To mark their ten year anniversary, Hesperus Press is seeking the help of readers everywhere to uncover and rediscover an out-of-print classic that will be published by them this September. All that is needed to accompany suggestions is an introduction to your touted book, which must be no more than 500 words, explaining just what it is that makes it so special and worthy of republication to be enjoyed by a wider audience. The winning entry will have their written introduction appear as a foreword to the book when it is republished by Hesperus.

The deadline for entries is Friday 1st June 2012, so get choosing, thinking and writing! Entries can be sent to info@hesperuspress.com or left in the comments section of this post by Wayne Gooderham on the Guardian Books blog. For more information about the Uncover A Classic competition, visit the Hesperus Press website.

Among the many highlights within Issue 46 are:

• An extract from Tim Parks’ latest novel, the unnerving and insightful The Server (Harvill Secker, May 2012)
• New poetry from Julie-ann Rowell, Neil Curry, Caroline Price, Marina Sanchez and David Attwooll
• Sue Colbourn interviews Matthew Knight, a clinical psychologist with Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, who has been using poetry in therapeutic settings since the late-nineties, with some staggering results – including a wonderfully moving account of a man who spoke after four years of silence upon reading Wordsworth  – the power of whose words is further explored by Gillian Clarke, Stephen Gill, Bernard O’Donoghue and Raymond Tallis
• Brian Patten features in the regular Poet on His Work feature, writing a no-holds-barred account of the inspiration for his poem Stepfather (which is this week’s Featured Poem on The Reader Online)
• New fiction in the form of an absorbing short story, The Magpie by Mark Godfrey

The joy of Wordsworth’s words is also revelled in by Jane Davis, who ponders over the pleasure of Lines Written in Early Spring whilst being amongst nature; more stories from the Reading Revolution from Penny Markell, who takes us through a day in the life of the Get Into Reading London Project Manager, and Casi Dylan talking about how good mistakes can be made in endeavouring in the adventure of shared reading; and an exclusive preview of the latest Reader Organisation anthology, the utterly enchanting A Little, Aloud For Children, introduced by its editor Angela Macmillan.

Perfect summer reading if you’re lounging around poolside somewhere more reliably sunnier or just on the lounger in the garden.

If you’re already subscribed, you can expect Issue 46 of The Reader to land on your doorstep anytime soon and if not, then what are you waiting for - subscribe to receive your copy today.

Last time we went off to Romania; this time around we’re heading to the second-most populated country in the world – so there are lots of stories to tell – and a fascinating cultural mecca: India. Over to our Events and Publications Intern Michael McGrath to give the lowdown…

India. The name alone can stir one’s imagination. It’s not difficult to conjure up images of the country’s warmth and charm: vibrant, colourful landscapes; fresh, exotic foods; the beaming smiles of passing children. What lies beneath these familiar images and sensations, however, is an incredibly diverse country. There is an ever-increasing gap between the urban rich – in cities like Mumbai and Delhi – and the rural poor that make up the majority, for example. Cultural differences also exist between the many different religious groups that coexist in the country. But perhaps it is India’s astounding array of languages that is its most divisive feature.

Charles de Gaulle once asked of his native France, ‘how can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ If France’s plethora of all things fromage demonstrates its varied national identity, then surely it is India’s profusion of languages that gives one a sense of its magnificently diverse population. There are at least 1652 languages in use in India today, with the government recognising 112 mother tongues that have more than 10,000 speakers.

The lingua francas for most Indians are Hindi and English, but it is the latter that has flourished in recent decades. India’s emergence on the world stage (including its membership to the G20) has given the country a more outward-looking identity, with English becoming the language of the educated, the prosperous, and the aspirational. A 1997 survey by India Today magazine estimated that about a third of the country’s population of more than one billion could hold a conversation in English. This linguistic trend has had an undeniably large effect on Indian culture, particularly its literature.

A new wave of Indian novelists and poets writing in English has materialised in the last few decades. Not only have these writers created an exciting new branch of English literature, but they are also receiving some of the most coveted accolades in literature for their efforts. The Nobel Prize in Literature, for example, has recognised Indian writers, awarding Rabindranath Tagore, V.S. Naipaul and Indian-born Rudyard Kipling honours for their works. In the last fifteen years three Indian writers have received the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Literature: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008).

