Latest news with #literature
Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Electric Spark by Frances Wilson: Spy, Secretary, Superstar: The Prime of Miss Muriel Spark
Electric Spark: The Enigma Of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson (Bloomsbury £25, 432pp) In the summer of 1953, Muriel Spark – not yet the famous novelist behind The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie – was en route from London to the Edinburgh Festival, rattling with amphetamines. She was reviewing a new play by T.S. Eliot, who praised the ensuing article as 'one of the two or three most intelligent reviews' he read. But a year later, Spark was gripped by drug-induced psychosis, believing that Eliot was sending her cryptic messages, disguising himself as her window cleaner and stealing her food. Prescribed Largactil, she quickly recovered, yet an interest in code-cracking and deceit would always colour her imagination. In the dreary world of post-war British fiction, still a boys' club fixated on realism, be it Kingsley Amis's campus satire Lucky Jim or the kitchen-sink drama of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, Spark's sleek brand of experimental struck like lightning. Her 1957 debut The Comforters portrays a woman who hears in her head the text of the very book we're reading. Her 1961 smash hit The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie tells us right away that the maverick teacher of the title (played on screen by Maggie Smith) will be betrayed by her pupils. The first line of 1970's The Driver's Seat, Spark's own favourite of her 22 novels, introduces us to a woman in search of her future murderer – two decades before Martin Amis cemented enfant terrible status with the same idea in London Fields. Enigmatic yet crisp and concise, crackling with twists, each of Spark's 22 novels was written in one go without her needing to revise them – or so she told a BBC interviewer later in life. Frances Wilson casts an admiring yet sceptical eye over that and other claims in this new biography, exploring the mind behind the books. Born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish factory worker and Presbyterian mother in 1918, the author worked as a secretary before leaving Edinburgh for Southern Rhodesia. She had married Sydney Spark, a troubled teacher she met at a dance at 19. He had found a post there after his worrying antics, such as firing a starting pistol in the classroom, had deterred employers at home. Seven years later, Spark walked out on Africa and her husband – as well as their young son, Robin. At a job centre in London she was recruited for undercover work with the Foreign Office, where she helped flood Nazi Germany with propaganda from a clandestine HQ in Bedfordshire. Wilson speculates that it wasn't Spark's first rodeo – she might have been a spy in Bulawayo, identifying enemy aliens among settlers. An abiding interest in secret communication tipped her into madness once she embarked on literary life in London, where she encountered strife from the start. Appointed editor of the magazine Poetry Review in the 1940s, she championed edgier poets such as Eliot and W.H. Auden. 'I started publishing modern poems rather than Christmas card-type poems,' she said in an interview in 2000. But she rubbed long-time contributors the wrong way. 'They would do anything to get published. Those that weren't queer wanted to sleep with me. They thought they were poets and there should be free love or something.' When Spark entered a story competition in The Observer – 'as one might enter for a crossword puzzle,' she said – she won first prize. It poured oil on the jealousy of her on-off lover Derek Stanford, a jobbing writer and sometime collaborator who betrayed her by selling her letters and writing rumour-filled books about her. Spark was 'a magnet for mediocrities', says Wilson, describing alarming encounters in her rackety Grub Street life. Where an earlier biographer referred to Spark's failed seduction by the forgotten experimental novelist Rayner Heppenstall – a BBC producer who was pals with George Orwell – Wilson instead calls it 'attempted rape'. By the Sixties, Spark was a superstar, London in the rear-view mirror. In Manhattan she was given an office with a view of Times Square by the editor of The New Yorker. In 1966 she upped sticks again, to Italy. In Rome she lived in a Renaissance-era apartment so grand she couldn't see the ceiling; in Tuscany, she settled down with Penelope Jardine, an art student she met while getting her hair done. With Jardine as her gatekeeper and companion, peace broke out – at least until Spark received a proposal from biographer Martin Stannard. Spark had praised his biography of Evelyn Waugh in a review for this paper in 1992. When Stannard sent her a card to say thanks, she replied that she wished she herself would have a biographer as good. Stannard seized the moment and put himself forward, though not without trepidation: how would an academic with the dress sense of Norman Wisdom (as he put it) measure up to a woman so chic? The ensuing years were an ordeal for both parties. Spark had sought redress for the tittle-tattle peddled in the books that her former lover Derek Stanford had written about her. But that wish led her to thwart the very biographer she appointed, controlling his work through lengthening bouts of failing health. One of Spark's friends recalls sitting with her at her kitchen table as she read aloud scornfully from Stannard's 1,200-page manuscript, which had been submitted for her approval as per their agreement. Every detail was questioned: her mental breakdown was, she said, actually 'a physical breakdown which inspired a form of dyslexia'. The book, rewritten four times, was eventually published after Spark died in 2006 – essentially in its original form, Stannard tells Wilson. Wilson's own biography avoids a cradle-to-grave approach, opting for a dynamic and dizzying weave of early struggles and future success. She reports that in 1961 a magazine polled leading novelists about whether they wanted to make a political, moral, spiritual or intellectual impact ('Certainly not,' said 007 author Ian Fleming). Spark replied: 'In all four fields I would like more readers to see things as I do.' Wilson calls her the 'most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape'. Hard not to agree.
