Books features
theartsdesk
Next to tell us about her recent reading habits is singer and songwriter Martha Wainwright, who since the arrival of son Arcangelo last November has been juggling music with motherhood. Born in Montreal in 1976, Wainwright is part of one of North America's greatest musical dynasties: her father is folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and her mother is the late Kate McGarrigle, who died early in 2010 having performed and recorded with her sister Anna as a revered duo for almost half a century.Her brother, Rufus, is an acclaimed singer and composer, and her half-sister Lucy Wainwright-Roche has Read more ...
judith.flanders
Visit the room in the Louvre where the Mona Lisa hangs, and all you will be able to see is a glass-covered rectangle and hundreds of camera phones held high. Certainly you will be unable to examine the woman in the picture, or contemplate the work of the artist who painted her. Yet they - sitter and artist - are, finally, what matters: that one day, the (probable) Lisa Gherardini, wife of a silk-merchant, sat down in front of an artist, who began to paint her. Five hundred years later, another sitter, the art critic Martin Gayford, sits down in front of an artist, Lucian Freud, who likewise Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks to their credit, both the group and its members have grown up into professionals at the head of their field.Specialising in Renaissance polyphony at a time when such music was not only unfashionable but almost entirely Read more ...
theartsdesk
Could Peter Carey possibly become the first author to win the Booker three times? Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001) both previously won him the most prestigious and hotly contended literary gong this side of the Atlantic (and south of Stockholm). The judges, led by Andrew Motion, have whittled the long list of 13 down to the final half-dozen, and Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is among them.In order to win he will have to impress the panel more than the five other contenders. Here is the full list:
Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America
Emma Read more ...
theartsdesk
Born in Stockport in 1959, Tibor Fischer is the son of two Hungarian basketball players who fled their homeland during the 1956 revolution; his 1992 Booker-nominated debut novel, Under the Frog, revisited this subject in wonderfully fleshy, blackly comic form. In 1993 Fischer was included in Granta's influential list of the 20 best young British writers, and in the ensuing two decades he has fulfilled that promise with a series of richly rewarding novels and short stories.
I’m just finishing the latest issue of Glas magazine, Squaring the Circle. Glas is devoted to translating contemporary Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Carlos Acosta is not just a superstar dancer with the Royal Ballet and around the world, he is an avid reader - and indeed writer. After writing his autobiography No Way Home, he has also scripted dance shows and is now writing a novel.Unsurprisingly, his thoughts and memories turn to his native Latin America - to the Chilean Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) and the Spaniard Carlos Ruiz Zafon (born 1964) - when he chooses what next to read, a marked contrast with the heroes of European ballet dramas such as Swan Lake, Giselle and the Chekov-inspired Winter Dreams that he dances this autumn at Read more ...
theartsdesk
Next up in our summer reading series is dramatist Patrick Marber whose shrewd, sometimes excoriating, but always riveting observations of the human condition in plays such as Closer always manage to pull off that rare trick of appealing to critics and audiences alike.Born in 1964, Marber spent several years being a stand-up comic and has said that it was writing collaboratively on shows such as Radio 4’s On The Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You - and the latter's extremely successful television spin-off – alongside Armando Ianucci and Steve Coogan, that gave him the confidence to write plays. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“The empire writes back” was Salman Rushdie’s pithy summation of the process that changed British literature during the late Seventies and early Eighties, a shift epitomised by his novel Midnight’s Children winning the 1981 Booker prize. It wasn’t just the empire. Everyone else who had been, in one sense or another, colonised (women; the working classes; those once termed "adolescents") by literary fiction began articulating their experiences in a manner that often ran counter to past orthodoxies.Subtitled Nothing Sacred, this was the last programme in an excellent three-part series tracking Read more ...
theartsdesk
Born in Edinburgh in 1958, musician, singer and songwriter Mike Scott has been the leader of the rock band The Waterboys for almost three decades. Perhaps best known for the sky-scraping hit single “The Whole of the Moon”, on albums such as Fisherman’s Blues, This is the Sea and Book of Lightning, Scott has consistently reinvented the band's sound, fusing folk, rock and pop and working with a changing cast of musicians.He currently lives in Dublin, where earlier this year over five nights at the Abbey Theatre he premiered the latest Waterboys project, An Appointment with Mr Yeats, which Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker is our fourth guest to choose some favourite books for holiday reading. Born in 1956, she is known in part for her suspended sculptures that appear to capture the moment of explosion, as well as for her celebrated sleeping installation of actress Tilda Swinton (The Maybe) at the Serpentine in 1995.Her inquiring, deconstructing ideas that include wrapping Rodin’s The Kiss in a mile of string (Tate Britain, 2003) or dropping, crushing and variously destroying objects have brought Parker constant explosure in major galleries, from Tate Britain and Read more ...
theartsdesk
Third in our summer book extracts series is the theatre designer Tobias Hoheisel, whose designs for Glyndebourne Opera's Janáček productions remain iconic, and more recently designed English National Opera's Boris Godunov.Born in Frankfurt, Hoheisel trained in design in Berlin and was strongly influenced by the theatre of Peter Stein/Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth and the world-class Berlin orchestras inculcated in him a love of opera and music.Hoheisel produced landmark Janáček stagings for Glyndebourne in Katya Read more ...
theartsdesk
Second up in theartsdesk's short series of recommended reads is Tom Russell, the Texan musician who has a reputation as the last great American songwriter. His 25 albums stray from cowboy music to "folk opera" - which makes his reading selections surprising.
Mentor by Tom Grimes which details his years at the Iowa writers workshop and his relationship with writer Frank Conroy (Stop-Time author). A decent book on the ups and extreme downs of prose writing. To me it details, without meaning to, how writing can only be lived and learned and not taught. We are at a low point in the Read more ...