This recent success has revitalised the literary scene in India. Jaipur, the famously pink city in the middle of the Rajasthan desert, has held an incredibly popular literature festival since 2006 – attracting the likes of Tina Brown, Ian McEwan and Oprah Winfrey.

Perhaps one of the most famous pieces of fiction to emerge from India in recent years is Salman Rushdie’s much-lauded Midnight’s Children. The book begins with the story of the Sinai family and the birth of its newest member. Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is celebrated in this new country and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences for Saleem, namely: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ – all born in the first hour of India’s independence.

Saleem, using his telepathic powers, assembles a Midnight Children’s Conference, bringing hundreds of ethnically diverse children together while also attempting to discover the meaning of their gifts. It is also at a time when Saleem’s family begin a number of migrations, and witness a number of the violent outbreaks that cripple the subcontinent during its separation. Saleems’s path in life mirrors India’s varied fortunes during this period, allowing Rushdie to examine the effects of colonialism, independence, and partition.

Midnight’s Children has won a host of literary awards, including The Man Booker Prize in 1981. In addition, to celebrate its twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversaries, the Booker Prize presented Midnight’s Children with ‘The Booker of Bookers’ and the ‘Best of the Bookers’ awards respectively.

Rushdie’s magnum opus is but one example of the many great works that have emerged from India since the country’s independence. What links the majority of these works is their ability to challenge long-held assumptions, confront difficult issues, but also enthral readers with their exquisite language and beautiful verse. If Midnight’s Children heralded a renaissance in Indian writing, then the future of Indian literature (and indeed world literature) is looking rather exciting.

Ransom Publishing specialises in publishing books specifically targeted towards struggling or reluctant readers, offering easily-accessible, high-quality and high-interest reading material that engages and excites without being offputting or patronising.

Titles are aimed at readers of all ages, from children and young emergent readers to adults. The Dark Man series by Peter Lancett, aimed at older, very reluctant teenage readers has proved incredibly popular, winning an Educational Resources Award. New titles include Vampire Dawn, an edgy and contemporary reworking of the classic vampire genre also geared towards teenagers and young adults, and Spook Squad, a series all about four girls and a poltergeist who have a very important job to do: protecting the human world from ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night…

For more information and to see the full range of titles, visit the Ransom Publishing website and blog.  

If you think capitalism’s bad – mass privatisation, rising inequality, BT adverts – then, before you decide to collectivise your land, buy a tractor and denounce your next-door neighbour to the Securitate, you might first want to read Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums, set in 1970s Romania during Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist dictatorship. Muller was an eyebrow-raising (i.e. not Philip Roth) winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, but LGP’s unflinching depiction of the everyday horrors and banalities of life under the regime is enough to silence any Anglophone complaints about the supposed eccentricities of the awarding committee.

The novel, largely autobiographical, is told from the perspective of a female German-Romanian student who, along with her three male friends, comes to the attention of the secret police and is subjected to harassment, spying and interrogation. The sparse and sometimes enigmatic narration convincingly captures the psychological effects of living within a strictly circumscribed reality, in which individual thought and expression are oppressed.

It’s not a barrel of laughs – the narrative is driven largely by suicide, madness and despair – but the narrator, at once jaded and unworldly, gives the prose a captivating, deadpan quality: her ‘heart-beast’ leaps out of her chest and onto the floor; she observes her ex-SS father hacking at the ‘damn stupid plants’ in the garden; the factory workers in the city produce ‘tin sheep’ and ‘wooden melons’ with their provincial hands. LGPs could be read as a realist counterpart to George Orwell’s 1984, inhabiting a similar world in which your best friend can be your worst enemy, and in which the present tyranny seems to stretch on forever.

