Fiction

I suspect I might not be the only one who finds it unnerving to be at the start of a year that features, so prominently, the number thirteen. 2013 – it feels like bad luck just to read it in my head, let alone say it aloud! But worry not, I have assuaged my fears by turning to literature. There are some remarkable books which make use of the number thirteen, making me think that this number can be better understood as a source of inspiration, rather than a bringer of bad luck. Most infamous must be Orwell’s 1984 with its opening line: It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen. At least 2013 was rung in with just twelve strikes of the clock. How terrifying to be in a world where thirteen strikes is normal! (Of course the day would be in April, T.

The Costa Book Awards has made its own history tonight by selecting, according to its press release, an all women shortlist* for the first time. Here are the category winners, each of whom bags £5,000: 1). Mary and Bryan Talbot win the Costa Biography Award for Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, a book that examines two father-daughter relationships: James Joyce and his daughter Lucia, and Mary Talbot's relationship with her father, who was a James Joyce scholar. 2). Hilary Mantel takes the Costa Novel Award for Bring up the Bodies, the brilliant and demanding Booker winner about which quite enough has been written. 3). Francesca Segal’s The Innocents snaps up the Costa First Novel Award.

Find out which books PD James, Sam Leith, Susan Hill, Mark Amory, Barry Humphries and many more hate, then tell us about yours in the comments section. Craig Brown Which classic work do you think this comes from? ‘Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same golden tawny brown. She had high cheek-bones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt.’ Jeffrey Archer? Jackie Collins? Lee Child? I’ll give you one more clue.

The word ‘turboparalysis’, coined by Michael Lind (who has a brilliant piece on the subject in the Spectator Christmas double issue), is paradoxical, even illogical. And yet it is clear, perfect for our times. Lind defines his term as: ‘a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.’ Turboparalysis is a new word; but its sense is familiar. We are often warned that we ‘risk repeating the mistakes of the 1930s’. Comparison between eras is always awkward.

There is a Persian proverb which states that 'books are a man's best friend.' Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been dominated by its proverbial male companion. When presented with today's Islamic Republic, an unfamiliar Western reader can easily believe that a female literary voice cannot possibly exist underneath the seemingly anonymising chador, the Islamic female dress most closely associated with Iran. Instead, all that would appear to emanate from Iran is a male voice: Ahmadinejad defending arms programs; the Mullahs dictating morality; Khomeini, father of the nation, ever-present from beyond the grave, still influencing the country he theologically revolutionised thirty-three years ago this winter.

Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, has announced that her next book will be a picture book. Rather than writing a follow-up dystopian adventure for her teenage readers, she has decided to engage with four-year-olds in Year of the Jungle, a story about how her family coped when her father spent a year serving in Vietnam. Collins is not the only staggeringly successful children’s author who has taken an unexpected step away from her fan base with her writing. Whereas Collins is turning to younger children, J.K. Rowling turned to grown-ups with her recent adult novel about provincial life, The Casual Vacancy. Many Harry Potter fans were disappointed. While they didn’t expect wizards, magic and Hogwarts, neither did they expect such a grim, miserable novel.

Editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, is this week's Shelf Lifer. He reveals a predilection for Herman Wouk, an in depth knowledge of certain sections of the Eaton's catalogue and a fondness for a particular character in P.G. Wodehouse. What are you reading at the moment? Don’t Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk As a child, what did you read under the covers? I grew up in Canada, where the nights end early, and a child’s day does as well. So pretty much all my evening reading was done under the covers. A lot of Hardy Boy mysteries. And the Eaton’s catalogue. For the lingerie ads. Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? I do recall dabbing an eye while reading J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement.

Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so think yourself lucky.) Hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Norman Mailer and Rachel Johnson are, inter alia, Tom Wolfe and Craig Raine. Wolfe must be a strong contender, his Back to Blood containing the sentence: 'Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw.