Forbes
12 hours ago
- General
- Forbes
James Baldwin's Top Books, Ranked And In Order
American writer James Baldwin during an interview with Harlem Desir, founder of SOS Racisme, a ... More French anti-racism group. James Baldwin's books didn't just capture the American moment; they exposed it with a clarity that made the literary establishment flinch. Baldwin didn't compromise. Ever. That may be why America hesitated to fully embrace him. He refused the safe confines of literary convention, transforming every form he touched: novels with the rhythm of scripture, essays with the pulse of fiction and plays and poetry that preached in secular tones. His writing style fused biblical cadence with surgical clarity: at once prophetic and forensic, lush and spare. Baldwin's prose carried the conviction of a heretic who still remembered the heat of belief. At 14, he was Harlem's boy preacher, delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons at the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly. By twenty-four, he had walked away from the church—and from America—haunted by the sting of spiritual exile. That estrangement deepened as a gay Black man in a nation that demanded his silence and a literary world that preferred him sanitized. Baldwin refused both. He turned that rejection into agency, repurposing the sermons that once offered salvation into blistering literature that forced America to reckon with its own damnation. American novelist and activist James Baldwin addresses an audience in a church. Baldwin is most remembered for The Fire Next Time, Giovanni's Room and Go Tell It on the Mountain, works that didn't just challenge American complacency but shattered it with language as bruising as it was redemptive. His Malcolm X screenplay became the clearest metaphor for Baldwin's relationship with American institutions: praised for his vision, then discarded for its truth. When Hollywood altered his script into an unreleased documentary, Baldwin did what he always did—he published it himself as One Day When I Was Lost. In 1948, Baldwin fled to Paris not as an expatriate seeking adventure, but as a refugee from a country that demanded his silence in exchange for his survival. Yet exile became his greatest strategic advantage. From the safety of Parisian cafés, he could see America with the clarity that only distance provides and the intimacy that only love makes possible. He returned not as a foreign correspondent but as a native son armed with uncomfortable truths, speaking with the authority of someone who had loved America enough to leave it and cared enough to come back and tell it the truth about itself. To know Baldwin is to read him in order and trace the evolution of a writer who never stopped sharpening his pen or holding up the mirror. James Baldwin wrote six novels, seven essay collections, one short story collection, two plays and a screenplay. Ranking his work is inherently subjective because Baldwin wrote to disrupt, not to be categorized. But some works have proven more essential than others for understanding both the man and the nation he never stopped diagnosing. Below, I rank Baldwin's most impactful works, not by literary prestige, but by how urgently they speak to America's unresolved wounds. Baldwin's 'The Fire Next Time' is a non-fiction book composed of two essays written at the height of America's segregation era, yet they remain among the most urgent moral reckonings in American literature. The first, 'My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,' is Baldwin at his most intimate and searing. Addressed to his 14-year-old namesake nephew, it reads like a father's urgent whisper: survive this country that was built to break you. Baldwin exposes the psychological foundation of American racism: White Americans require Black inferiority to sustain their own sense of superiority. But even when he exposes that violence, he refuses to abandon hope. In the second essay, 'Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,' Baldwin turns inward. The boy preacher from Harlem who once fled to Paris has returned as a reluctant prophet, confronting a nation that has not changed and a self that has. His conversation with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad becomes a turning point. Baldwin is offered a clear path: Black separatism, but instead, he chooses something far more radical—the agony of hope. He demands that America become worthy of the love he refuses to withdraw. He loved America the way a parent loves a wayward child: with rage, yet tenderness. Baldwin delivered the moral blueprint for a Civil Rights Movement, one that demanded change, not reform. 