John Baker’s Blog

A taster:
‘Do you go into Wexford much, Granny?’ Helen asked as her grandmother sat down at the kitchen table.
‘Oh, I go in once a week,’ she said and sipped her tea.
‘How do you get in?’ Helen asked.
‘This only started last year when I sold the sites,’ her grandmother said, moving over to sit at the [...]

Peter Monaghan in The Chronicle Review looks back at the fate of a first novel:
Since William Heinemann Ltd. first issued it in London, the novel has sold about 11 million copies in some 50 countries and as many languages. (This month Anchor Books will issue a 50th-aniversary edition.) In the United States, in an era [...]

James Wood on Guardian Unlimited talks about character:
But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was [...]

A taster:
I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derison, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that [...]