Where to publish my fiction? The question will have occupied all aspiring writers. It is famously hard to publish fiction in Britain, which is why each of the few prizes for unpublished fiction attracts vast attention. There is a new prize in this sparse field: The White Review, the thriving independent quarterly arts journal, has inaugurated a short story prize for unpublished writers. The competition, which is limited to residents of Great Britain and Ireland, opens on 1 December 2012 and closes on 1 March 2013. Submissions should be made at thewhitereview.org. The prize will be judged by the writer Deborah Levy, Karolina Sutton and Alex Bowler, editorial director at Jonathan Cape.

A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of Helmut Flieg, whose strikingly under-celebrated life would appear to intercept a myriad of major twentieth century historical gradients. Despite being written in the 1960s, The Architects comes to us posthumously following years of state suppression in the GDR – Erich Honecker's attack on Heym during a Party conference prevented the novel from seeing the light of day - and rejection in the West.

Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel Writing Month. Organised by a Californian outfit called the Office of Letters and Light (I know – please stick with me), the event has been running since 1999, and now answers to the moniker NaNoWriMo, which sounds like a toddler doing R2D2. The rules are simple: starting on November 1st, you have until November 30th to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. You upload it to the event’s website, which checks your word count, and assuming you’ve passed the 50k mark you’re given a certificate and a web badge. Your novel is never readable on the site: it’s deleted as soon as the wordcount is performed.

Philip Roth has retired. He told a French magazine that, at 79, he was ‘done’. There will be no more books. For the little it is worth, I think he ought to be a Nobel Laureate – American Pastoral stands as one of the best books written since the war about, among other things, the failings and failure of the post-war era, and The Human Stain and Portnoy’s Complaint aren’t too bad either. Roth is an obvious choice for the Nobel committee; but it is simply perverse of them to be scared of his renown, or even to mistrust it. Roth’s retirement recalls Martin Amis' view that writers die twice: the mind weakens, even though the flesh remains willing. Amis’ belief carries a negative, mournful air.

There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of the super-heavyweight contenders will always be Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel-in-letters, Pamela. When it first appeared Pamela was as much of a sensation as the X Factor and Fifty Shades rolled into one, a genuine ‘multi-media event’ more than two hundred years before that phrase was even coined.

On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those days. The standard question was: why the hell aren’t we in government and whose fault is it? The Duncan Smith leadership was evidently doomed from the moment of its conception, but the ‘quiet man’ stumbled on to his inevitable demise. If the party wasn’t going to find a broadly appealing leader, I’d better write one instead.

During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high? This question plagued the defence of an Italian man named Fabrizio Collini some sixty years later. Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case is based upon that historical trial. Collini, who has lived in Germany since the 1950s, enters the luxury hotel suite of a man named Hans Meyer. They are near the Brandenburg Gate. He shoots him from behind, repeatedly, and stamps in his skull until it no longer resembles a skull. He gets himself arrested, says that he did it.

Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. McCormack has published two novels: Crowe’s Requiem, and Notes From a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. Forensic Songs, his latest collection of short stories, fuses traditional social realism with elements of science fiction, and the detective genre. While some stories here follow the path of straightforward naturalism; analyzing the difficult relationships within families; or the alienation of emigration, others probe issues that move into the world of futuristic surrealism.

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled classical ideas about the merits of a space not so dissimilar to this in character. Best to make one’s desk in a room adjoining the bedroom, he said. That way, the writer need not leave his cell at all. In ancient Rome, even more so, nature was often considered a distraction. Both writers and artists since have honed the skill of mixing a little hibiscus with their hermitude.

Unless you're a twenty-something year old woman, you probably have no idea who Lena Dunham is. Well you will soon. Until now Dunham's cult followers have been downloading her HBO series, Girls, illegally but at 10pm tonight viewers will get a chance to see it on UK TV. Lena Dunham is the latest pin up for those of us young women who think Caitlin Moran (a drooling fan of hers) is a little too old, a little too Wolverhampton and a little too successful to be a figurehead for our rudderless ship. Happily married since she was twenty-four, Moran isn't exactly representative. Girls seems to have hit a nerve with young women who are nearer the norm: waiting for their career to kickstart, sleeping with reluctant inappropriate men and all the while still believing the world owes them one.