62 years later, that challenge remains. Who should read this: Readers struggling to understand racial injustice will find Baldwin's clarity as necessary now as it was in 1963. Where to read this: Penguin Random House Baldwin's first essay collection established him as one of the most important Black intellectuals of his generation, one who was honest and refused to offer blind allegiance. Across 10 essays that blend memoir, cultural critique and social commentary, Notes of a Native Son introduced the style that became his signature: using personal experience to interrogate national failure. The title essay draws a line between the death of Baldwin's stepfather and the 1943 Harlem riot, bridging the gap between private grief and public rage. In 'Stranger in the Village,' Baldwin reflects on his time in a remote Swiss village, where the locals had never seen a Black man. The piece contrasts European racial innocence with America's violent history, showing that Black identity in the U.S. is shaped by intention and confrontation, not detachment. The collection also marked Baldwin's public break with Richard Wright. In 'Everybody's Protest Novel,' he criticizes fiction that reduces Black life to suffering or symbolism. In 'Many Thousands Gone,' he revisits Wright's Native Son, arguing that Bigger Thomas, as a character, risks reinforcing stereotypes rather than dismantling them. Baldwin respected Wright's courage but resisted the idea that rage alone could define Black life. The Modern Library ranked Notes of a Native Son among the top 20 nonfiction works of the 20th century. Who should read this: Writers learning how to transform personal experience into universal insight or readers interested in the relationship between individual psychology and social systems. Where to read this: Beacon Press James Baldwin Baldwin's debut novel redefined the coming-of-age story by grounding it in Black Pentecostal Christianity in 1930s Harlem. The semi-autobiography follows 14-year-old John Grimes, who is struggling with his identity as the stepson of Gabriel, an abusive Baptist preacher whose checkered past affects how he treats John and his mother, Elizabeth. Though the novel itself happens over the course of 24 hours, Baldwin employs sophisticated flashbacks that span 70 years to show how slavery's trauma has scarred successive generations of the Grimes family. There is a lot of emphasis on the American South, showing how the family's migration north carried their wounds with them and how geographic escape couldn't heal generational damage. Baldwin understood that trauma doesn't respect geography; it travels in the blood. The novel's religious framework allows Baldwin to examine questions that secular language couldn't address, and John's conversion experience on the church's 'threshing floor' functions as both religious awakening and psychological breakthrough—spiritual transformation and self-acceptance become inseparable. The biblical allusion to Matthew 3:12, where John the Baptist describes Jesus separating wheat from chaff, becomes Baldwin's metaphor for John Grimes's own sorting of salvation from eternal condemnation. Baldwin drew heavily from his own childhood while avoiding mere autobiography to create multifaceted characters. Who should read this: Anyone who grew up in strict religious households and struggled with identity or readers interested in how historical racial trauma can affect Black families. Where to read this: Penguin Random House Baldwin's Giovanni's Room is one of his most discussed novels because it represented his most daring departure, not from American soil, but from its expectations. Set in postwar Paris, the novel centers on David, a young American torn between the life he promised Hella and the ill-fated love he finds with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. The room at the novel's center is Baldwin's most loaded metaphor. Cramped, dark and steadily decaying, Giovanni's room, where the two men have their affair, traps David and Giovanni in a love that cannot speak its name and a shame that clings to the walls like rot. Dim, airless and increasingly filthy, the space becomes the physical embodiment of David's repression and Giovanni's despair. The novel is narrated in retrospect on the eve of Giovanni's execution and traces David's psychological unraveling as he fails to reconcile his desire with the expectations of masculinity. There are no Black characters in Giovanni's Room, which is a decision that stunned critics at the time and distanced Baldwin from the literary establishment that had already begun boxing him into the role of a 'race writer.' At the time the book was published, scholars believed that whiteness inherently meant heterosexuality and Blackness meant homosexuality. But Baldwin's point was clear: the act of repression, which is the cost of denying one's identity, goes beyond color. After the book was published, Baldwin's author photo was removed to obscure the fact that this bold, intimate, and unsparing novel about white gay men had been written by a Black man. It remains one of the most important novels ever written about sexual identity, exile and the high cost of emotional cowardice. Who Should Read This: LGBTQ+ readers seeking a serious literary treatment of same-sex relationships from the pre-liberation era and readers who are interested in how internal conflict drives narrative. Where to read this: Penguin Random House. James Baldwin knew exactly what he was doing when he titled his 1974 novel after a blues song. The story is simple enough to fit on a police report: Fonny Hunt, 22, a Black sculptor, is wrongly charged with rape while his pregnant fiancée, Tish Rivers, fights to prove his innocence. But Baldwin decided that simple stories expose the most complex truths about institutional power and bias. Baldwin structures the story around Tish's voice, letting her 19-year-old perspective carry the weight of institutional betrayal and injustice. She moves between the present crisis while