Posts tagged 'literary journals'

Hannah Kent, deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, has spent time living and writing in Iceland, the setting for her forthcoming debut novel, over the past eight years.

The Australian visit of one of Iceland’s leading literary lights, Sjón, is just days away. Hannah provides a perfect introduction to Icelandic literature – and Sjón in particular – in this passionate appreciation.

Hannah Kent

There is an Icelandic riddle that asks: ‘What in the house keeps silent and yet speaks to all?’ The answer? A book. It is a maxim that is revealing of Iceland’s profound respect for and love of the written word. A small island, its coast of black sand washed on all sides by the cold waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, Iceland’s nationhood has, in many ways, been built on a reverence for language; its heritage is unquestionably literary.

Books, reading and storytelling have not only long been part of Icelandic cultural traditions, but arguably comprise its cultural landscape. The Icelandic sagas (Íslendingasögur), medieval prose histories relating the lives of the Norse and Celtic inhabitants of Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries, form the nation’s cultural backbone. Landmarks of world literature, with many of the manuscripts preserved to this day, the sagas are ‘the great foundation myths’ of Iceland; singularly responsible for threading the country’s mythologies and historical traditions through the generations.

For hundreds of years Icelandic households gathered in the evenings during the dark grip of winter for kvöldvaka, where a member of the family would read aloud to amuse the others as they turned their hands to chores: knitting, fulling wool, mending tools. Recitation and contemplation of the sagas, many of which were known by heart, and readings of devotional books, newspapers and – in later years – published books of folktales, not only helped pass the snow-locked hours before sleep, but cultivated the education of Iceland’s people.

Unlike its European and Scandinavian neighbours, Iceland’s population achieved almost total literacy before 1800 – a remarkable feat for a country that, even after 1800, possessed only one school. As Uno Von Troil, a traveller to Iceland in 1772, remarked in his journal:

‘You will seldom find a peasant who besides being well-instructed in the principles of religion, is not also acquainted with the history of his country, which proceeds from the frequent reading of the traditional histories (sagas) wherein consists their principal amusement’.

This sentiment was supported by Sir George Steuart MacKenzie, who travelled to Iceland in 1810 – ‘the literary character of the people is doubtless the most extraordinary and peculiar’. He was struck by the fact that literature could thrive amongst a community ‘so oppressed by all the severities of soil and climate, and secluded amidst the desolation and destructive operations of nature’.

In modern times there has been little sign that Icelanders’ love affair with the book and with storytelling is diminishing. Reykjavík, the country’s capital, was appointed as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2011, in recognition of its ‘outstanding literary history with its invaluable heritage of ancient medieval literature’, and ‘the central role literature plays within the modern urban landscape, the contemporary society and the daily life of its citizens’. Despite the fact that these citizens amount to only 317,000, the country continues to publish the most books per capita in the world – the equivalent of five books each year for every 1,000 citizens – and has produced a vast number of internationally known writers, including 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Halldór Laxness. Other, more contemporary Icelanders to achieve international acclaim include Arnaldur Indriðason (2005 winner of the Golden Dagger Award) and Yrsa Sigurðardottir, both crime writers, and Nordic Council Literature Prize winners, Thor Vilhjálmsson, Einar Már Guðmundsson and Sjón.

Sjón cuts a distinctive figure in Iceland’s cultural landscape

Sjón (born in 1962 as Sigurjón Sigurðsson) is perhaps most emblematic of the vibrancy and originality that can be found in the contemporary Icelandic literary scene. At only 16 years of age he published his first poems, and a few years later he formed the surrealist poetry group, Medusa, with other artists. Now the author of seven novels and many collections of poetry, Sjón has applied his creativity in other areas: establishing the record label Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and collaborating with Lars Von Trier and Björk on the lyrics for Dancer in the Dark. His literary abilities and interests are manifold and reflected in the style of his work; from the precise, controlled lyricism of his novel The Blue Fox (Skugga Baldur, 2005) – where a priest hunts an enigmatic blue fox through a wintered landscape and a naturalist finds a young girl shackled to a ship wreck – to the stream-of-conscious surrealism of his most recent publication, From the Mouth of the Whale.

From the Mouth of the Whale (Rökkurbýsnir, published in Icelandic in 2008, and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2011), is, like Sjón, representative of the way in which Icelandic literature today coalesces the country’s rich history with modern sensibilities. It is the story of Jónas the Learned, a self-taught naturalist and healer who has been sentenced for sorcery and necromancy, outlawed to Gullbjörn’s Island in 1635. Shortlisted for the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, From the Mouth of the Whale is a portrait of seventeenth-century post-Reformation Iceland: a bleak island shrouded in poverty, mysticism and superstition, just as the bright light of science is dawning upon the world. It is a novel where tradition is amalgamated with discovery.

