspective on the reunification of Berlin is sadly lacking. For almost fifty years-from 1945 to 1994-there was a large and vibrant American Community in Berlin. I was once a part of it. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Berliners during the Berlin Airlift, and through the Berlin Wall from rise to fall. It deserves to have a literary resolution to its disappearance. That's what I hope to do with Reunification.

So what's the storyline?

It's a multi-threaded story, based on the premise of an American who was stationed in divided Berlin during the 1970s returning to reunified Berlin on an academic Fellowship to write a book about how the Stasi dealt with dissidents. As he works on the book, however, it becomes clear that there are broader implications about the role of the CIA, from which Mike, the first-person narrator, has retired.

The next major thread is romantic. The novel opens at a reception where Mike is "reunited" with Ilse. She was his girlfriend during the time that he worked at the Army Security Agency Field Station in Berlin. She is not pleased to see him, and breaks a plate across his face to emphasize the point. The reader wants to know why she did that, but she's not talking, and neither is he, because his jaw is taped shut to help the cut from the broken plate heal. They have to figure out if there is still an "us" in their relationship.

The other big thread of the novel is a spy whodunit. When the narrator reads his own Stasi file, he discovers that somebody was reporting on him while he was in the Army in Berlin. Since nobody ever really retires from intelligence work, he can't rest until he finds out who it was. The prime suspect is Ilse, but he refuses to believe it was her, and sets off through the dark inner recesses of his memory in search of other suspects, and there are plenty to be found in the rogue's gallery of characters that he served with in the Army Security Agency. With his case-officer hat on, he imagines whom he could have recruited, if Field Station Berlin had been on his target list.

As more clues come out of the reconstructs produced by the special software that the Fraunhofer Institute developed to reassemble to files that the Stasi case officers shredded just before the GDR collapsed entirely, Mike develops a clearer picture of MUZIEK, the cover-name for the Stasi source who was reporting on him. The detection required to solve the whodunit mystery is molded on the classic fair-play mystery novels of detectives like Ellery Queen, whose works present the reader with all the same clues that the detective has, so as to give the reader a chance to solve an intellectually challenging puzzle along with the detective.

The plot thickens when Mike's daughter comes to visit him, and falls in love with the Director of the Stasi Archive where Mike is doing his research. The Director is none other than Ilse's son. Since the course of true love is never easy, there is a barrier to creating an "us" out of this German-American couple. In this case it is the question of whether the Archive Director is her half-brother.

Then add an IRA informant in witness protection who thinks that Mike is a hit man sent to rub her out, and serve stirred, not shaken in a classy cover.

The advance copies of the chapters that I have seen hint at a political thread in the novel. What's that going to be about?

The political thread is just that: a hint. It runs parallel to Mike's reunification with his Ilse, and her angry reaction to seeing him again. The political winds in Berlin changed after the Berlin Wall fell, and Germany was reunited. When I lived there in the 1970s, Kennedy was still incredibly popular in Berlin for his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech a decade before. Now, a generation after the Berlin Wall fell, German politicians are steering a new policy course intended to demonstrate their independence from America, and Americans are not as popular in Berlin as they used to be.

I guess that this is to be expected when you consider that German President Joachim Gauck and Chancellor Angel Merkel were both raised in the East. We didn't do them any favors when the country was divided among the four victorious Allied powers.

The merger of East and West Germany made some unexpected changes in the German Weltanschauung [mindset]. The thread of 'is there is still an "us" in U.S.-F.R.G. relations,' plays out in the background in parallel to Mike and Ilse trying to figure out if there is an "us" in their relationship.

There was a cryptologic contest to break the encrypted message in The Day Before the Berlin Wall: Could We Have Stopped It. Will there be another one in Reunification?

Yes, there will be. The display quote at the beginning of the book will be encrypted. The prize will be the same as the other cryptologic contest I run on my website: a signed copy of one of my novels.

Has anyone claimed a prize yet?

