Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Creating Cathy / The story behind Wuthering Heights's wild heroine

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Cathy and Heathcliff in the 1992 film of Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Creating Cathy: the story behind Wuthering Heights's wild heroine

How a ruthless warrior queen in a childhood fantasy became the prototype for Emily Brontë’s protagonist

Emma Butcher
Mon 30 Jul 2018


W
hether you love it or hate it, there is no denying thatWuthering Heights holds a strange power. It is both a love story and a screeching train wreck of violence, cruelty and obsession. Its words contain a strength and soul that every writer hopes to achieve, yet few manage. As for the author, although an enigma to the point of myth, Emily Brontë has resonated with readers of all ages worldwide. Brontë’s novel does not shy away from the uncomfortable truths that make us human. And that is why her works strike home, generation after generation.

Brontë’s Lovers, Facing Even More Storms





Brontë’s Lovers, Facing Even More Storms

A New ‘Wuthering Heights,’ From Andrea Arnold


By DAVID BELCHER
SEPT. 28, 2012


WITH more than a dozen film versions, Emily Brontë’“Wuthering Heights” is something of a cultural touchstone for ill-fated love. The title alone conjures up images of a brooding Heathcliff and a delicate Cathy clinging to each other or suffering alone on the Yorkshire moors. For many fans, the characters are synonymous with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 movie. And yet, at least when it comes to screen adaptations, the novel may be the most misunderstood book of all time.
“I think it’s developed a cultural mythology, sort of like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but there are so many other plotlines,” said Hila Shachar, author of  “Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company.” The love story is appealing as myth, she continued, “but why do we remember it as a love story?”

Five Minutes With Lily Cole


Lily Cole

Five Minutes With Lily Cole

In a series for the BBC News website, Celebrities and news-makers are grilled by Matthew Stadlen in precisely five minutes.

In this video, Matt talks to Lily Cole.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcmWOGTZ8TU
Five Minutes With: Lily Cole


Lily Cole / What is perfection?



Lily Cole Perfection


Actress and model Lily Cole reveals her unique thinking about perfection



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMcLqHwrKI


Red Shoes' starring Lily Cole / A short film by Lorna Tucker



Red Shoes' starring Lily Cole 
A short film by Lorna Tucker


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub76MGDYJNU
Red Shoes' starring Lily Cole - a short film by Lorna Tucker


Monday, July 30, 2018

Lily Cole / Why I made a film about 'violent, awful' Heathcliff


Lily Cole




Lily Cole: why I made a film about 'violent, awful' Heathcliff


Her appointment to the Brontë Society caused a storm. How will her new film – inspired by Wuthering Heights – be received? We meet the former supermodel at her Impossible HQ

Simon Hattenstone
Wed 25 Jul 2018



L
ast December, when Lily Cole was appointed creative partner of the Brontë Society for 2018, it caused a brouhaha. Brontë expert Nick Holland resigned from the society, describing the decision as “a disgrace” and “rank farce”. Yes, Cole might have a double first in history of art from Cambridge University, but what concerned him was that she had chosen to make her living as a model. “The central question,” Holland huffed, “should be, ‘What would Emily Brontë think if she found that the role of chief ‘artist’ and organiser in her celebratory year was a supermodel?’ We all know the answer to that, and anyone who doesn’t isn’t fit to make the decision or have any role in the governance of the Brontë Society.”

Lily Cole interview / 'Our concept of beauty is so restrictive'

Lily Cole: ‘I’m impressed by what technology can do, but [my site] Impossible is driven by analogue instincts, like valuing time and meeting people in the real world.’


Lily Cole interview: 'Our concept of beauty is so restrictive'


In her career, Lily Cole has been feted as a model and actress. Now, playing the legendarily beautiful Helen of Troy, she is confronting what first brought her to attention… her looks

Carole Cadwalladr
Sun 8 Jun 2014


Lily Cole




T
here's an unpredictability to Lily Cole. She made her name as a model while still a schoolgirl and has trodden the familiar route of model turned actress, but in the meantime she went to Cambridge University, where she graduated with a first in history of art, and soon after leaving took the altogether less familiar path of becoming a model turned technology entrepreneur. Last year, she launched a wish-fulfilment website called impossible.com, a site where people post their wishes and that "encourages people to do things for others for free".

