I was lucky enough to win a copy of Milkman in the 2018 Better Read Than Dead Booker Prize giveaway. This book was a big deal back then (which feels like a lifetime ago). It went on to win the Booker Prize (shortly after I won it in my BRTD stack), making Anna Burns the very first Northern Irish writer to get the gong.
Get Milkman here. (I hope I’m not milking it, but if you do, as an affiliate I’ll earn a small commission.)
As per the blurb: “In this unnamed city, to be interesting is to be dangerous… [Milkman is] a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.”
The “nameless” city is quite clearly Belfast, Burns’s hometown. Milkman is loosely based on her experiences growing up in that neck of the woods during the Troubles. Burns herself has called the setting as “a distorted version of Belfast”, but also that it could work as “any sort of totalitarian, closed society existing in similarly oppressive conditions”.
Burns nails the opening line, too.
The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.
Milkman (Page 1)
It really sets the tone for this historical psychological novel. The narrator is an unnamed 18-year-old who is being stalked by an older man she calls “the milkman”. He also happens to be a paramilitary honcho. Despite her rebuffing his offers of “lifts” and “talks”, and her quasi-relationship with a more age-appropriate man she calls “maybe-boyfriend”, rumours start to spread around the insular community that she and the milkman are having a torrid affair. This sends the narrator’s mother off the deep-end, panicked that her daughter is practically an old maid and now her reputation is ruined.
It’s a hard plot to summarise, mostly because nothing and no-one is specifically named. Even the narrator only refers to herself as “middle sister” and “maybe girlfriend”. This is a heavy-handed but effective allusion to the culture of silence that surrounded the Troubles (see, once again, Seamus Heaney’s poem Whatever You Say, Say Nothing).
Also, much of the plot of Milkman is built around seemingly small events, things that might barely rate a mention if you and I were to discuss our day over a cocktail. Everything is heightened, everything is politicised, and everything is prone to being extrapolated upon by the community. A trip to the fish and chip shop becomes a harrowing experience with a major domino effect in the main character’s life, all because of a rumour that the proprietor heard about her love life.
(Important note: one not-small event that warrants a major trigger warning are particularly violent and horrifying animal deaths, about a hundred pages in. I had to skip my eyes down a couple of pages to get past it, it was making me queasy.)
Anyway, over the course of the novel, the milkman’s stalking escalates, to the point where he’s threatening to kill the narrator’s maybe-boyfriend if she doesn’t leave him. The narrator’s friend calls her out for her aberrant behaviour – like reading while walking, and running at the reservoir – which has apparently made her an easy target for this crazy stalker-slash-hardcore paramilitary. Oh, and she gets poisoned by a local kook. The poor lamb is having a rough month! Luckily, it all kinda-sorta works out by the end. Mostly.
If William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf had a love child who grew up in 1970s Belfast, they would write this book. Milkman won major praise – more than Woolf or Faulkner received for some of their works, even – with reviewers praising Burns’s voice and portrayal of the complex social politics of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. The Booker Prize judges said:
From the opening page her words pull us into the daily violence of her world — threats of murder, people killed by state hit squads — while responding to the everyday realities of her life as a young woman, negotiating a way between the demands of family, friends and lovers in an unsettled time. The novel delineates brilliantly the power of gossip and social pressure in a tight-knit community, and shows how both rumour and political loyalties can be put in the service of a relentless campaign of individual sexual harassment… an exploration of the universal experience of societies in crisis.
Booker Prize Judges’ comments on milkman, 2018
I think it’s best to inhale Milkman – read as much of it in a single sitting as you can. I was reading it bit-by-bit at first, and not really getting into it; then, one night, I had the time to read two-thirds of it all in one go, and that’s when I started to really feel the flow. I’d also recommend reading it immediately after Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, if you’re not particularly familiar with the Troubles. As a non-fiction and fiction pairing, they both explore the consequences of a culture of silence and complement each other superbly.
“I just can’t finish it, it hurts me to my core to try and read it.” – Danielle Mongeon
“While I was reading this book I seriously contemplated making a Dr appointment because I felt like nothing on the pages made any sense to me and I could not keep up with who the author was talking about. No one has any names and as far as I can tell this book has no meaning. I will most likely burn this winter if my house gets too cold.” – Aubrey
“Charming and funny, but serious too. If you are not a skilled reader with a sense of humor, though, you will probably not like this novel. In that case, don’t give it a low rating. Consider giving yourself a low rating instead.” – Reviewer
“It’s no fun being Irish. Or Reading Milkman. There. I just saved you 17 torturous hours.” – Michael Culp
The Pulitzer Prizes are a set of awards given each year for achievements in American journalism, literature, and composition. You might have noticed that quite a few of the books I’ve read and recommended here on Keeping Up With The Penguins are lauded as Pulitzer Prize-winners – for some reason, I seem to share a literary sensibility with the panel of judges. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (formerly the Pulitzer Prize for Novel) is awarded “for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”. Here are eighteen great Pulitzer Prize-winning books from the past 100 years.
