The Snorgh in the Bookseller.
Sunday February 5, 2012
I’m delighted to say that The Snorgh and the Sailor
The Snorgh and the Sailor by Will Buckingham celebrates storytelling in a different but delightful way, as a solitary and grumpy Snorgh is inspired by a sailor washed ashore in the storm. Althought set in his ways, the Snorgh’s life is changd forever by the arrival of the nthusiastic, adventure-hungry sailor. This is a charming book that celebrates the power of the imagination and the thrill of adventure, and Docherty’s quirky benpanship creates a truly endearing Snorgh.
The book is not due out until April; but you can keep up-to-date on Snorgh-related happenings by Liking the Snorgh’s very own website page. And you can pre-order the book here
Snorgh Sneak Peek
Thursday January 19, 2012
It’s only three months or so until my children’s book The Snorgh and the Sailor is due to be published by Alison Green Books, illustrated by the breathtakingly talented Thomas Docherty.
A couple of days ago, I received a sample copy of the book in the post, and it looks beautiful; so I thought I would share a sneak preview of Tom’s beautiful illustrations with visitors to this blog. The text is rather small; so to find out more about the story, you’ll need to buy the book when it comes out (it’s available on pre-order
The Snorgh snuffles around his lonely marsh…
Snorghs don’t have visitors!
The sailor arrives…
An incident with a whale.
Leave a comment [2]
A Devil from the Vaults
Sunday January 15, 2012
It was about a decade and a half ago that I decided to take writing seriously. I was in the Tanimbar Islands in Indonesia, with a typewriter, time on my hands, and a yearning to make use of my native tongue; so I sat down and wrote a story called “George’s Devil”. Perhaps it wasn’t a particularly good story (although, even now, I console myself with the thought that it wasn’t particularly bad), but it was the first story I wrote since I was at school, and so I still bear some degree of affection towards it. Shortly after I finished it, flushed with an over-exaggerated sense of my own capacities, I decided to write a novel…
Anyway, a couple of months back, novelist and all-round good sort, Steve Himmer from the excellent website Necessary Fiction, said that he was running a month’s event throughout January of 2012 publishing the first stories ever written — written, not published — by published writers. Steve assured me that the stories didn’t have to be any good. In fact, he said, it might be even better and more interesting if they were not very good at all. Thus reassured, I dug out the story, which was still in its original typewritten format on crumbling foolscap paper, typed it up in electronic form, and sent it off. The story has now been published over on the website. You can read it by clicking HERE.
Introducing Happiness Now Published
Thursday January 5, 2012
Just a very short post to say that my book Introducing Happiness: A Practical Guide
The book – a practical, if sceptical guide to the philosophies of happiness – was an absolute pleasure to write, from start to finish; and I’m delighted that it has now found its way out there into the world. In due course there will be a companion website on the Icon Books site: I’ll link to it when it is up and running.
Kindle users can download the book direct. Those who prefer their books to be made not out of bits of information, but out of bits of trees can get hold of the paperback version.
Storytelling the Yijing (I Ching)
Thursday December 15, 2011
For the past few years, I’ve been working on a long-ish fiction/non-fiction project that explores the Yijing (I Ching / 易經) as a kind of storytelling machine. It was this project that precipitated me first into studying Chinese, and that then led to me travelling out to China last year – and, like all projects worth doing, it has seemingly colonised my every waking hour. Anyway, the book itself is still in draft form and needs some more attention before I decide what to do with it, but I’ve just had an article – one that includes three stories from the projected book – published in New Writing: The International Journal of the Theory and Practice of Creative Writing, and those who have access to the journal can get hold of the article here.
For those who don’t have direct access to the article (sorry!), it’s an attempt to ask what it is about the Yijing that makes it such a successful storytelling machine. It draws on various bits of theoretical gubbins from Calvino’s Lucretian literature machines to Ming Dong Gu’s work on the Yijing itself, but it also puts the literature machine that is the Yijing to work, so that readers can see it in action in the weaving of three odd little tales about ancient Chinese culture heroes (Fu Xi 伏羲), the importance of rubber-bands in the mechanisms of stories, and fox spirits. These stories will hopefully reappear in due course when the book is finished, and when I manage to track down a publisher possessed of sufficient enthusiasm/derangement to publish it.
Five Indie Books You (Probably) Won't Find in the High Street
Wednesday November 16, 2011
The last year or so has been a year of some absolutely fabulous reading; and – as ever – I’ve far more enjoyed burrowing around the more obscure fringes of the literary world than I have ploughing through the latest pile-em-high, Booker-shortlisted, must-read blockbuster. So here are some recommendations for five of the books I’ve loved the most over the past year, books that your local bookstore may – more fools them – have overlooked.
The Bee Loud Glade by Steve Himmer
This is undoubtedly the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of the entire year. Hell, let’s go the whole hog and say this book is the greatest novel about ornamental hermits of all time. Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is as funny as it is profound, as strange as it is compelling. This is a book about wealth and poverty, about solitude and friendship, and about – among other things – a lion called Jerome. You simply can’t dislike a book that features a lion called Jerome.