Self-expression and independent thought are virtually impossible in The Land of Green Plums, but the characters in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros face identity issues of a more extreme variety – namely, that everyone starts turning into rhinoceroses. First performed in Paris in 1960, seven years after the premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the two main characters in this play don’t have to wait around very long for a mystical appearance. A rhino comes crashing down the street, trampling a cat but leaving the Sunday-afternoon ennui largely intact: one character, asked what he thinks of the incident, remarks, ‘Well … nothing … it made a lot of dust …’

Soon, however, everyone’s at it, and the chaos and destruction intensify; the moral recrimination begins and the remaining humans form a mini-resistance to the violent occupation. The meaning of the play would have been fairly unambiguous to a Parisian audience in 1960, sixteen years after the end of the Nazi occupation of the city; the characters often speak in terms of collaboration and betrayal (‘I never would have thought it of him – never!’), whilst allowing themselves to give in to denial and resignation (‘we must move with the times!’).

Typically of absurdist theatre, the nightmarish and the comic are combined: in one horrific scene, which looks back to Kafka’s Metamorphosis and forward to David Cronenberg’s The Fly, the character Berenger witnesses his best friend Jean turning into a rhinoceros; rapidly turning green and becoming hoarse, he renounces humanist values and cries out for ‘The swamps! The swamps!’ Later on, Berenger recognises the straw boater pierced on the horn of a recently transformed ex-human: ‘The Logician … a rhinoceros!!!’ ‘He’s still retained a vestige of his old individuality,’ observes his colleague of the disembodied head bobbing along the orchestra pit.

The characters in the play summon several discourses – logical, legal, medical, relativist – in order to explain and come to terms with their bizarre predicament, but all are shown to be inadequate. Where Rhinoceros ends with a flourish of humanistic defiance, however, no such consolation is offered in the work of the philosopher E. M. Cioran, who in his A Short History of Decay (1949) blames the human inclination toward belief and fanaticism for the sufferings of the world. Such nihilistic sentiments were probably not uncommon after the Second World War, especially if you’d spent most of the 1930s in Germany describing yourself as a ‘Hitlerist’ and expressing your support for the fascist Iron Guard back home. ‘Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his ideas into a god the consequences are incalculable,’ he writes after the war.

For those of us who embrace nihilism as a convenient excuse to sit around shrugging our shoulders and eating crisps, Cioran comfortingly assures us that ‘ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart,’ which, if true, certainly adds a sheen of philosophical respectability to watching Jeremy Kyle on a grey Tuesday afternoon. If you are feeling ennui-stricken and missing the rumble of rhinoceros hooves or of time tearing itself apart, then you could do worse than read Andrei Codrescu’s The Posthuman Dada Guide, written in the playful and subversive spirit of the movement that it celebrates.

The Romanian Tristan Tzara was one of the founders of Dadaism, which came to prominence during World War I – a time when ‘like a spectator watching splendid mannequins being outfitted for the evening by a tailor (Mr. History), Romania gathered the leftover scraps to make its own, rather improvised, suit from the elegant remnants,’ according to Codrescu, referring to its post-war acquisition of Transylvania and Bessarabia and resultant cultural variety. Like Cioran, the Dada artists and writers saw the modern world as inherently meaningless, but they celebrated rather than mourned this fact (which is possibly the crucial – if in this case achronological – difference between postmodernism and modernism). Romanian writers in the twentieth century seem constantly to be staring absurdity in the face, as Europe cracks up and realigns itself, then cracks up again; Romania joined the EU, with its promise of stability, in 2007, and may find itself caught in this cycle once more.

This was one of those book purchases that falls into my – or should I say ‘the,’ perhaps others will empathise – ‘I didn’t know anything about it but it just attracted me’ category. Its procurement from an obscure charity shop made my acquisition all the more mysterious, and the subsequent life experience that the book spilled perhaps seemed even more significant as a result of the lack of any prior knowledge  or preconceptions on my part.  I bought it in the summer holiday between the second and third year of my degree studies, one of the slightly unsettling and thrilling periods of time as a student in which I suddenly had bit of space to read what I wanted, and time to do so. My reading habits have always benefitted from a change of scene, and so back at my family home I sped through the pages of Guo’s novel, which tells the story of Zhuang (or ‘Z,’ as she introduces herself to others, anticipating the mispronunciation of her full name) who is sent from China to London by her parents to learn English.