From the Mouth of the Whale – or Rökkurbýsnir, if you’re Icelandic

The Iceland represented by Sjón, as Jónas narrates his story to a lone sandpiper, similarly teeters between the magical and the known: ravens’ heads are roasted and their brains picked apart in search of bezoars; a solar eclipse drives peasants to despair and madness; the ghost of a parson’s son runs riot until it is exorcised with poetry; whalers are massacred; and corpses are invaded by the Devil, who ‘rides the deceased like a cruel jockey driving his horse’. Sjón’s prose is at once intensely surrealist and peculiarly charming, and – like so many Icelandic authors – he plays with the myths, history and folktales of his country. Just as Jónas breathlessly exclaims, ‘Every book is imbued with a human spirit,’ so are Sjón’s novels imbued with a spirited appreciation and exploration of language and Icelandic literary culture.

In a 2011 interview with David Shariatmadari from the Guardian, Sjón acknowledged Icelanders’ need for storytelling: ‘In a small country, you really feed your identity with stories. Nobody else is … looking at you, so the only people you can assume are interested in who you are, and where you come from, and where you’re going is yourself and your people. So you’re very much reliant on the story of your origin…’ It’s a philosophy and a recognition that, as Reykjavík’s City of Literature site suggests, ‘the art of the word is the strongest thread in Iceland’s cultural history’. It is what holds Iceland together as a nation, what connects it to its past. As Jónas exclaims in From the Mouth of the Whale:

‘And so it is with all the far-fetched tales […] of this world with their uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs, witches who can sell sailors a favourable wind or send their sons to the moon; in some strange way they come close to the stories that we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable.’

Hannah Kent is deputy editor of Kill Your Darlings, and teaches at Flinders University. She recently received the 2011 Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award for her manuscript, Burial Rites, which tells the story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland.

Sjón will be in conversation with Alan Brough next Monday 14 May, in a double bill with Roddy Doyle and Blanche Clark at the Comedy Theatre, 6.30pm–9.30pm. Tickets $35. Book now.

An Ampelmädchen street light at a pedestrian crossing in Dresden, Germany, via WikiCommons

Late last year a US-based organisation advocating for women in the literary arts, VIDA, surveyed major UK and US literary publications such as the London Review of Books, The Atlantic and The New Republic. They counted how many women wrote for the publication, how many women reviewed books, and how many books by women were reviewed relative to books by men. The numbers show what many of us have suspected or known for a while: women are underrepresented on every level in these publications.

The stats are published online in the form of pie charts, and there’s something peculiarly poignant about seeing them broken down in this way: the small blue female slice, often scandalously slim, in a big red pie. The New York Review of Books last year published 79 women and 462 men; The Times Literary Supplement reviewed books by 330 women and 1036 men; The Paris Review interviewed one woman author and seven men. That’s a small slice.

Australian publications don’t fare much better. Books editors from The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed on a recent episode of The Book Show were all surprised to discover that their pages showed a comparable bias. If you picked up the Australian Literary Review last week you would have been faced with an illustration of a cranky John Curtin staring out from the front cover, surrounded by a list of highlights inside the issue: without exception, they take the form “male writer on male writer”. A glance at the contents list inside reveals two women contributors out of fifteen overall, and one review of a book by a woman writer. I wrote an open letter to Luke Slattery, the editor of ALR, last week, asking for his views on the issue.

Editors of the VIDA-canvassed journals have been mostly defensive. Ruth Franklin at The New Republic faulted presses for not publishing enough books by women. TLS editor Peter Stothard articulated an attitude similar to the one critiqued by Jodi Picoult last year, when Picoult complained about the attention lavished on white male literary writers in the pages of The New York Times: “while women are heavy readers,” Stothard admitted to The Guardian, “we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS” which simply publishes, he claims, “the best reviews of the most important books.”

Since the beginning of the novel, women have been closely associated with it as readers and writers of the genre, but attached to the most derogated and supposedly corrupting forms of fiction such as romance (think Emma Bovary). It’s a persistent form of sexist thinking, mixed up with value judgments about what kind of books count as important literature, but it’s still rare to see it so openly and uncritically expressed.

TLS aside, it’s hard to imagine to that editors are sitting around congratulating themselves on successfully excluding women from the literary world. Some of the most sophisticated discussion of the issues raised by the VIDA stats has taken place on the literary site Bookslut, where two of the editors, Jessica Crispin and Michael Schaub, initiated an exchange of ideas on the topic, exploring the complexity of the unconscious biases that shape our gut reactions to books, without recourse to a rhetoric of blame or shame.

Editors like to complain that women writers and reviewers pitch less than men. This may well be true: after all, what woman in her right mind would look at the ALR each month and think “I belong here”? There’s no way around it: if we want a bigger slice of the pie, we need to ask; it will not be handed to us any other way. The ALR is one of the few outlets that actually pays decent money per word; it’s national, with a huge distribution: it should be obvious that women are entitled to be an equal part of the public intellectual conversation to which its editor aspires.