No, and I'm surprised. The system used is a 'paper-and-pencil' system, one that was actually used by the Russians, and there is enough depth to break it. I only had one submission, and it didn't even get the character count right. That's a hint for anybody who's interested. For the crypies who are worried that I might be giving something away that the Russians don't know about, the system is described on Wikipedia, but I'm not going to say where, of course. That would make solving it too easy.

From what I have read in the press, it seems like some of the Germans are suffering from a sort of "buyer's remorse" about reunification. A great number of East Germans now find themselves strangers in their homeland, suffering from East nostalgia. Like John Galsworthy said, one has "to leave one's country to become conscious of it," but in their case, they didn't leave their country. Their country left them.

I know how they feel. The same thing happened to us Americans. When my wife and I went back to Berlin after the Berlin Wall fell, and returned to the American Kaserns, the housing areas, the school, the hospital, the PX and the Commissary that had once been so familiar to us, these places were like a ghost town inhabited by living people who couldn't see the apparitions that shimmered before us. The sensation was as surreal as an episode of The Twilight Zone or The X-files. Thomas Wolfe's message was clear: you can't go home again. Your old home has been taken over by strangers.

The similarity of the German and the American experiences is the reason that I think that Reunification will find a welcome among both American and German audiences alike. That's why it's going to be released simultaneously in the States and in Germany.

It seems pretty clear that the flashbacks to divided Berlin come
from your personal experience while there in the U.S. Army. What are you basing your modern-day Berlin episodes on?

Like I said, we've been back to Berlin since the Berlin Wall came down, and the Internet brings the Berlin dailies like the Berliner Morgenpost, the Berliner Zeitung and the Tagesspiegel right straight to your computer screen. That's enough to get the ball rolling, but not to complete the novel. To put the icing on the cake, we're going back to Berlin in spring 2013 for an extended stay. After that, Reunification will go into final editing.

When can we expect to see Reunification on bookshelves?

The trade paper edition will come out on 13 August 2013, the anniversary of the start of construction of the Berlin Wall, and the eBook edition will follow in time or Christmas. While 2013 is the fifty-second anniversary of the start of construction of the Berlin Wall, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the first permanent SIGINT collection presence on Teufelsberg in Berlin, the operational home of Field Station Berlin. This anniversary is being marked by a reunion of Field Station Berlin veterans in Berlin, and the issue of a sheet of Cinderella stamps commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Field Station Berlin on Teufelsberg.

Can we read a sample somewhere before then?

Sure. The first chapter is up on the book's website.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Thank you for inviting me.

Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Interview-with-Author-T-H-E-Hill-on-his-Upcoming-4156067.php#ixzz2IF1eyvOp

 

Into The Blue: An Analysis of Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colours: Blue’

By Evangeline Spachis

This review originally appeared on Evangeline Spachis' blog on November 23, 2012.

‘Three Colours: Blue’ is the first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s celebrated ‘Three Colours Trilogy’ produced in 1993 and starring Juliette Binoche in the role of ‘Julie’. The collected: ‘Three Colours: Blue’, ‘Three Colours: White’ and ‘Three Colours: Red are all said to represent the three colours of the French flag and the ideals they represent: ‘liberty’ (blue), ‘equality’ (white), and ‘friendship’ (red). ‘Three Colours: Blue’ is perhaps the most well-known of the three films and both boosted the popularity of French New Wave cinema, the career of Juliette Binoche and the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski outside of Europe. This article will begin to analyse the film in greater detail, particularly focusing in on its successes.

The plot is set in Paris, and centres on Julie’s struggle to recover from a horrific accident she was involved in that resulted in the death of her husband and a beloved young daughter. After suffering such a terrible trauma, she begins to devote the rest of her life trying to completely erase her past from her memory: from moving to Paris, to selling all the furniture and belongings that inhabited her former life with her family. For instance at the time of his death, her husband, a famous and respected composer, was in the middle of a new musical composition written for a newly united Europe to celebrate the end of the Cold War. Consumed with grief she destroys the musical sheets on which he was working.

