+++ 26 announces a major new project with the V&A and London Design Festival. Read about 26 Treasures here +++ New recommendations and reviews from 26 members can be found here +++ Should foreign language entries be accepted in D&AD Writing for Design? Read our members' opinions here +++
Read a book recently that’s brought you out in goosepimples? Seen a film that’s tickled your fancy? Let’s be having your finest recommendations for CDs, DVDs, web sites, magazines, exhibitions, stage plays, TV programmes, adverts or anything else that hits the spot.
To share your impeccable taste with fellow 26ers, just send in your plugs to newsletter@26.org.uk. Keep them short, sweet and light. Around 100 words should do the trick.
26 is now an official Amazon affiliate. That means if you order a recommended book or CD by following the links to Amazon, 10% of what you pay will end up in 26’s coffers, helping us to put on more events and recommend more books. A virtuous circle, if you like.
24 FOR 3
Jennie Walker Bloomsbury, £5.99 list, or £5.39 on Amazon
This is a delightful gem of a novel. Set over the length of a test match (England vs India), a sinuous little tale about a wife, her dull husband, her only marginally more interesting lover, the au pair who’s stayed forever and a missing stepson, unwinds in both a manner that isn’t – and to a destination that isn’t – predictable. Walker (actually poet Charles Boyle) has a deft ability to sketch characters in a few sentences, and the dialogue is crisp and dreamy at the same time. I tore through the book as fast as, well, Kevin Pietersen in one of his more destructive phases. Rishi Dastidar
Florian Zeller Pushkin Press, £10 list, or £9 on Amazon
In which France’s latest literary wunderkind made his debut, with the sort of roman a clef which would have made Martin Amis rage with jealousy, if the latter did jealousy. Sure it’s overly tricksy, and sex-fixated, and there’s not plot to speak of, but my does he do curlicues of sentences that track an arrogant young man’s descent into obsession, potential murder and the destruction of children’s innocence, which is – trust me – actually funnier than I’ve made that sound. Rishi Dastidar
A bit of fun and nonsense if you have five minutes to spare. The premise is simple... cut and paste some of your copy into an appropriate box on the website, and by the magic of instant linguistic analysis, your style is likened to one of the giants of literature. I've always prided myself in my versatility, but three randomly selected chunks of the totalcontent website had me pigeonholed as James Joyce, Charles Dickens and Elmore Leonard. Ummm. Well at least I’m no Barbera Cartland.
Mohsin Hamid Penguin £7.99 list, or £4.79 on Amazon
Not what you think. In fact I'm not sure the word ‘Islam’ gets mentioned once – the protagonist is a fundamentalist of a different kind. Interesting authorial voice/perspective, thought provoking and very easy and quick to read. Roger Horberry
Any excuse to see Rebecca Horn’s ‘Concert for Anarchy’ and I’m there. A grand piano is suspended upside-down from the ceiling and periodically disgorges all its keys like rattling teeth. Lovely. Other highlights of the Barbican’s Surreal House installation (with an upstairs and a downstairs and extra stairs by Louise Bourgeois) are Jan Svankmajer’s creepy ‘Down to the cellar’ film, Noble + Webster’s ‘Metal Fucking Rats’ and ‘The Wait’ by Ed Kienholz – an installation featuring a dessicated woman and a head made of glass bottles. There’s plenty of inspiring wordplay too, from Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Georges Perec. Fiona Thompson
Cornelia Parker Baltic Gateshead, until 19 September 2010
Any 26ers who’ve recently visited the V&A’s British Galleries for the ’26 Treasures’ project may have noticed Cornelia Parker’s ‘Breathless’ installation suspended above Room 55. A cousin of this work is now on display in the UK for the first time, at the
Baltic in Gateshead. In ‘Perpetual Canon’, 60 flattened brass instruments are suspended in a circle, illuminated by a single bulb. The cornets, trumpets and euphoniums, tubas and giant Sousaphone, are cartoonishly squashed, but the effect is somehow magical. Fiona Thompson
EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED
Wells Tower Granta, £10.99 or £6.58 on Amazon
And here he is, another feted American short story writer, come over here to show us how it is done, this most noble of arts: the shimmering sentences that you want to rip out and turn into poems; the air of humidity and enervation that makes the wisps of plot entirely appropriate; and the thing that really sets this collection apart, the controlled, simmering violence between ill-at-ease protagonists. Damn these yanks, stealing our literary formats etc etc. Rishi Dastidar
Another musical recommendation this month but there's some truth in the saying "all art aspires to the condition of music". The best writing has the ability of music to connect to your emotions - it's what we all strive for, at least much of the time we're writing.
I went to the Royal Festival Hall for the tribute concert for Kate McGarrigle. Kate, a Canadian singer-songwriter, died of cancer in January. She's proof, along with Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and many others that better things come out of Canada than draconian deficit-cutting models for George Osborne to follow. Kate was the centre of an extraordinary musical family - and extended family - including her children Rufus and Martha Wainwright, friends Richard Thompson, his ex-wife Linda, their son Teddy, plus Emmy Lou Harris, Nick Cave, Lisa Hannigan, Neil Tennant. They all gathered to sing Kate's songs on a Saturday afternoon in a full-house RFH.
It was wonderful. As emotional and uplifting a concert as I've ever been to. Now I'm listening again to the music of all the performers but you could start with Kate & Anna McGarrigle's French Record. It's just beautiful. John Simmons
PG Wodehouse Arrow, £7.99 list, or £7.19 on Amazon
Every few months I like to top-up on my Wodehouse. He wrote nearly 100 books, so there’s little danger of running out. I graduated from classic Jeeves & Wooster to the Blandings novels, and now I’m dipping into the Mulliner series. Recounted by inimitable raconteur Mr Mulliner, these are tall fireside tales of sprinting bishops, stuttering cousins, sure-fire wagers, and miracle-cure tonics, direct from the snug of Angler’s Rest. However, it’s not so much the subject matter as the style and rhythm of the writing that takes me return to Wodehouse time after time. His sentences ebb and flow like babbling country brooks, always impeccably constructed and easy to follow, yet sometimes half a page long. It makes a welcome change from the machine-gun fire of most commercial copy, and I hope that if I read enough, the knack of crafting such perfectly pitched prose might lodge somewhere in my bonce’s subconscious. Jim Davies
Bill Bryson Harper Press £7.99, or £4.43 on Amazon
Published a couple of years ago but still hugely readable and most entertaining (if you like Bill's chatty but facty style, which I do). The main message is we know next to nothing concrete about Shakespeare, but that hasn't stopped speculation aplenty, some of it downright bizarre. The last chapter's gentle demolition of the various competing claims concerning who really wrote the plays is particularly fine. I don't think I'm giving away the punchline when I reveal it was in fact Shakespeare. Who'd have thought it? Roger Horberry
A recent trip to Paris provided an excuse (as if excuse were needed) to indulge in this collection of all things French. Of course the essays are elegant and erudite and brilliant as you’d expected. But what I hadn’t expected was a) the insight into the life of a writer; or rather writers: Mallarme, Elizabeth David, and of course, Flaubert, of course; b) the passion of it all. Yes it’s a collection of writings about passions, but still – however cold-eyed Barnes is with his subjects, he does not lose his tendresse for them. Rishi Dastidar