Indeed, the change of scene I was subject to in moving home for the summer is somewhat incomparable to the experience of Z, who is thrust into the bustle and unfamiliarity of the unaccommodating capital city. Z’s narrative voice is a reflection of her own broken English and journey towards fluency, and although this aspect could potentially jar with some readers, for me it only served to make the book all the more compelling. Any novel that breaks away from conventional prose has often already won half the battle in endearing me just through doing so. Remarking upon the complexities of grammar, Z contests that in China, ‘We are bosses of our own language.’ But the narrative that is delivered undeniably presents her as very much in charge of English, too, albeit in a non-standard way. The unconventional word combinations and comments on everything from baked beans to the pub make the book what it is – an original, amusing, bittersweet understanding of the world and a chapter of a life.

At the centre of the novel is what is essentially a love story between Z and an –interestingly – an unnamed man. This is interwoven with snippets of Chinese history and culture, often told through Z’s accounts and recollections of her family and their life. I particularly liked the structure of the novel, with each chapter title an excerpt/definition from Z’s precious Chinese-English dictionary, which the following chapter is linked to in some way. Through this, the novel explores the relationship between rules, ideas and definitions on the one hand, and real life situations on the other, as Z’s perception of the world expands and is challenged. I found it difficult to bear witness to this, fictional though it may be, and not be prompted to re-assess my own perceptions and understanding on some level, too – one of the many powerful things that reading can do.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo, Chatto and Windus (2007)

All too often classic tomes are reduced in length and detail as to make them more accessible to the modern imagination.  Those who haven’t read Dickens’s Oliver Twist could be forgiven for not having heard of Rose Maylie – the orphan’s long-lost aunt.  Similarly, perhaps it is only Janeites (and those of us who are fans of Austen, but who can’t bring ourselves to use the J-word) who are au fait with Charlotte Lucas’s romantic dilemma in Pride and Prejudice.

Time has a habit of chopping away those fatty parts of a story it deems unpalatable. 

And so, the numerous adventures reserved for Gulliver have been discarded in the modern mind, bar one: his voyage to the land of Lilliput, with its six-inch tall inhabitants.  It is here that Swift employs his most scathing polemic on English society.  The triviality of war, the ineptitude of politicians (some things never change), and the insignificant details that separate church from church are all handled with the author’s typical wit and flair.

Perhaps it is Swift’s critique of the feud between the Catholic Church and the Church of England that is most worthy of mentioning.  Here we read that all Lilliputians originally split their eggs open by cracking the big end, and are subsequently known as big-endians.  But there were those who decided to give the small end a whirl, converting (as it were) to small-endians.  The two factions separated, with the small-endians becoming dominant and their counterparts being denounced and marginalised.  If there is a more accurate or memorable satire on the trifling nature of religion, I am yet to read it.

Is Middlemarch by George Eliot one of the definitive books all women should have in their personal library?

Whilst taking time to sift through her Tweets last week, Jane found this intriguing list via Gutter Bookshop’s Twitter feed of 100 books to maketh a man: ‘The Essential Man’s Library’ as it is being termed, somewhat open to interpretation.

The question that arises from this list, aside from the debates that could rage over whether the books listed are the definitive ones that address qualities of ‘manliness’ and whether any obvious choice is missing, is what would the list of 100 books to maketh a woman look like? Would it be dominated by female authors, of which there are certainly a few ‘essentials’ that spring to mind - George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen… - (interestingly, only four books out of the 100 ‘books for men’ listed were written by a female author) or would strong female characters take precedence? What would be the ‘essential’ life lessons women could take from certain individual books – or are there too many to mention?

We’d love to have your input – leave us a comment here, or tweet us with your choices…

And if you want to be in the loop with all that the director of TRO is up to, why not follow Jane on Twitter directly – or take a look at her newly located blog for lots and lots of interesting reading about reading.