It is a film that is rich in textures, which is fairly typical of French cinema. It is atmospheric, multi-layered and more meaningful with every viewing. As expected from the title, the colour blue features predominantly- a significant use of mise-en-scene throughout the piece. The use of the colour blue in for example, a blue chandelier or a blue-lit swimming pool, allows the director to permeate the colour’s meaning in the film, blue being a colour that connotes great sadness as well as liberty. The title also prepares the viewer into looking out for the colour, which heightens its effect.

Julie’s struggle for freedom from her grief and former life is the main strand of plot. In one particular, seemingly stand-alone scene, Julie sits in a cafe and the camera shoots a tight close-up of a sugar cube absorbing coffee from her cup. It may seem insignificant, but Kieslowski’s decision to focus on this moment infers how Julie has begun to take notice of the mundane in exchange for the more pressing matters of her life such as her burgeoning grief for the loss of her family.  Kieslowski expanded on this in a master class saying,

“Quite simply, we are trying to show how the heroine perceives the world…We show a close-up of a sugar cube soaking up coffee to show she is not interested in anything outside…in other people, their business, in the man who loves her and has found her after a long search. She’s not interested in anything at all- just the sugar. She concentrates on it in order to be able to discard other things.”

At four key moments in the film, Kieslowski includes moments of a fade out and a fade in back to the scene. They appear to occur when Julie experiences a breakthrough in her recovery or at a significant turning point in the plot, for example when she meets her husband’s pregnant mistress and decides to give her family home to her. Here, Julie accepts her husband’s infidelity and chooses to do good in order to learn from her past. Another fade in occurs earlier on the film whilst Julie is still in hospital recovering after the accident. A journalist comes to speak to her, wishing to talk about her husband. She refuses, unwilling to face her past. This pivotal moments in Julie’s life are pinpointed in the editing of these scenes- the viewer is shown her emotional state explicitly in this way. The editor of ‘Three Colours: Blue’ Jacques Witta elaborated by saying:

“…punctuating the film with fades in order to gives the music more space and highlight the emotions… Traditionally the fade-to-black is not used for this; traditionally it is used to show time. With a cross fade we show a short time between two moments, for a longer time we use the fade-to-black….we used the fade-to-back in the middle of a scene, to quickly create a space, a suspense…to quickly create a pause with significance.”

Music also plays an important part in the plot, as well as in the director’s creative vision. At various parts of the film, Julie’s husband’s unfinished composition plays, and it appears that despite destroying much of it herself, the memorable tune still plays on her mind. There is a particular scene where Julie is in the blue-lit swimming pool (a returning example of mise-en-scene), and she goes under water presumably to drown out the music she continues to hear, but it is no use. Another example of this is in an early sequence when Julie is stood by a piano. She hears her husband’s composition, and yet no one is sat playing the piano. She slams the piano down and the music stops, which challenges the idea of diegetic and non-diegetic sound. The final composition, completed by Julie’s husband’s business partner (who also incidentally is in love with her) is played in full at the end of the film over a montage of all the different people Julie has encountered over the course of the film, despite her attempts to isolate herself from the rest of the world. It is a touching and fitting moment in the film. As Annette Insdorf in her book ‘Double Lives’ explains:

“Since the sequence begins and ends with Julie, it seems as if all these people are now part of her. There is genuine closure as the film ends: she has completed the concerto and fulfilled the mourning…Having tried to live in “liberty” – without memory, desire, work, or commitment – she is ironically returning to love.” (p.51).

Though it is often said that this film must be watched along with the other two films in the trilogy, ‘White’ and ‘Red’ (as one Amazon reviewer joked “why buy the trousers and not the whole suit?”), I believe that ‘Three Colours: Blue’ can stand alone in its own right. If viewed solely as an interesting tale of one woman and her coping with grief, then the film is entirely satisfying and is one that can be universally appreciated. By the end of the film as we see a hint of a smile on Juliette Binoche’s face and we believe as a viewer that her character has made a turning point in her development. ‘Blue’ is a visual and arousing cinematic experience, one that deserves repeated and in-depth viewings. It is a film that people return to again and again and continues to be celebrated and talked about nearly 18 years after it was first made.