Viola Davis / ‘That's how I feel about my life now. I’m pretty fabulous’

 ‘Why can’t we say: you know what, I’m confident, I’m really happy about the work I did. I gave it my best’: Viola Davis. Photograph: Patrick Fraser for the Observer

Viola Davis: ‘That's how I feel about my life now. I’m pretty fabulous’


By Alex Clark
Sunday 15 January 2017
Her extraordinary performance in the upcoming Fences has seen Viola Davis tipped for an Oscar. But her success has taken a huge amount of self-belief. She tells Alex Clark why it is only through demanding respect that you get the parts you are due


I
t’s the run-up to Christmas and everybody in Los Angeles, which to a Brit feels unseasonably sun-drenched, is bemoaning the chilly weather; as we settle down in the Beverly Hills hotel, Viola Davis draws a warm jacket around her shoulders. Not that she’s complaining: throughout our conversation, she is determinedly upbeat, celebratory, optimistic. She radiates a sense of excitement and satisfaction that, at 51, all the hard work is really beginning to pay off.

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson review / A stunning debut novel





Everything Under by Daisy Johnson review – a stunning debut novel

Longlisted for the Man Booker prize, this complex story about a troubled mother-daughter relationship creates a strange new mythology

Jeef VanderMeer
Thu 26 Jul 2018

M
y introduction to Daisy Johnson was the instant classic Fen, a bold, take-no-prisoners collection situated somewhere between Angela Carter and Deborah Levy. The muscular style and blunt poetry of its stories about women often forced to contend with difficult men used the fantastical in brilliantly physical ways. Johnson’s first novel, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, builds on that achievement by blending a deep understanding of character and storytelling sophistication to examine a troubled mother-daughter relationship. The result reminds me of Iris Murdoch – that uncompromising interiority of character – and more recent works such as Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond.

Daisy Johnson / Seeking 'intense strangeness in a world that feels like ours'


‘I don’t think I would have wanted to write a book that everybody liked’ … Daisy Johnson.
Photograph: Pollyanna Johnson

The first book interview


Daisy Johnson: seeking 'intense strangeness in a world that feels like ours'


Fen’s author explains how short stories were the perfect form to ‘do really weird things and have really weird things happen’

Richard Lea
Thu 14 Jul 2016


“T
he starting point was the eels,” says Daisy Johnson. These strange creatures writhe in “headless masses in the last puddles” as the land is drained in the opening story of her debut collection, Fen, spinning us off into an uncanny world where an older sister can starve herself into becoming an eel, a dead brother can return as a fox, and a house can love a girl “darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want”.

Fen by Daisy Johnson review / An impressive first collection


Fen by Daisy Johnson review – an impressive first collection

Johnson’s surreal and atmospheric stories are set in a liminal landscape where girls become eels

Sarah Crown
Saturday 18 July 2016

T
here was a time when East Anglia’s fenland was nothing more than a silty mix of fresh- and saltwater marshes into which people rarely ventured, an unstable place with one foot on solid ground and one in the sea. Attempts were made to drain it as far back as Roman times, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that technology advanced to the point where its freedom from flooding could be guaranteed. Today it is heavily cultivated, its fertile soil providing some of the country’s richest farmland. But for all that, it remains conditional: a tricksy, liminal landscape lying below sea level whose web of fields and schools and houses is wholly dependent on the system of pumps and embankments that has been constructed to protect it. There is an uncanniness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perimeters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality; the ever-deepening sense, in this age of global warming, that their inhabitants are living on borrowed time, in a borrowed place.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Man Booker prize 2018 longlist includes graphic novel for the first time



Man Booker prize 2018 longlist includes graphic novel for the first time

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, which explores the disappearance of a young woman, ‘does just what good fiction should do’ – and will compete with Michael Ondaatje’s WarlighT

Alison Flood
Tue 24 Jul 2018 00.01 BSTLast modified on Tue 24 Jul 201816.38 BST
 
Nick Drnaso – the first graphic novelist ever to be nominated for the Man Booker prize. Photograph: Olivia Obineme for the Observer

A graphic novel about a vanished young woman and a thriller about a vanished mother have elbowed their way on to a giant-slaying Man Booker prize longlist that “capture[s] something about a world on the brink”.
Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, the first graphic novel ever to reach the Booker longlist, explores the chilling effect of 24-hour news after a girl has disappeared. Judges picked it as a contender for the £50,000 prize ahead of titles from former winners including Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Peter Carey and Alan Hollinghurst, describing it as “oblique, subtle [and] minimal” and saying the “changing shape of fiction” meant it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel made the cut.


