John Baker’s Blog

For St Patrick’s Day MA Peel mused:

I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation by the British.

The post goes on to review the film Kings from Tom Collins, and the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson

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When The Cat Kin didn’t sell enough copies, Faber decided not to publish the sequel, so Nick Green, the author, went on to publish Cat’s Paw as a print-on-demand volume available through Lulu.
Now The Cat Kin is shortlisted for the Bolton Children’s Book Award and the Sefton Super-Reads Book Award.
In her Guardian blog, Ann Giles wonders how a book as good as The Cat Kin could suffer from poor sales. What kind of marketing support did the publisher give it?

Certainly, I’d never heard of it, or seen it in any shops, until a book blogger friend alerted me both to the book and the fate of its sequel. I checked on Amazon, as I always do, and followed it by googling Nick Green to find out what’s what. An intelligently put together website is always a plus, and he also writes a blog. Being one for avoiding the big bookstore chain, I turned to my trusted independent, hoping they might actually have it already, as they specialise in children’s books. The owner, who reviews children’s books for The Bookseller, had not come across it either, despite the torrent of review copies coming through the front door.

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100 Best Last Lines From Novels, e.g.:

Is it possible for anyone in Germany nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams?

You have to guess.

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“God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” said Sebastian Horsley, the British author who was refused entry into the USA last week. The reason for his rejection: moral turpitude. He referred to the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, in the wake of revelations that he had frequented prostitutes. “I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Mr. Horsley said. “Depravity is part of the job description.”

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