If you purchase one of these Pulitzer Prize winning books through an affiliate link on this page, I’ll earn a small commission.
March by Geraldine Brooks
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2006
In her 2005 novel, March, Geraldine Brooks reimagines Louisa May Alcott’s children’s classic Little Women from the perspective of the mostly-absent March patriarch. The Pulitzer Prize judges commended Brooks for adding “adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested”. They called March “a lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time”.
The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Pulitzer Prize for Novel 1940
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath is now widely considered a classic of American working class literature, and a strong contender for the Great American Novel moniker. In the year following its 1939 release, Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Novel, and the National Book Award, for his searing social commentary. It was also the best-selling novel of the year (an astonishing 430,000 copies), and the Armed Services Edition went through two full print runs. Read my full review of The Grapes Of Wrath here.
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction2015
Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See explores the depth and breadth of human nature through a story about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in unlikely circumstances over the course of WWII. According to the Pulitzer Prize judges, Doerr “illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another”. They called this New York Times best-seller “dazzling … a magnificent, deeply moving novel”. Read my full review of All The Light We Cannot See here.
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1953
The Old Man And The Sea was first published in 1952, the last major work of fiction by Hemingway to be published during his lifetime. The deceptively short and simple story revolves around an aging Cuban fisherman, and his struggle to reel in a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream. Hemingway was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the year following its release, and it was also cited specifically in the judges’ comments when he received a Nobel Prize for Literature (which Hemingway, in turn, dedicated to the people of Cuba).
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2003
Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2002 novel Middlesex tells the uniquely intertwined history of Cal, an intersex third-generation Greek American. The Pulitzer Board described it as a “vastly realized, multi-generational novel as highspirited as it is intelligent … Like the masks of Greek drama, Middlesex is equal parts comedy and tragedy, but its real triumph is its emotional abundance, delivered with consummate authority and grace,”. Read my full review of Middlesex here.
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2019
Richard Powers’ The Overstory is “a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance”, one that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among several other awards and short-listings in 2019. It contains the stories of nine fictional Americans, each of whom share some special connection to trees, despite their disparate circumstances and eras. The Pulitzer Prize website describes it as “an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them,”.
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Pulitzer Prize for Novel 1937
Gone With The Wind is best known these days as the classic film, but back in 1936 it was an astonishingly popular novel by American author Margaret Mitchell. It was an instant best-seller, with hundreds of thousands of copies flying off the shelves long before the 1939 film adaptation. It depicts a questionable coming-of-age story against the backdrop of a horribly white-washed version of Southern plantation life immediately prior to and during the Civil War. It doesn’t stand up to today’s critical scrutiny, but at the time it was a phenomenon, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Novel the year following its release.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1999
As the ’90s drew to a close, Michael Cunningham was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, a novel that draws upon the life and work of Virginia Woolf “to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair”. It is a “passionate, profound, and deeply moving” novel, one that is still widely recognised as Cunningham’s most remarkable literary achievement. Read my full review of The Hours here.
A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction2011
A Visit From The Goon Squad is “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed”. Egan centres the story on the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker, and his employee, the young and passionate Sasha. Told through a series of creative and innovative formats, this story “captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both”.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988
Toni Morrison was awarded a slew of prizes for her 1987 novel Beloved, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among them. It seems particularly fitting, given that she hoped for the novel to stand in as a memorial testament to the lives lost and damaged beyond recognition by the Atlantic slave trade (“There’s no small bench by the road,” she said, “and because such a place doesn’t exist, that I know of, the book had to.”) In this unique story, of a former slave living a haunted life in Cincinnati, Morrison captures a universal pain and shame. Read my full review of Beloved here.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction2018
It’s so rare that a truly funny book wins the Pulitzer Prize – which makes it all the more special when one does! Less got the gong in 2018, and it was very well deserved. The story revolves around Arthur Less, an aging gay man so desperate to avoid the wedding of his ex-lover that he accepts every invitation to every half-baked literary event around the world. Less is “a scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, [and] a bittersweet romance of chances lost”. Read my full review of Less here.
The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Pulitzer Prize for Novel 1921
In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, for The Age Of Innocence. It was a controversial choice, but not (necessarily) because of the author’s gender. The Pulitzer Prize for Novel was originally set to go to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, as per the choice of the Prize’s jury at the time, but the board overruled them and awarded the prize to Wharton instead. The apparent reason for the switch was Lewis’s novel having “offended a number of prominent persons in the Middle West”, and Wharton said in a note to Lewis that she “despaired” over the decision. Read my full review of The Age Of Innocence here.