remembering the past joy and showing how love develops, even when there is surveillance. Yet Baldwin refuses to let racism eclipse the love story at the novel's center. Tish and Fonny's relationship develops from childhood friendship into intimacy, and their physical connection is considered beautiful rather than shameful. If Beale Street Could Talk concludes without resolution; Fonny remains in prison as Tish prepares for motherhood, though their child represents proof that Black love creates futures despite every effort to prevent them. The novel's contemporary relevance became undeniable after Barry Jenkins' 2018 film adaptation, and audiences recognized the same patterns of institutional misconduct. This may be Baldwin's most direct political novel, one that uses intimate storytelling to expose systemic violence. Who Should Read This: Readers seeking to understand how personal relationships survive under systemic pressure. Where to read this: Barnes & Noble Baldwin's Another Country is a train wreck, overstuffed with ideas like a jazz improvisation spiraling off-key. The novel follows a group of Black and white, gay and straight, men and women—artists, lovers, misfits—trying and failing to love each other cleanly in a country that has never been honest about what love costs. The novel opens with the suicide of Rufus Scott, a gifted Black jazz drummer tormented by racism, poverty and shame. His tragic death pushes the story outward, tracing the impact of Rufus's absence on the lovers and friends he left behind, and Baldwin makes it clear that trauma does not stay contained. Instead, it spreads and affects outward. Every interaction in Another Country is charged with the awareness that something important has already been lost and maybe was never possible to begin with. What follows, subjectively, is Baldwin's most ambitious storyline—formally messy, emotionally volcanic and at times maddeningly undisciplined. James Baldwin in Paris with friends. At some points, the plot sprawls, but this formal messiness serves Baldwin's purpose. The novel's emotional register shifts constantly—from tender to savage, from lyrical to clinical. Baldwin captures the exhaustion of people trying to love across lines that America has drawn in blood. When Ida says to Vivaldo, 'You don't know, and there's no way in the world for you to find out, what it's like to be a Black girl in this world, and the way white men, and Black men, too, baby, treat you," the statement carries the weight of centuries, but Baldwin doesn't let it end the conversation—it begins one. Baldwin was trying to write the Great American Novel at a time when no one believed a Black, queer writer could do so, and he nearly pulled it off. The book is replete with interracial desire, bisexual longing, friendships strained by race, gender and class and the righteous anger of a generation trying to invent new ways of being human. To put it in perspective, Baldwin wrote about the price of denial in this book because every character in the story is running from something, whether it's their history, identity or accountability, and no one goes away scot-free. The novel is imperfect, but its imperfection feels earned and at times even necessary. Baldwin was attempting something unprecedented: a Great American Novel that refused to center whiteness or heterosexuality, written at a time when no one believed a Black, queer writer could claim that territory. Every character pays the price of denial—whether denying their sexuality, their racism, their complicity, or their pain. Decades later, Another Country stands as Baldwin's most ambitious gamble: forcing American fiction to confront the messy, painful, necessary work of learning how to love across the chasms this country has created. Who Should Read This: Readers who want to understand how Baldwin wrote about queerness and interracial relationships in 1962, when both were largely unrepresented in American literature. Where to read this: Barnes & Noble If Baldwin's first essay collection, 'Notes of a Native Son,' introduced him as a sharp observer of American life, 'Nobody Knows My Name' is where he starts aiming straight for the jugular. These 13 essays were written at the cusp of the civil rights movement, and they all show Baldwin testing and trusting his voice both as a keen observer and a truth teller. The writing is tighter, colder and more overt because he is no longer just describing the wound but also tracing it back to the hand that made it. The centerpiece is 'The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,' Baldwin's patient takedown of Norman Mailer, and, by extension, white liberal self-deception. And even though Baldwin doesn't cancel Mailer, he expresses his disappointment all while asserting that Mailer didn't mean any harm, because we know what comes next: good intentions that still manage to distort Black pain into aesthetic currency. His warnings about performative allyship feel eerily prescient, especially in a post-DEI era. Writer James Baldwin candid portrait session circa 1965. In 'Fifth Avenue, Uptown,' Baldwin walks through Harlem without flinching. There's no nostalgia, no romanticism, just one of the most damning portraits of structural neglect in American literature and Baldwin's observations on inequality, poverty and the visible filth lining Harlem's