It's late, I'm tired, so forgive me if visits to magnificent Thirroul always give pleasure - if not the arrival, the departures ;-)
Novelists today tend to be pretty bloodless creatures. Look at their bios: They’re mostly workshop professors or M.F.A. hatchlings. They review their peers’ books, sit on grant panels, give readings and interviews, and, during their free time, cook up soft-boiled bores to pay their children’s tuition. None of that for Michel Houellebecq! The French author, lately of The Possibility of an Island, is an old-style enfant terrible: more lecherous than Pepys; more bibulous than Hemingway; more wretched than his own dim lodestar, H. P. Lovecraft. Here, for illustration’s sake, is what Emily Eakin wrote for The New York Times of her visit to Houellebecq:
Houellebecq answered the door in stocking feet … and ushered me into the living room. He curled up in a chair with a pack of Silk Cuts and a bottle of Jim Beam and hardly moved for the entire weekend… . By the time we sat down to dinner—in the living room—he was too inebriated to eat. He picked at his boiled crab and got some of it on his sleeve. His head began to nod; his eye- lids drooped. But for the first time all day, he looked almost cheerful. “I am the star of French literature,” he slurred. “The most radical one of all.” He reached over and petted my knee. “What’s your name again?” he mumbled. “How would you like to be in my erotic film?” A satyr against mankind
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Ondon Erotic Book Fair
The deal we did with Amazon was right for the time because it gave us a very cost-efficient way of providing maximum service to our customers, but we are due to make some changes to punch our weight on the online channel.
As was the case last year, one of the more interesting and provocative moments of the fair came during a panel on "21st century issues," moderated by Hachette Livre UK chief Tim Hely Hutchinson, and featuring Vicky Barnsley from Harper UK, Alan Giles of HMV, agent Gill Coleridge from Rogers, Coleridge & White, and Stephen Page of Faber & Faber.
The most newsworthy remarks, at least as far as Reuters is concerned, have to do with Amazon, even as panelists continued to fret about Google. Barnsley said, "Personally, I see Amazon as a bigger threat to publishers," having displayed "interest that they want to move into the publishing space.... They recently hired someone from Penguin US; they are approaching agents and trying to acquire content, which is very different from what Google is doing."
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• · · Wife who accepted mistress : Cliff Bambridge of 1 Ocean Street of Thirroul fame has the history of Jeeps and Juicy stories at his fingerprints: The world famous author, DH Lawrence arrived in Thirroul in 1912 and finished the novel "Kangaroo" whilst there. This watercolour by Sydney artist Gerardo Barranquero depicts Lawrence bathing with pregnant chatterley lover in the Pacific Ocean at Thirroul ; Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy
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