Crime gives library loan beating to other genres

Photograph by Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

With a conspicuous absence of non-fiction, this year’s PLR figures show crime fiction dominating lending, with children’s books not far behind.

By John Dugdale

As with Sherlock Holmes’s dog that failed to bark in the night-time, the most telling thing in the league table of library borrowings for 2010/11 is what’s absent. Why is there no non-fiction at all in the top 100, although cookbooks, memoirs and Guinness World Records are invariably among the leading titles in annual charts of books bought?

And where is David Nicholls’s One Day, Britain’s No 1 bestseller in 2011 after making the top five in 2010? Like Dawn French’s debut novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous, also a hit in both years, it’s nowhere to be found. One inference would be that people are more likely to buy books they expect to read or refer to more than once. Fans of Nicholls’s love story, or Jamie Oliver’s recipes, by and large coughed up cash to own or to give them; so if a book is either useful or treasurable, it’s unlikely to appear prominently and may not figure at all.

That also would explain other aspects of the table – compiled by Public Lending Right (PLR) and covering mid-2010 to mid-2011 – such as the relatively feeble showing of literary novels: only Joanna Trollope (38), Hilary Mantel (41, 94), Kathryn Stockett (42), Sebastian Faulks (44), Sarah Waters (80) and Nick Hornby (81) fly the flag for non-genre fiction.

Whodunnits and thrillers, by contrast, are rarely reread for obvious reasons: once you’ve finished them you know the solution or outcome. This disposability seems to account for the overwhelming dominance of crime authors in PLR’s rankings, and also James Patterson’s emergence as supreme among them. The American overseer of a production line churning out a slew of titles each year, Patterson regularly scores several top 100 bestsellers. Few make it higher than mid-table, however, and it’s in library loans that he’s pre-eminent, Britain’s most-borrowed author for the fifth consecutive year.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Strong showing for Irish writers on Frank O’Connor shortlist

Colm Tóibín and Edna O’Brien both among finalists for €35,000 short story award.

By Alison Flood

Click to buy

Irish literary heavyweights Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín have both made the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor prize, the world’s richest award for a short story collection.

The award-winning Irish writers will be competing with two first-time authors, Canadian Alexander MacLeod and American Suzanne Rivecca, for the €35,000 (£26,500) prize, as well as with former winner Yiyun Li and American novelist Valerie Trueblood, picked for her first short-story collection.

“It’s a bumper year for Irish writers with a collection from Edna O’Brien, who’s a superb writer of stories – she always has been, they’re better than her novels by far – and Colm Tóibín,” said judge Alannah Hopkin, the Irish novelist and short-story writer. “I opened Tóibín’s book The Empty Family after reading lots of younger writers just starting their careers, and I read only a few sentences before I said ‘Oh my god, he’s a master’ … With Edna O’Brien, you feel like you’re inside someone else’s mind. These are not conventional stories – they’re almost a meditation or a rapture.”

…read more

Researchers find 20 unpublished Anthony Burgess stories

Burgess’s Manchester archive houses many short stories, film and theatre scripts and musical compositions as well as the original screenplay for A Clockwork Orange.

By Stephen Bates

At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born.

The short stories, unproduced film and theatre scripts and hundreds of musical compositions have emerged from the contents of three houses in London, Monaco and Italy, bequeathed to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation after the death of his widow, Liana, four years ago. Burgess died in 1993.

Among the archive are 50,000 books and 20,000 photographs, symphonies, poems and unfinished or rejected scripts for television and film projects, including lives of Atilla the Hun, Sigmund Freud and Michelangelo and a play about Harry Houdini that he collaborated on with Orson Welles, another frustrated creator of unproduced projects.

                                                                                                                                                              …read more