Esi Edugyan plunges into the 19th century, opening with watchful, 11-year-old George Washington Black cutting sugar cane and doing his best to survive on a Barbados plantation owned by sadistic Englishman Erasmus Wilde. One day ‘Wash’ is plucked from the fields to help Wilde’s scientist brother with his experimental airship The Cloud-cutter. Due to be published in August, this evocative, page-turning adventure sees ‘Wash’ travel from the Caribbean to the Arctic in search of freedom.
Photograph: Profile Books, Serpent’s Tail

“We all read it and were blown away by it,” said the judge and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid. “The graphic novel has increasingly become front and centre in terms of storytelling [and] we felt [Sabrina] does just what good fiction should do.”
Also in the running for the UK’s most prestigious literary award is a thriller from the crime writer Belinda Bauer. Snap opens with a mother abandoning her three children in a broken-down car and plays out as they struggle to deal with her disappearance. The judges called it an “acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma”, which “undermines the tropes of its own genre and leaves us with something that lingers”.



Sophie Mackintosh takes the reader to a house on an island, where three girls live with their mother and King. But their world is upended when King vanishes and three men are washed up on the beach. Writing in the Guardian, Cal Revely-Calder said the novel is written ‘in the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread’.
Photograph: Penguin Random House, Hamish Hamilton
“I’d read it even before I knew I would be a Booker judge and it seemed to me to be an outstanding novel,” said McDermid. “My fellow judges read it and one said, ‘This transcends genre’, and someone else said, ‘This shows what genre can do at its best’ ... It is an extremely clever piece of storytelling with characters you care about, and that’s what we were looking for – something well written that engages with mind and heart.”
A longlist that stands out for its “willingness to take risks with form”, according to chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah, also features debuts from Sophie Mackintosh and Guy Gunaratne. Mackintosh’s The Water Cure “unpicks patriarchy at its core”, according to the panel, while Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City is “an inner city novel for our times”. The poet Robin Robertson mixes verse and prose in his first novel, The Long Take, while Daisy Johnson’s first novel, Everything Under, is enough to put the 27-year-old alongside Sally Rooney, picked for Normal People, as the youngest authors on this year’s list. Johnson and Rooney are “looking at the world from the perspective of their age and their books have a very different flavour”, McDermid explained, “but they’re there because they impressed us”.
 Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight has made this year’s Booker longlist. 
Only one former winner made this year’s Booker longlist: Michael Ondaatje, for Warlight, which opens in 1945 with London still reeling from the blitz. The other major name in the running for the Booker is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Richard Powers, selected for his novel The Overstory. With US writers having won the last two Man Booker prizes after the award was opened up to authors from outside the UK and Commonwealth – a decision that Julian Barnes described as “daft” earlier this month – naysayers will be celebrating the fact that just three US writers were longlisted this year: Powers, Drnaso and Rachel Kushner, chosen for The Mars Room. Called “terrifyingly authentic” by judges, The Mars Room follows the story of a woman beginning two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility.
The Guardian first book award-winner Donal Ryan makes this list with his story of a Syrian refugee, a care worker and a crooked accountant, From a Low and Quiet SeaEsi Edugyan’s Washington Black, the story of a slave who becomes the personal servant to an eccentric scientist, and Anna Burns’Milkman, a look at Ireland during the Troubles through the perspective of a young girl, complete a 13-strong longlist assembled from 171 submissions – the highest number of books ever entered for the prize.



Anna Burns pitches the reader into the heart of the Troubles in this story of a young woman pursued by a senior paramilitary figure. Writing in the Guardian, Claire Kilroy saluted the novel’s ‘digressive, batty narrative voice’ and its Beckettian ability to ‘trace the logical within the absurd’.
Photograph: Faber & Faber

“We tried to read blind as much as we could,” said McDermid. “We didn’t care where the writers came from or whether it was their first book or their 40th. I read most on my iPad so I really was reading blind, with no author bio or publisher information.”
Appiah said that he and his fellow judges had been struck by the way the novels on the longlist “disrupted the way we thought about things we knew about, and made us think about things we didn’t know about”.


Belinda Bauer won the CWA gold dagger in 2010 with Blacklands and the Theakston prize in 2014 with Rubbernecker. Her latest thriller returns to 1998 and is set in motion when Catherine disappears on the M5, leaving 11-year-old Jack in charge of his younger sisters.Writing in the Guardian, Laura Wilson called it ‘an intelligent mystery, written with razor-sharp observation and wry humour’.
Photograph: Penguin Random House, Bantam Press

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the times,” he said, “there were many dystopian fictions on our bookshelf – and many novels we found inspirational as well as disturbing. Some of those we have chosen for this longlist feel urgent and topical; others might have been admired and enjoyed in any year. All of these books – which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race – capture something about a world on the brink.”
Appiah is joined on the panel by McDermid, the critic Leo Robson, the feminist academic Jacqueline Rose and the artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.
The shortlist for the Booker will be announced on 20 September, and the winner on 16 October.




Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina / A comic, up for the Booker prize? About time too





A comic, up for the Booker prize? About time too


Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina is the first graphic novel to be longlisted for the prize. It’s good news for everyone who loves books

Claire Napier
Wed 25 Jul 2018

N


ick Drnaso’s Sabrina has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize – the first graphic novel in the award’s 50-year history. I’ve spent six years writing and editing criticism of comic books (as we in the know like to call them) and this news inspires a great feeling. We made it in during the first half-century! All right!

Howards End's James Ivory: 'I don't have some morbid preoccupation with detail for the sake of detail'


Helena Bonham Carter in the Merchant Ivory film 'Howards End', which has been digitally restored 

Howards End's James Ivory: 'I don't have some morbid preoccupation with detail for the sake of detail'


It's time to see beyond the frocks of Merchant Ivory films with the rerelease of 'Howards End', which has undergone a digital 4K restoration overseen by the director

Geoffrey Macnab
Tuesday 25 July 2017 16:15

Merchant-Ivory’s Howards End (1992) is being given a major rerelease in British cinemas this month, 25 years on from its original release.
As it hits our screens again it is easy to forget just how polarising and contentious Merchant Ivory’s work once seemed. These films, produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory, were a mainstay of British cinema at a time when the UK industry was in a parlous state during the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s.

Review / 'Elmet,' by Fiona Mozle

68147173

Fiona Mozley Photo by Heidi Stoner

Review: 'Elmet,' by Fiona Mozle


FICTION: A gripping, disquieting first novel set in Yorkshire, which was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize. 


By Malcolm Forbes Special to the Star Tribune
JANUARY 5, 2018 — 11:49AM



The outsider on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist was, appropriately, a novel about outsiders. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel “Elmet” follows a father and his two children as they beat a retreat from an intolerant and uncaring society and forge a new rural life for themselves in a small copse. However, peace comes at a price, and in time the family’s “strange, sylvan underworld” is besieged by hostile forces hellbent on tough justice.
The book takes its name from an ancient Celtic kingdom that covered what is today part of Yorkshire. For her epigraph, York-born Mozley quotes from Ted Hughes, who in his “Remains of Elmet” poems referred to the area as a former badlands, “a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” Though set in the present, Mozley’s novel re-creates that lawless realm and reinterprets the region’s medieval history. The result is a dark, rich, timeless fable.
Mozley’s main characters are narrator Daniel; his “hawkish” sister, Cathy; and their hulking father, always referred to as Daddy. After Cathy is reprimanded at school for standing up to school bullies, Daddy whisks his children away to begin again far from the madding crowd. He builds a house and teaches the children how to plant and forage, and hunt for food with bows and arrows. He also enlists Vivien, one of their few neighbors, to school them. “She’s going to teach you things what I can’t. She’s good at things what I aren’t.” When cash is required, Daddy takes part in bare-knuckle fights, always winning. “The violence,” Vivien explains, “he needs it. It quenches him.”
The family lives off the land — “land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries.” The problem is the land isn’t theirs. Mr. Price appears on the scene to repossess what he claims is rightfully his. For a while he is kept at bay. But when he suffers a particularly heavy loss, the finger of suspicion points at Daddy — at which point a vengeful Price decides these outcast-misfits haven’t so much outstayed their welcome as overstepped the mark.
The main narrative of the novel is routinely intercut with short sections — italicized, vignette-sized — each an update on Daniel’s search for a missing Cathy. We come to read with mounting dread, bracing ourselves for a devastating conclusion. Mozley doesn’t disappoint. Before getting there, though, there is a great deal to appreciate, even wonder at. Mozley dexterously balances scenes of harsh cruelty and visceral brutality (not least a bloody fight that is all muscle, gristle and spilled teeth) with quieter, ruminative interludes, such as the fate of the siblings’ mother. Landscape is vividly mapped; characters are simultaneously magical-mythical (Daddy the “bearded giant”) and strikingly real; and the local dialect lends a musicality to each exchange (“He indt there”; “there wandt owt I could do”).
“Elmet” is bleak but beautiful, earthy yet airy. Mozley has emerged as an exciting new talent.
 Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Elmet

By: Fiona Mozley.

Publisher: Algonquin, 312 pages, $15.95.

STAR TRIBUNE