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.

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.

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)

A range of readings and literature themed events will be taking place at the store between 5-8.30pm, with something in store to please readers of all tastes. Local author Maureen Lee will be reading from her upcoming novel Au Revoir Liverpool, as well as answering questions and signing books; a Poetry Showcase featuring John Redmond, Clare Shaw and Deryn Rees-Jones reading some of their work; plus another of the store’s ‘Twisted Tales’ series featuring international horror legend Ramsey Campbell and Richard and Judy Book Club listed debut novelist Alison Littlewood.

For film buffs, there will also be a World Book Night  themed movie quiz, with all questions (and answers) involving books that have been adapted for the big screen.  And the best thing about it is that all the events of the night are absolutely free.

World Book Night at Waterstones: A Free Evening Celebrating the World of Books
23rd April, 5.00-8.30pm
Waterstones Liverpool One
12 College Lane
Liverpool, L1 3DL

For more information on the evening, please call Waterstones Liverpool One on 0151 709 9820 or visit the website.

‘They are honest insects, butterflies. They may get one’s attention with spots and swirls, great flourishes of colour, displays of dazzling brilliance. One does not have to look all that closely, however, to see how fragile that beauty is, how it is held together by the worm that it once was, and will be again.’

This beautifully written book tells of loss, life, love and something approximating love. Set in the north of Ireland in the 1800’s, the story is made up of parts of a fractured whole, brought together through its varied ‘tellings’, its diverse time-zones, its different authors. There is Maddie, speaking to a different generation from her place in a nursing home of her time as a servant in ‘the Castle’. Then there is her Mistress, Harriet, who, despite being the authoritative voice of the castle, struggles with parental authority, particularly in instilling respect and discipline in her children. Trying to teach them ‘lessons’, Harriet takes to locking them in the ‘wardrobe room’ for a time, a windowless room with nothing to do but think – a harsh precursor of ‘time-out’. It is in this room, during a period of thinking on the crime that has warranted the punishment, that her young daughter, Charlotte, tragically dies. We learn of Harriet’s story through the pages of a diary she kept during her incarceration in prison for Charlotte’s murder, but it reappears constantly in the telling of Maddie’s story to Harriet’s grandchild, Anna. ‘It’s an odd thing, isn’t it’, says Maddie, ‘the way the past has no interest for the young till it comes galloping up on the back of the future.’

I read with women at a Belfast prison every Wednesday. There was recently some fascination with a dull humming sound coming from high up in our reading room, which turned out to be a wasp. A really big wasp. It was tired, presumably locked in, a prisoner itself, but faring poorly in its unnatural surroundings. We were wondering, quite selfishly, if it had any fight left, whether it would sting us or not. Despite its intimidating size, it was not interested in us. It merely wanted freedom, and every ounce of its strength went into fighting that battle at a window that will never open. From her own prison cell, Harriet remembers her butterfly collection, her caged little bits of ‘sky’.

‘How hard the smallest of creatures will try for life. Constantly under threat, they devise new methods for survival. Everything they do is for the continuation of the species: to mature, to reproduce, to die. One aim, one goal in mind, so beautifully simple. I wonder, have I succeeded or failed? I am better than what I have done, than the one act for which I have been reviled, will be remembered.’

So too, are the women in that room. I wouldn’t necessarily read The Butterfly Cabinet with my group – not because it’s not a great read, because it really is. I would read it with everyone who has not been in prison. They need it more. It challenges the reader to think from a range of perspectives – same story, different interpretations, different emotions, different readings – The Butterfly Cabinet could metonymically represent the kinds of things that happen in shared reading groups all over, in all environments; the intersections of life stories, the retrieval of all the parts, the identification of the self in them, the fitting of the pieces together, and a need, a desperate need, to make sense.   

 The Butterfly Cabinet, Bernie McGill, Headline (2011)

Here he is, a pocket sized Ray Mears. Well, ok, a racist, imperialist,  17^th Century version of Ray Mears, who actually, if you go by the picture in my hard-backed copy, looks rather like a distant relative of Lady Gaga. Lord Crusoe, ripped, bearded and wild eyed like Nooky bear, with a tan that makes David Dickinson look as though he bathes daily in the milk of a very white ass, is resplendent in goat-fur culottes, with matching gilet, sporting on top of his head what looks like a coconut squashed into a furry pencil case.  To accessorise, he carries a gun, which let’s be honest is bigger than Friday, the grateful ‘native’ who prostrates at Robinson’s hobbity toes, in thanks for being rescued from … Oh, I can’t tell you that! The gun is probably the contemporary equivalent of a man driving a Ferrari.  However, since Freud hadn’t been born by then, we can dispense with the phallic symbolism.

Daniel Defoe’s grand title for this ripping sea-farer’s log is that of ‘The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe –Mariner.’ This is highly misleading and should be changed for ‘Robinson Crusoe -Marooner’ for in the grand scheme of things, he really doesn’t do that much sailing. I’m not going to spoil it for you, you will probably need some sea-sickness tablets at the start. However, you really should read this book for a freeing picture of life without twitter, mobiles, Google, or people!  You can instead catch your own parrot and teach it to talk and if you like you can also maim a few goats and keep them as pets. As a vegetarian, I did not like this book; as a thinking, feeling human being, I loved this book. Crusoe has a way of sharing his thoughts and feelings with you, that at times it was like a crab of emotion had pincered my heart. It was gripping, sudden and made me gasp.

On one of his dark night(s) of the soul (there are quite a few), when he finds a footprint in the sand, he is thrown into a bubbling swamp of paranoia and fear:

“… I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.” 