streets. In 'East River, Downtown,' he turns his gaze to the white bohemians of Greenwich Village, people who believe they've opted out of America's racial hierarchy. Baldwin's response? Not quite. His analysis also calls out how these well-meaning liberals construct theories about racial superiority while remaining trapped by the very systems they claim to reject. Even at his most scathing, Baldwin never pretends he's above the system he's critiquing. In 'Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,' he admits to the temptation of escape—of leaving the whole mess behind—but concludes that there's nowhere to go. The honesty costs him something. And he knows it. Some of the essays feel like sketches for The Fire Next Time—a few ideas half-formed, a few punches not fully landed. By the end, it becomes clear that Baldwin is not writing solely for readers, but rather because silence is no longer an option. Who Should Read This: Anyone tired of watching difficult conversations about race fizzle out before they begin. Where to read this: Penguin Random House James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues weaves together addiction, jazz, pain and estrangement to tell a story that is ultimately about how fragile, yet resilient, complicated family relationships can be. What keeps the storyline engaging is the conflict and silence between two Black brothers who love each other deeply but have never learned how to say it. But Sonny's arrest is just a trigger for the unnamed narrator because the real short story unfolds in pulses of memory, confession and sound. As the older brother tries to make sense of Sonny's life, he is forced to confront the pain in his own: the death of his daughter, Grace, the trauma of their childhood and the rage of watching your people suffer while the world moves on. The story spans just a few conversations, a walk through Harlem, and one unforgettable live performance—but in that small space, Baldwin discusses grief, race, masculinity, generational guilt and the high cost of survival. Sonny, a musician and recovering addict, becomes what Baldwin once described as 'the artist as disturber of the peace.' His drug use, volatility and music are all expressions of resistance, misunderstood by a society and a brother that values control and respectability over emotional depth. Readers soon learn that what makes Sonny's Blues so haunting is that the narrator isn't cruel—he's simply been taught not to feel anything and does not listen until it's too late. In the final scene, as Sonny plays jazz in a Harlem nightclub, his brother finally hears the music not as noise, but as testimony. The performance is chaotic, mournful and defiant. In it, the narrator doesn't just recognize Sonny's pain—he recognizes his own. At the very least, Sonny's Blues is about the lives we live beneath the surface, the stories our bodies carry, and the reality that sometimes, the only way to speak is to play. Who Should Read This: Readers trying to understand or relate to estranged family members they love, or anyone navigating a complicated relationship. Where to read this: Oxford University Press Baldwin's most unforgiving collection yet is eight stories that read like psychological autopsies of American racism. If you think you understand how hatred works, think again. In this collection, Baldwin maps out the exact neural pathways that turn children into monsters. The centerpiece, "Sonny's Blues," might be the greatest short story ever written about art as survival. A Harlem teacher watches his jazz-pianist brother battle heroin addiction and finally understands that some people don't use drugs to escape reality but to help them face it. When Sonny finally plays, pouring his pain into bebop, it feels like catharsis. But the real gut punch is the title story, told from the perspective of Jesse, a white Southern deputy who can't get aroused until he remembers the lynching his parents took him to as a child. Baldwin forces you inside the mind of a torturer and shows how racism doesn't just destroy its victims but creates monsters out of its perpetrators. The story ends with Jesse lost in a violent fantasy, his pleasure inseparable from Black pain. There's a rawness about this collection that makes readers understand that this isn't literature as therapy or politics as entertainment, but rather, it's Baldwin performing surgery on the American soul without anesthesia. Every story here is a map of desperation—heroin, music, violence, sex or God. Some paths offer release and others leave ruin in their wake. Who Should Read This: Readers who are ready to confront the psychological cost of racism, not just for its victims, but for the people who enforce it. Where to read this: Penguin Random House Bottom Line James Baldwin didn't just write about America—he performed emergency surgery on it. His prose cut through decades of self-deception to expose what lay beneath, and he forced a nation to see itself clearly, and what he showed us was so disturbing, we're still trying to look away. His work remains one of the most important of the 20th century, not because it's beautiful, but because it's true—and the truth, as Baldwin knew, is the one thing America has never been able to handle. What Should You Read First For James Baldwin? For newcomers, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955) is