News From Nowhere are holding a special evening event on World Book Night – Monday 23rd April from 6pm-9pm – to allow literature lovers to celebrate the momentous occasion surrounded by tons of books. They’ll have 25 free copies of one of the World Book Night books, Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, to give away on the night, as well as a communal book display for readers to show off the books they love, a range of one-minute readings from favourite books, consolation prizes for those who don’t manage to snap up one of the 25 free copies of Good Omens and refreshments for all.

Whether you’re a seasoned booklover or you’ve never been in a bookshop before, this night is for you – you can browse, buy or just soak up the bookish atmosphere. It’s also Shakespeare’s birthday, and we’re sure he could think of no better birthday party than sharing in the joys of books.

World Book Night at News From Nowhere
Monday 23rd April, 6pm-9pm
News from Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop, 96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1 4HY 0151 708 7270

And make sure you join us right here on the blog on Monday for our own Shakespeare inspired World Book Night celebrations…

For those of you who know me already, I do a lot of commuting between Preston and Liverpool to get to The Reader so I can do my bit for the communications team. And put plainly, commuting is the worst. Sitting on tin-can Northern trains and rattling through Lancashire to Merseyside in a cramped, overcrowded carriage can become quite onerous. If it wasn’t for a Thermos full of steaming coffee, Twitter on my phone, and a good book, I wouldn’t make it past Wigan.

I decided that a book would be my greatest ally in such circumstances, and that I’d reread Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to get me through the first few journeys. I’ve read it once before; I was around 15 -16 years old and I read it to look cool mainly. I’d just started listening to real music with meaningful lyrics and began enjoying proper films, the classics. To my pretentious teen-self I looked very cool indeed on the bus to college, head buried in a definitive American novel. That being said, a lot of the novel escaped me, the plot ran rings around me. I was too concerned with the fashion of the novel to understand fully what it really was about America that Kerouac was presenting the world.

So, on the railroad, whizzing back and forth to The Reader, I have been quietly devouring the book and getting reacquainted with Jack Kerouac’s wild, mad America while traversing the wild, mad pastures of north-west England.

On The Road is a blend of fiction and autobiography. It follows Sal Paradise, a fictional representation of Kerouac himself, as he hurries exuberantly across America during the 40s and 50s in search of the American dream. On his travels he befriends a true madman, Dean Moriarty: a man with few limits; a man that finds awe in everything and everybody. Their unrelenting journey on the road to personal release and fulfilment is peppered with drink, drugs, sex and jazz: the ultimate modern, hedonistic cocktail.

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”

The novel reads like an outpouring of thought. Words spew off the page with unstoppable force, like thoughts falling out of Kerouac’s mind. He famously wrote On The Road in three weeks on a continuous, 120ft long manuscript made up of taped-together pieces of tracing paper which he called ‘the scroll.’ However, the published novel is the result of a mammoth creative process, the consolidation of the extensive scribblings and observations in Kerouac’s notebooks, which he used to capture his real-life experiences and the people he encountered on the road.

This type of spontaneous prose is the ideal accompaniment for journeys. Guiding myself through the epic sentence structures, the lengthy descriptions of hitch-hiked car journeys, heavy parties and almost preternaturally long jazz sessions carried me from Preston to Liverpool and back again in no time at all.

Sal’s time on the road – the result of a feeling ‘that everything was dead’ – spans years. He settles sporadically, but can’t resist the free life. The novel catapults him across America as if time is subordinate: something that inevitably passes by, but something that mustn’t get in the way of experience. All the themes explored by the characters’ actions converge throughout the story. Isolation and alienation, detachment, possession and freedom: this is all of America, past and present, in 290 pages.

A reading of On The Road will make you yearn for fresh experiences. Rereading the book on a crowded commuter train, leaving Lancashire in my wake, I longed for the wide-open vistas of America; the expansive black roads stretching beyond the horizon; the blistering seats of an old Cadillac; a mad friend, with whom I could experience all that life has to offer…  I don’t mean this literally – because I can’t drive and can be a very car-sick passenger – but in essence. On The Road instils a sense of possibility in the reader, that there are an infinite amount of experiences out there to be experienced. And at this time in my life – degree in hand, internship underway – new and exciting experiences are very much attainable…

On the Road, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Classics (1957/2000)