My first novel was published last year (it was widely reviewed) and I started paying a different sort of attention to these questions. In particular, I noticed with dismay how few women are nominated for major literary awards. In the past 20 years the Miles Franklin has been won by only four women. Several state Premier’s literary awards last year included no women writers on their fiction shortlists. The exception is the recent Prime Minister’s awards, where Eva Hornung won the fiction category with her novel Dog Boy. It’s not all gloomy: I like to think the future belongs to the young women starting to shape the literary landscape, such as Angela Meyer’s super-sharp Crikey blog LiteraryMinded and the editors of the new little magazine Kill Your Darlings. And now after all these metaphors I’m seriously hungry for a decent sized piece of pie.

Kirsten Tranter is a Sydney writer. Her first novel, The Legacy, was published internationally in 2010.

For a long time, literary magazines have been the lifeblood of books, writing and ideas. With Harpers in trouble, the recent hiatus of Heat, and the whole industry in flux, here’s an overview of good reading on the subject.

We begin with a mythbuster. The myth is that a literary magazine or journal is less likely to survive in the marketplace than a general interest title. Wrong, it turns out, according to a study published on Bookslut. Here’s some analysis at Poetry Foundation.

Another myth: often assumed to be at the vanguard of progressive thought, it turns out that literary magazines continue to be dominated by men. A recent survey has shown that men are disproportionately represented at every literary periodical of note. Again at Bookslut, Alizah Salario considers the dominance of men among New Yorker critics: “Why don’t I submit my work and pitch stories more often? I know I should. I just don’t. I hesitate. I do the dishes. I come back to my computer and my idea has soured. Is it because I’m a woman, or is it just because I’m me?”

Bad reviews can be traumatic: here’s Emily St. John Mandel on the subject. Reviewing and reviewers have been the subject of much discussion lately, including here at the Wheeler Centre. Zadie Smith’s appointment as Harpers‘ new fiction critic has prompted some chatter, such as this defence of 'middlebrow’ and this (both from the New Yorker): “Smith [said] that reviewing was having a fascinating moment. The book review is currently tasked with reinventing itself, thanks to the Internet, where the most inconsiderate reader could post a thumbs-up/thumbs-down review on sites where they could wreak considerable damage.”

Finally, the Paris Review has pleased fans of the late, and highly prolific, Chilean master Roberto Bolaño. The quarterly has announced it will be publishing a “lost” Bolaño story called ‘The Third Reich’ over 4 issues, beginning with the forthcoming spring issue. Here’s an excerpt.

Looking for a bookish gift that’s not a book? Soho!, a literary board game could be the answer.

The game revolves around collecting “6 pieces of rashly commissioned copy [that] need to be retrieved from a somewhat motley bunch of recalcitrant writers… And, being writers, all 6 are currently holed up in 6 Soho pubs, cadging free drinks, chatting up people half their age (but with, oddly, twice their looks), and complaining vociferously about their agents”.

The characters themselves are drawn with the same cheeky humour including such writing stalwarts as “travel blogger and author of ”Leicester: City of Crisps“, Toby D’Azure” and “Girl-about-town and sparkly-heeled chick-lit tyro Sophie Blush”. Players are required to corral copy from these various literary geniuses. The game is apparently “suitable for all ages, though under-12s might not get some of the jokes and under-8’s will probably throw tantrums. Also, any taxi-drivers will have a built-in advantage, but there’s not much we can do about that – they have enlarged hippocampi, you know”.

The game is a fundraising drive for Smoke, a London-based literary magazine that’s currently on a “short sabbatical to consider its options and work on other projects” including Soho!. As we look to the future of literary journals in Australia, could board games be the new e-books?

Subscribers to Australian Book Review would have opened the magazine to find that the Calibre Prize was awarded to two outstanding essays.

Dr David Hansen’s “Seeing Truganini” looks into the European silent generation who witnessed the last public display of the remains of the ‘last Australian Aborigine’. Hansen looks says Australians find themselves “not in embarrassed silence, but in the equally regrettable white noise of pious post-colonial cant.” As a curator of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hansen’s piece balances personal insight with gutsy writing in an essay written specifically for the prize.

“On Being Odd” is Lorna Hallahan’s look at the marginalisation of those who look different and their stigmatisation in literature and society. She sends a salute “to Aristotle: ‘Happiness is born in connection to others, not just in beauty’”. Hallahan draws on her background as a theologian and social worker to put forward a compelling argument in favour of the stigmatised.

Part of our job here at the Wheeler Centre is to keep you up-to-date with what's happening in the literary online world.

Amongst the thousands of blogs devoted to all things books, writing and ideas, some of our favourites include Reeling and Writhing, a chatty blog about books by Genevieve Tucker, a newsy blog called Still Life with a Cat by Kerryn Goldsworthy and Perry Middlemiss' extensive literary blog Matilda.

If you're looking for the inside tip on literary Australia, you could do worse than to pay a visit to the Meanjin blog Spike, from the literary journal of the same name, or visit Overland. And as a handy example of just the kind of thing we're aiming to do here at the Centre, the two journals will be teaming up for our Meanland event in February, Reading in a Time of Change.