a great starting point. This seminal collection of essays has a personal twist to it that is complete with intelligent social commentary, laying bare the difficulties of race, identity, and belonging. Baldwin's reflections on his father's death, the Harlem riots and his experiences in a racially divided America provide a visceral understanding of the Black experience. Following this, "Giovanni's Room" (1956) offers a daring exploration of love, sexuality, and isolation. Set in postwar Paris, the novel follows the life of an American man grappling with his sexual identity, challenging societal norms and expectations. Baldwin's eloquent prose and unflinching honesty make this work a poignant examination of the human condition. What Are Famous Quotes By James Baldwin? 'Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.' - James Baldwin (If Beale Street Could Talk) 'Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.' — James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son) 'The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.' — James Baldwin (The Devil Finds Work) Was James Baldwin LGBTQ+? Baldwin never allowed himself to be constrained by labels, yet his identity as a Black queer man shaped everything he wrote—and how he moved through the world. In novels like Giovanni's Room, Baldwin wrote openly about queer love and longing, long before such stories were welcomed in the American literary canon. In 2021, he was inducted into the LGBTQ Victory Institute Hall of Fame.
New York Times
14 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lynn Freed, South African Writer With a Wry Style, Dies at 79
Lynn Freed, a South African-born writer whose mordant, darkly comic works explored her Jewish upbringing during apartheid, along with the jagged feelings of displacement experienced by expatriates and the ways that women negotiate their identities and sexual desire, died on May 9 at her home in Sonoma, Calif. She was 79. Her daughter, Jessica Gamsu, said the cause was lymphoma. The author of seven novels, dozens of essays and a collection of short stories that were originally published in The New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic, Ms. Freed was praised by critics for her spare, wry and unsentimental style. 'If Joan Didion and Fran Lebowitz had a literary love child, she would be Lynn Freed,' the critic E. Ce Miller wrote in Bustle magazine, describing Ms. Freed's writing as 'in equal turns funny, wise and sardonic.' Raised by eccentric thespians in South Africa, Ms. Freed immigrated to New York City in the late 1960s to attend graduate school and later settled in California. Her first novel, 'Heart Change' (1982), was about a doctor who has an affair with her daughter's music teacher. It was a critical and commercial dud. Ms. Freed caught her literary wind in 1986 with her second novel, 'Home Ground,' which drew generously on her upbringing. Narrated by Ruth Frank, a Jewish girl whose parents run a theater and employ servants, the book subtly skewers the manners and lavish excesses of white families during apartheid. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The magic of summer camp inspired Charis Cotter's new novel
Charis Cotter says some of her earliest memories are of attending summer camp as a child in Ontario. "We'd have dress-up nights and skits. I loved the skits. And singing, the singing was great. To me [it] was just magical," she said. She draws on these magical memories for her latest novel The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall, which tells the story of a girl who goes to summer camp for the first time and encounters a ghostly mystery. The prolific and award-winning author of children's books moved to Western Bay, Newfoundland, about 15 years ago, after spending most of her life in Toronto. She believes the move gave her the same sense of vitality she used to experience in the summers of her childhood. "Growing up in the city, but going out and being in the country, I just felt like I came alive. It was where I belonged. It inspired me," she said. Living next to a large cemetery in Toronto, and then moving into a house situated between two cemeteries in Western Bay, she has always been drawn to the sense of wonder graveyards inspire. "I always want there to be more to life than what you can see and touch, that there's something more mysterious happening, and magical," she said. In her writing, she approaches the idea of the supernatural with a sense of playfulness rather than fear. "To me it's a key to get into a child's imagination. It's with grownups, too. You start talking about ghosts, and immediately everyone is listening." Cotter has authored more than a dozen books for young readers, garnering accolades from the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards and the Atlantic Book Awards for children's literature, plus national and international awards. Yet, her first passion was acting, and she still brings that early love to her craft through engaging presentations. Cotter especially enjoys visiting children in classrooms. Drawing on her theatre training — she studied acting in Toronto and London, England — she presents dramatic readings in character and helps children learn to tell their own stories. Among her many personas, she has given readings dressed as