• Annette Insdorff, Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski, New York: Miramax Books, 1999

_________

For more movie reviews by Evangeline Spachis visit her blog: GIRL ON FILM

European Commission offers grants for translation of European literature: EUR 2,000 – 60,000 available.

https://www.ecn-eu.com/news/08/01/2013/143

Brussels, Belgium, 09 January 2013


  *Brujita* 

"The European Commission has launched a grant programme with a total budget of EUR 2,700,000 for the trainslation of European works of literature. Individual translation projects will receive funds of between EUR 2.000 and EUR 60.000 are available, but EU support is limited to a maximum of 50% of the total eligible cost.

The purpose of this grant is to stimulate the widest circulation of European literature among European citizens by supporting the translation of high-quality European literature into the different languages of the countries participating in the Programme.

Applications made by publishers or publishing houses wishing to translate the works of authors who have won the European Union Prize for Literature are encouraged.

In order to foster European integration, special attention will be given to the circulation of literary works written in languages of countries that have joined the European Union since 2004."

Deadline: 6 February 2013

View the ECN Procurement Notice
(visible to ECN Expert Users only: login required)

Absinthe Video of the Week: Amour by Michael Haneke

In honor of Michael Haneke's Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film our video today presents the trailer for the film Amour.

You can also read an interview with the director here.

James Herbert on his daily routine, writing The Rats and how he hates violence

From The Telegraph

The horror writer talks to Angela Wintle about his working day, the inspiration for his first novel, The Rats, and how horror writing just pours out.

James Herbert at home in Sussex Photo: Harry Watts

By Angela Wintle

James Herbert, 69, is Britain’s bestselling horror writer, a position he has held since the publication of his first novel, The Rats, in 1974, which depicted a London overrun by flesh-eating rodents. His books have sold 54 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 30 languages. His latest novel, Ash (Macmillan), is out now. An adaptation of a previous novel, The Secret of Crickley Hall, will be shown on BBC1 this autumn. He lives in Sussex with his wife, Eileen. They have three daughters.

Routine I’m terrible in the mornings, but I’m always at my desk by 10am. You have to be disciplined as a writer. I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself. At 1pm Eileen buzzes me on the intercom for lunch. I’m back at my desk by 2.30pm and work on for three hours, then I reward myself with a large vodka before settling down for The Simpsons. People laugh at this because I’m supposed to be dark and mysterious.

Childhood I grew up in the East End of London, the youngest of three boys in a Catholic household. Both my parents were market traders and worked seven days a week. We lived in a condemned Dickensian house at the back of Petticoat Lane in Whitechapel. The Krays lived around the corner. My mother scolded me once for branding them animals in one of my novels. She said, ‘They read your books in prison and you’ll get into trouble.’

Manuscript This is the manuscript (pictured below) of my first novel,The Rats, which I wrote while working as an art director at a London advertising agency. The book has sold more than a million copies in Britain, although it never reached number one. I think it was deliberately kept out of the bestseller lists because graphic violence was unusual at the time – and The Rats is full of it, although it is never gratuitous. It was inspired by a line in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in which Renfield, the maniac who idolises Dracula, says he has seen a thousand rats with red eyes looking up at him. As I was an art director that phrase resonated because I knew it would make a great visual. It was also drawn from my childhood experiences in the East End. Our house backed on to an area where market traders dumped barrels of rotting fruit. It was alive with rats.

^{Photos: Harry Watts}

Mother This is a sepia photograph (pictured above) of my late mother. She came from a poor background in Manchester and travelled to London to make a new life. When she got off the Tube aged 21 the first person she met was my dad and she asked him to take her to the nearest Catholic church. He accompanied her, even though he was an agnostic, and they started dating. She had an ability to see things with a child’s eye and told us wonderful stories. I’m sure that is where my love of storytelling came from.

Horror I hate violence and I didn’t plan to write horror; it just poured out of me. The great thing is that you can write humour, romance or political thrillers under that genre. You can write about a mundane situation and take a mental leap to something outrageous. When I started out, horror was suggested by other writers but never fulfilled. I wanted to do something different. Unfortunately, some writers took it too far and I took the rap.

