The Reader Online

Earlier this month, Rana Dasgupta won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize for his novel Solo. We are delighted by this – we published an extract of Solo in The Reader 33 - Dasgupta, it would seem, is less pleased.

In an article written in today’s Guardian, Dasgupta has confessed that he found his victory “very depressing”:

“I had loads of people emailing me, asking ‘Can I post this to the discussion?’,” he says. “A lot of people were immensely irate about the whole thing – I was amazed by the passion it raised. I was mostly saying ‘Please don’t post anything’.” A user with the postername John Self posted an invitation Dasgupta had sent via Facebook for friends to come and vote on the Not the Booker thread, and at that point “anything that was said about my book was a conspiracy,” Dasgupta continues, “and people were saying that I was behind it all.” It reached a point where Dasgupta felt there was “no way of arguing with any of this”, and posted on the thread himself to withdraw from the competition.

Did you know that you can download previous issues of The Reader magazine from our website?

Did you also know that it’s completely free to do so?

Issue 33 is now available to download

This means that you can now access the past four issues of The Reader– that’s a whole year’s worth, for free! Just follow the link above, and enjoy all The Reader has to offer.

Issue 33 of The Reader magazine, ‘The Current of a Word’, has arrived!

Highlights include: new fiction from Rana Dasgupta (an extract from Solo) and Clive Sinclair; Camille Paglia on her collection Break, Blow, Burn; Jonathan Bate and David Constantine on Shakespeare.

To purchase The Reader 33, or to subscribe to the magazine, click here.

The Reader 32 is now available as a free download, so if you haven’t been able to read it yet, now’s your chance. You can also download the first and second instalments of Mary Weston’s short novel The Junction from our downloads page… the final part has been published in The Reader 33.