Queen Elizabeth II and as a housecleaning ghost from Scottish lore. She also does creative writing workshops with school children. Two of her titles, The Ghosts of Baccalieu and The Ghosts of Southwest Arm, are collections of stories arising out of these classroom writing workshops. "I want to stimulate kids' imaginations," she said. "I want them to be creative and lose themselves in daydreams and use their imaginations because I just think it's vital to human existence and creativity." In The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall, the young protagonist feels different from other kids and is nervous about attending summer camp for the first time. In fact, many of Cotter's novels feature characters who feel out of step with their peers. "I think a lot of kids feel that way," she said. "I think kids can relate on some level to that feeling of not being sure of yourself and not being sure of your friends … or feeling that you're weird or different." What inspires her to write about these young characters? Cotter believes she is a 10-year-old at heart. "Everybody has an age that they are inside that's not their chronological age, it's their psychological age or the age that they operate from and see the world around them. And I always say that I'm 10 inside," she said. "There's insecurity, hesitation, but the world is opening up." Whether she's writing a new ghost story or telling tales to a room full of fifth graders, Cotter is driven by a deep empathy for the children she engages with. "I want their emotional experience of life to be validated," she said. Sometimes in a classroom setting, a child will disclose their real-life experience of grief. "Somebody will say, my father died last year, or my grandmother died. And then I have to try to respond to them in a way that isn't just playing, it's something more. And it's very moving when that happens." Ultimately, Cotter's goal is to inspire delight in her young readers. "My books are always to do with ghosts, and ghosts have to do with death. So, there is a sadness in my books. But my main purpose in writing is always to give the reader a good time, to entertain them and have fun, and pull them into another world," she said. In the coming months, Cotter will offer signing events in Newfoundland and Ontario. She also hopes to do another school tour in the fall. Copies of The Mystery of the Haunted Dance Hall are available in all bookstores. Her next local book signing will take place at Coles in the Village Mall in St. John's on Saturday, June 14, from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.
Wall Street Journal
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: ‘Parallel Lines' by Edward St. Aubyn
Edward St. Aubyn's five-book cycle, the Patrick Melrose novels, published between 1992 and 2011 and now widely recognized as a classic of British literature, covers a lot of territory in the chronicle of its magnetically messed-up hero. Childhood trauma, addiction, euthanasia and the concealed cruelties of the English aristocracy count among its darkest preoccupations. Mr. St. Aubyn is equally obsessed with psychoanalysis and ethical philosophy, inheritance and spirituality, and the torment of trying to distill such mysteries into meaningful language. The novels veer breathtakingly from gonzo druggie farce to exquisite manor-house satire to earnest talking-cure confessionals, relying on the diamantine luster of the prose to hold them all together. You should read them, is what I'm saying. Less obviously, the books are also instances of what the critic Marco Roth has labeled 'neuronovels': fiction interested in the brain's relation to behavior and personality. 'Never Mind' (1992), the first book in the series, turns on the first time that Patrick, at 5 years old, is sexually abused by his sadistic father. During the violation he feels himself 'split in half,' so that part of his consciousness is stuck in the moment of violence and part seems to have escaped his body to seek distraction in anything else. The mental rupture defines his coming of age. In an indelible scene from his drug-addled 20s in 'Bad News' (1992), Patrick has a full-fledged schizophrenic episode when his brain is colonized by a 'bacteria of voices.' The depictions of his fragmentation, and his long, arduous struggle toward unity, are so precise and vivid that they could serve as neuropsychology case studies. The brain and its role as the seat of consciousness continue as fixations in the fitfully successful novels Mr. St. Aubyn has published outside the Melrose series, the best of which are 'Double Blind' (2021) and its sequel, 'Parallel Lives.' Science is confronted far more technically in these pendant works, whose decentralized cast, spread mostly between Britain and the U.S., allows the omnivorous author to indulge in an exploratory sprawl of ideas. Among the characters established in 'Double Blind' is the billionaire venture capitalist Hunter Sterling, who has begun investing in futuristic biotech innovations such as 'Happy Helmets,' which reproduce in their wearers' brains the neurological states of, for instance, business leaders or religious gurus. Yet that very cerebral plasticity is a source of crisis for Hunter's love interest, Lucy, who in her 30s is diagnosed with a brain tumor and ushered into a life of cancer treatments.
