John Baker’s Blog

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 [...]

New Title: English and Chips

In The Fragrant City, the city of my birth, 3500 kilometres away, I’m nothing until I can speak English. This wasn’t the case for my father or his father, or for any of my ancestors going back more than 12,000 years. They were who they were. But for me and my [...]

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 [...]