I knew exactly how he felt on my own dark Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, when a guy tried to break into my house at 2.00 in the morning. (Funnily enough, he had un-nerving Nooky bear eyes too!) I mean, dear reader, I live in the countryside, where these things don’t happen… I stared out of the window long after he had gone, convinced that the dark, strange outline of my wheelie bin was him, hunkered down, underneath the kitchen windowsill, waiting to pounce.  Crusoe became my new BFF as we joined together in the warmth of a soothing bubble bath the next day and merged our doom-laden cogitations of our demises.  He really was a good guy to have around, because whilst I went and stayed on my friend’s sofa for a couple of days until the heebies had found the jeebies and left.  Poor ole Robin had to stay on his own, with no escape from the Island and sweat it out. I drew strength and inspiration from his courage and wondered if it was humanly possible for me to dig a moat in 24 hours? In the end, it turned out ok for me, and for Robinson? It turned out – sorry, can’t tell you that either!

This is a story of survival, ingenuity, resourcefulness, hope, desperation, faith and adventure. Read it to escape, read it to wonder, read it to despair at the brutality and horrors of slavery, read it to make friends with the faithful Friday and see the world through his eyes, but most of all, read it for the description of Robinson’s inner island –a modern day metro-sexual is our Crusoe –you will not be disappointed. (If you are, boo ya sucks! There is always Heat Magazine for ‘Castaway-Chic’ inspiration)

 Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, Penguin Classics (1719/2003)

I bought this book about two years ago and it has been rising and sinking my slush pile of books ever since. Over the Christmas break I finally sat down to read it.

This book tells the story of the town of Oran, in Algeria in the 1940s, and the struggle of its citizens to combat an outbreak of bubonic plague. Although the clue is very much in the title, and from the first page you may feel as if you know what is coming next, each chapter still manages to build surprise and suspense.

The novel is narrated by an unknown person, who is recounting the effect of the plague upon the town. It brings together straight narrative with information from the notebooks of the mysterious Tarrou, a visitor to Oran who happens to be caught up in the outbreak.

As the people of Oran become prisoners placed under quarantine, each must deal with the separation from those they love, caused by both physical distance and by death. Each must come to terms with what life was like before the plague and what it may be like afterwards.

The largest and most imposing character however, is the Plague itself, which develops its own relationship with those living within its grasp and those that are absent, transforming what may at first seem to be a predicable story into a deeper meditation on life, death, separation and the passage of time.

It is a novel which holds up a mirror up to how we may choose to live in sickness and in health. Not a light read, but one that I would certainly recommend.

The Plague, Albert Camus, Penguin Classics (1947/2002) 

The Metamorphosis, or ‘Die Verwandlung’ in Franz Kafka’s native language German, was first published in 1915. It is Kafka’s most well-known piece of work and is considered to be one of the most influential stories of the 20th century.

The novella’s first translation into English appeared in the 1930′s. Since then, a number of translations have come into being – if you go into a library or bookshop, you’re likely to find at least six different translations of the story, each with their own slight differences in language and phrasing.

The focus of the story is the sudden ‘metamorphosis’ of the lead character Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, into a unnamed insect-like creature. Kafka intentionally decided not to name Gregor as a specific insect, wishing to emphasis the emotional impact of the change on Gregor rather than the physical aspects. Gregor is referred to in the original text as ‘ungeziefer’, which does not translate directly as ‘insect’ in English – its literal meaning is “unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice”, leading to lots of speculation amongst readers as to what Gregor has been transformed into.  

The Metamorphosis was banned under both the Soviet and Nazi regimes, with the Soviet Union describing the story as ‘decadent’ and ‘despairing’. All of Kafka’s work was also banned in his home country of Czechoslovakia (now split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) because of Kafka’s preference for writing in German rather than Czech.

The Metamorphosis was one of the few pieces of fiction Kafka published during his lifetime; he never finished any of the full length novels he had written. Despite the acclaim his work, including The Metamorphosis, has now garnered, Kafka’s writing went largely unnoticed until after his death. However Kafka’s influence has been wide-reaching in recent years – authors including Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez have been influenced by Kafka’s surrealist humour and subversive style of writing and it’s not uncommon to hear of things being called ‘Kafka-esque’. Indeed, Gabriel García Márquez cited The Metamorphosis as being especially important to his own work, saying that the story showed him “that it was possible to write in a different way”.

The story has also found its way into other art forms in modern culture, being referenced in everything from Brian Keenan’s autobiography An Evil Cradling, to the sci-fi horror film The Fly, to the world of graphic novels and comics – even to an episode of The Simpsons. Most recently, it has appeared in the 2008 film The Reader, where Ralph Fiennes can be heard reading aloud from the novella. In 2006, a stage adaptation of the story featuring music from Nick Cave was first performed at the Lyric Hammersmith in London and went on to tour the world – it was still in performance last year.

One of the quirkier literary takes on The Metamorphosis was published last year; ‘The Meowmorphosis’ tells the story of Gregor Samsa’s transformation not into a ‘horrible vermin’ but a cute and cuddly kitten. You may be less confused to discover it was published by the company who also published ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ and ‘Android Karenina’.

And…did you know that there’s a connection between The Metamorphosis and Doctor Who? It’s not just to do with transformations – in fact, David Tennant played Franz Kafka in the 2011 Radio 3 play Kafka: The Musical.  

Be here to listen to Part 1 of The Metamorphosis being read aloud at 9pm this evening, and join us on Twitter for a live discussion of the story as it happens – use the hashtag #eveningreadin to interact and share your thoughts!