Spurious by Lars Iyer
I met Lars Iyer, the author of Spurious, several years ago at a conference on Blanchot, where – dressed in a Hawaiian shirt so lurid it made my eyes go funny – he gave a punishing two and a half hour paper on Blanchot. If I hadn’t known what the experience of Blanchot’s il y a was before the paper began, I certainly did by the end… Spurious is a semi-autobiographical satire of academia that moves from squabbles over who is Kafka and who is Brod, to the anxiety of creeping fungal growths, to the end of world. It is the funniest book I have read for a long time. After reading it, in an outburst of generosity, I am even ready to forgive Lars for his epic paper on Blanchot (although not, perhaps, for the shirt).
Pirate Talk or Mermalade by Terese Svoboda
Mermalade? A whole novel written in pirate talk? Perhaps what’s most astonishing about Terese Svoboda’s book is that it is very, very good. An eighteenth century tale of mermaids, pirates, loquacious parrots and all kinds of sundry horrors, this was a book, Svoboda herself says, that was written “without hope of publication”. If that is so, then – Dear God! – how I wish that more books were written this way!
The Divine Farce by Michael S. A. Graziano
Three figures are trapped in a suspended concrete tube, sustained by pear-flavoured nectar. Eventually they break tube into a strange subterranean labyrinth, a heaven or hell of sorts. Michael Graziano’s brief, allegorical novel successfully treads a fine line between hope and despair. It shouldn’t work – it really shouldn’t. And after reading what at first glance looks like a relentlessly depressing book, this is a story that leaves behind a curiously cheerful miasma…
The Golden Age by Michael Ajvaz
Czech philosopher and novelist Michael Ajvaz’s wonderful ethnographic travelogue of an invented island culture where images have the same status as objects, and where cooking is considered a form of barbarity. The Golden Age is pure pleasure – funny and clever without being tricksy, beautifully crafted, and filled with the kind of lightness that my own literary hero, Italo Calvino, dreamed of being one of the characteristics of a new literature for what is now the present millennium. Glorious!
Leave a comment [1]
Introducing Happiness due out in January
Wednesday November 16, 2011
I’m very pleased to say that my “practical guide” to happiness is to be published next January by the lovely Icon Books. And one of the most immediately striking things about the book is that it is very yellow – which is just what you need in the middle of the January darkness (just a glance at the cover, and you will find all traces of Seasonal Affective Disorder fading away…)
It’s not just a pretty face, though. The book is a pretty brisk and breezy exploration of practical philosophies of happiness, and has been an enormous amount of fun to write. It is practical not in the sense that it tells you how to be happy, or provides you with the One Great Secret of Happiness, but in the sense that it serves up a whole load of ancient philosophy – from Zhuangzi to Epicurus, from the Stoics to Buddhism, and from the pleasingly disreputable Cynics to the uprightness of Confucius – along with good dollops of more recent research, to propose a number of experiments in living that you can put into practice.
My main contentions in the book are these: firstly that happiness is not one but many things; and secondly that there are many other things that are not happiness that also matter. And so there is no One Great Secret (don’t believe anybody who tells you that there is); and even if there was, we’d need to balance concerns with happiness against concerns with other things.
If you want to pre-order the book, then you can do so by clicking here
Leave a comment [1]
More Ramblings with Dave Bonta from Morning Porch
Monday November 14, 2011
Back in April I was fortunate enough to get a chance to meet up with Dave Bonta – poet, editor, thinker and photographer – and spend a couple of hours in Birmingham chatting about philosophy, Buddhism, Chinese thought, Levinas, happiness, religion and almost everything else. Dave has done impressive things attempting to wrestle our ramblings down into something more or less coherent and posted it as an epic two-part podcast.
Somewhat foolishly, when Dave asked about where we should meet, I suggested the Museum and Art Gallery Café. Foolishly on two counts: one that the food is terrible; and the other that the only noisier place to meet in Birmingham is probably spaghetti junction. Anyway, if you want to have a listen – and see me making such spurious assertions as “Zhuangzi is perhaps one of the only philosophers for whom misreading the text is justified by the text itself” – then both parts of the podcast are now online. You can subscribe to the Woodrat Podcast via iTunes.
Leave a comment [2]
Introducing the Snorgh
Tuesday October 11, 2011
It was several years ago now that my good friend, the shockingly talented illustrator Thomas Docherty (not to be confused with Thomas Docherty the literary theorist…) suggested that we might perhaps work together on a children’s picture book. And so after a great deal of discussion and much behind-the-scenes fun, we ended up putting together an idea for a story about a lonely, miserable and decidedly antisocial marsh-dweller called the Snorgh, and his unexpected adventures with a shipwrecked sailor.
I’m delighted to say that The Snorgh and the Sailor
Wednesday January 25, 2012
Will on Snorgh Sneak Peek
Thursday January 19, 2012
Len Webster on Snorgh Sneak Peek
Thursday November 17, 2011
Michael A. Robson on Introducing Happiness due out in January
Thursday November 17, 2011
Michael A. Robson on Five Indie Books You (Probably) Won't Find in the High Street
Monday November 14, 2011
Will on More Ramblings with Dave Bonta from Morning Porch