^{Photo: Harry Watts}

Drawing I drew this picture of Dracula (pictured above) for a charity auction at Bonhams in aid of the Prince’s Trust to celebrate Status Quo’s 40th anniversary. It was inspired by the film Nosferatu, and depicts Dracula climbing out of a crate of earth after his transportation to Whitby. I have drawn him with clawed hands and a Fender Stratocaster guitar strapped to his back. The caption reads, never too dead to rock.

OBE In 2010 I was awarded an OBE (pictured below) for services to literature. The Prince of Wales, whom I’ve always liked, invested me at Buckingham Palace. He asked whether I was writing a new book and I said, ‘Yes, I’ve just finished one, and you’re in it.’ Well, if you’ve ever seen anyone blanch, that’s what he did. I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK, it all comes out fine.’ But he was completely stunned and that was the end of our chat.

^{Photo: Harry Watts}

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9652148/James-Herbert-on-his-daily-routine-writing-The-Rats-and-how-he-hates-violence.html

Damien Hirst -

  

Thoughts, Work, Life:

IoS book review: Best European Fiction 2013, Ed Aleksandar Hemon

By

MAX LIU

for The Independent

If anthologies are often books that we buy but neglect to read, then Best European Fiction 2013 deserves to be an exception. For four years, Aleksandar Hemon has edited this annual collection of translated stories which display the possibilities of short fiction and negotiate what Hemon calls "accelerating history". This time, John Banville provides a preface, 32 countries are represented, and strong writing resonates across regions.

In his introduction, Hemon says the stories are "imperfectly translated" but what does he mean when he warns that they are also "proudly difficult"? Must difficult fiction combine dense language with unconventional structures, or can it include realist depictions of strange events which leave us not knowing what to think? "There's nothing worse than a reader with blind faith," says the narrator of Lasha Bugadze's "The Sins of the Wolf", a Georgian satire in which a novelist's assumptions are challenged when a girl demands to meet his characters.

To attribute some excellent contributions from south-east Europe to historical trauma diminishes the imaginative achievements of Borivoje Adasevic, Mirana Likar Bajzelj and Semezdin Mehmedinovic, but war features prominently for each. Adasevic's "For a Foreign Master" uses layers of narration to expose brutality between Serbs, while Mehmedinovic, who left Bosnia for the US in the 1990s, exhibits in "My Heart" a feel for words' materiality which makes palpable "the taste of cement on my tongue". He compounds a claim in Banville's preface: "There is verse, there is prose and then there is poetry, which may be conjured in either medium."

Comparisons become inevitable when subjects recur. Ray French's "Migration" looks unsubtle in the same book as Miklos Vajda's "Portrait of a Mother in an American Frame" and Bernard Comment's "A Son". Each confront the deaths of parents, but the ambiguous emotions Vajda's Hungarian expresses towards his mother, and the mixture of pity and scepticism inspired by Comment's narrator, are more interesting than the Welsh writer's reflections. The pretend experiments of Eloy Tizon's "The Mercury in the Thermometers" pale in the light of Beledian's virtuosity.

The Romanian author Dan Lungu's "7pm Wife", which draws a disturbing picture of a man who expects warmth and dependability from prostitutes, is one of several accounts of the Continent's murkier precincts. In "Madame Zabee's Guesthouse", Marie Redonnet imagines a Parisian brothel where displaced people cross national and sexual boundaries but remain powerless to alter their fates.

Loss of home and language is ubiquitous, but there's comedy to savour in Zehra Cirak's "Memory Cultivation Salon" when an old lady smooches a teenage boy as reward for exhaling smoke rings. In Tomás Mac Síomóin's hilarious "Music in the Bone", an Irishman conducts "the most magnificent orchestra that performs in the deepest depths of my soul".

The stories collected are moving, haunting, funny, powerful and, yes, difficult. More than a list of adjectives, however, they warrant attention. A slightly hectoring credo accompanies the Best European Fiction series – namely, that we don't read enough literature in translation – but the likelihood that you will relish this anthology's depth and variety is reason enough to read it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ios-book-review-best-european-fiction-2013-ed-aleksandar-hemon-8326255.html