Cover story

If you'd like to know my views on buying books in Italy, as well as on the cultural relativism of book covers, all you have to do is click here. You will also find a shameless plug for Little Monsters, which is what it's all about. My thanks to the Guardian blog (and to Sandra, who placed the piece). Finally, you'll get the chance to see a very lovely photo of the skyline of San Gimignano. Good god, what more do you want?

Latest sighting of Little Monsters

On a more cheerful note than the one struck by the previous post, here's a photograph from Foyle's, Charing Cross, London, UK (Europe, the World, the Solar System, the Universe... Remember?). Little Monsters is now a highlight! And just look what it's rubbing shoulders with (so to speak). Wilbur Smith! Chuck Palahnuik! Nick Hornby! Will Self! What an explosion of testosterone on three small shelves; it's the kind of display you could find yourself pregnant from just by brushing lightly up against, handbag in hand, assuming it didn't kick your head in first. (I could have expressed that more elegantly but concentrated male hormones often discombobulate my prepositions.) I only hope Carol survives the onslaught.

All that's missing is one of those enticing Three Quid Off stickers on the front cover, which all the others seem to have. Hmm.

(Thanks, as ever, to Jane and her roving mobile.)

Disturbing stock

Leonie Jackson, of Waterstones Walsall, has this to say about Little Monsters:

I really enjoyed this book although it is slightly disturbing, particularly the relationship between the protagonist and her ‘uncle Joey’. The main story is set during the Second World War and the present day runs alongside this narrative. It explores issues of abandonment and the feeling of not belonging through the main character, Carol’s, own past as well as her work with refugees in present day Italy.
What you would expect to be the main thrust of the novel, the fact that Carol’s father killed her mother, is only lightly touched upon, which is a shame as I was hoping for this to be explored in more detail. Still, if you loved Atonement this is of similar stock.

Similar stock to Atonement? Hmm.

Me, me, me, face out, piled high

Jane's been scouting for copies of Little Monsters in a few central London bookshops. Here's what she found (from Borders and Waterstones). Now don't say you don't know where to buy a copy!

Pansies

There's an interesting piece in today's Guardian CiF by Mark Lawson. Entitled How fiction lost the plot, it looks at the presumed sorry state of modern fiction publishing and runs through the usual suspects: cliquishness, discrimination, book prize juries descending to compromise. In the end, though, he pinpoints the failure of the public library system to support literary fiction, devoting its shelves to DVDs and Citizens Advice Bureau pamphlets rather than novels. Books that were once guaranteed a thousand hardback sales now languish in warehouses and, finally, remainder book stores, assuming they're published at all.

I've always been too much of a hoarder to feel happy about borrowing books, though I valued the opportunity the British Council library in Rome once gave me to sample writers I couldn't afford to buy in the pre-Amazon days when imported books cost the earth. The only person I know who consistently used a library is Jane, who went to the public library in Mare Street, Hackney, at least once a week. She now buys her books almost exclusively from the new and extremely well-stocked Oxfam book shop on Dalston Road. This is great for her and, of course, for Oxfam, particularly as she regularly re-donates the books to the shop. It's less great for the author and publisher, of course, as the copy has already been sold further up the line, although I've often found that a book bought in a charity shop leads on to other works by the same author being bought from retail booksellers, much as downloaded music, in my case at least, leads on to the purchase of a legitimate CD.

Lawson concludes by saying that the success or failure of a book now depends on the vagaries of judging panels. My editor confided in me that prizes can actually make very little difference to sales, and can even have a deleterious effect on them if the effect of the prize is to provoke spitefulness among the winner's rivals and peers. It's also true, though, that a book with a very low profile indeed can't help but benefit from a little attention. I'm obviously thinking about Little Monsters, for which no longlist is too long, no recognition too abject. I remember, some years ago, Hari Kunzru turning down a prize from the Daily Mail and wondering at the time if I'd have his moral integrity. Well, I don't wonder any longer. I haven't.

A couple of last thoughts. One comment was left by someone who published a first novel but had the second one turned down as being 'not good enough'. Gulp. Another contains a link to someone who failed to find a publisher at all and took to droplifting his novel. Droplifting involves leaving copies of the book in booksellers. The piece is entertaining, thought-provoking and worth a read.

PS Pansies, as you know, was the title of DH Lawrence's best known collection of poems. It doesn't refer to flowers, and it certainly doesn't refer to the morally disordered (pace JP2), but is derived from the French pensées - thoughts which, according to Lawrence, come "as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head." In other words, I'm rambling.

The Almost Corner Bookshop

Once upon a time there was a bookshop in Rome called the Corner Bookshop. It still exists, but it's moved slightly up from the river - wisely, as climatic things go - and is now the Almost Corner Bookshop. It's run by the delightful Dermot O'Connell, has a poetry section that would put many far larger bookshops to shame and has already ordered two copies of Little Monsters. If you're in Rome and have nothing to read and want to go to a genuine bookshop (i.e. one where the owner likes, and knows about, books) you could do an awful lot worse than pass by Via del Moro 45 and say hello to Dermot. The shop's in Trastevere, just a few doors away from Mario's, a trattoria I once couldn't live without (in the most basic sense), so you can combine the visit with any number of other pleasurable things (the Minimumfax bookshop just up the road isn't bad either). And in most cases you won't spend any more than you would if you bought the books at home (assuming Rome isn't your home). Come on. You've read Doris Lessing's Nobel speech (I hope). Now buy the books. Read. Turn off the computer Stop blogging. Read. (Oh God.)