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction2008
Junot Diaz has fallen from grace since being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, having been called out for despicable behaviour as part of the #MeToo reckoning. Despite the revelations, however, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao is still sold in editions with a Pulitzer Prize seal embossed on the cover. The story itself is a fascinating window into an aspect of American life – a Dominican-American who dreams of overcoming the challenges of his ghetto home to find love and success – but can we really separate the art from the artist?
All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Pulitzer Prize for Novel 1947
Who would’ve thought, when Robert Penn Warren was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1947 for his fictionalised account of the troubled term of a populist governor, that it would still be so resonant over seventy years later? All The King’s Men traces the political career of Willie Stark, a cynical Southerner who seems destined for the life (and death) of a messianic figure. The New York Time Book Review called the book “magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks,”. Read my full review of All The King’s Men here.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction2017
The Underground Railroad is a semi-speculative alternative history of the antebellum South, one that Barack Obama called “terrific” and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017. It “combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,”. According to the judges, “The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.” Read my full review of The Underground Railroad here.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1983
Alice Walker became the first ever black woman to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Color Purple in 1983. It has retained its cultural currency across the intervening decades – so much so that it continues to be banned and challenged in schools and libraries, which seems to be a rite of passage for any meaningful work of literature. The story of a young black girl, told through her letters to God, is a challenging read, but a vital and perennially relevant one. Read my full review of The Color Purple here.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007
Cormac McCarthy is a notoriously reclusive contemporary writer, but he granted rare and special insight into his writing process and creative mind after being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road in 2007. He told Oprah that it took him only six weeks to write the haunting post-apocalyptic novel. The idea came to him after a road trip with his son in El Paso, where he found himself wondering what the road might look like in a hundred years’ time. “It is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of,” according to his publisher.
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1961
To Kill A Mockingbird has been widely considered one of the most iconic American novels of all time since its release, so it was hardly a surprise when Harper Lee received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. The judges were openly disappointed in the literary offerings from established writers that year, but credited Lee with “revitalising American fiction” and producing a novel of “unusual distinction”. Her friend, Truman Capote, was happy for her – but remained bitter that she had won a Pulitzer, while he hadn’t for In Cold Blood, until his death. Read my full review of To Kill A Mockingbird here.
What happens when you experience symptoms that can’t be measured, tested, or diagnosed – let alone treated? In Ill Feelings, Alice Hattrick begins with her own and her mother’s experience of long-term unexplained illness, where symptoms are relegated to the status of “feelings”.
Over the course of the book, her focus widens to a societal and historical view (incorporating the experiences of “women of note”: Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and more), to form a “collective biography and memoir” of illness without any definitively identifiable cause. The team at Scribe were kind enough to send me a copy for review.
On the whole, I loved Hattrick’s insight and ideas in Ill Feelings. She gave me a lot to chew on; I’ve scribbled down notes like “the structure of medical care is based on mistrust“, and “the experience of illness and the experience of medicalisation are linked, but not the same”.
I was hoping, though, for more of a case study format, which might have made the various narrative threads easier to follow, and I’ll admit I embraced the skim for some dense sections of medical jargon.
Hattrick’s discussion towards the end of what this means and what might change with the emergence of long-COVID was fascinating, and I hope she writes more on that specifically in future.
Ill Feelings is not an easy read, but it’s an interesting and worthwhile one for anyone interested in the intersection of gender and disability.
There’s something really satisfying about a slim little paperback. They slide easily into bags, they fit neatly into nearly-full bookshelves, and they hurt far less when you drop them on your face or foot. I’ve put together this list of short books to read (note: these aren’t necessarily quick reads, if that’s what you’re after check out this list), all of which are under 220 pages.
Here’s a short story to kick things off: if a reader uses an affiliate link on this page to buy a book, a blogger receives a small commission, and they all live happily ever after.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
180 pages
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy traverses the whole universe in just 180 pages. The world as we know it comes to an end, and disgruntled British gentleman Arthur Dent unintentionally hitches a ride to safety. Over the course of his short but action-packed adventure, he meets aliens, learns to speak their language, and discovers the true meaning of the universe – complaining all the while. Pick this one up if you’re in the mood for a short book that’s also a wild romp, with some great advice into the bargain (don’t panic!). Read my full review of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy here.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
183 pages
The Vegetarian runs to 183 pages, and that was enough to earn Han Kang the 2016 International Man Booker Award. In this dark Kafka-esque tale, Yeong-hye’s ordinary and orderly life is disrupted by a series of brutal and bloody nightmares. She decides, as a result, to renounce meat and live as a vegetarian, much to her husband’s chagrin. As her family circles the wagons to get her back on the righteous path to bacon, Yeong-hye’s choice to eat only plants becomes more and more sacred to her, and she’s forced to take ever-more drastic counter-measures to protect it. Read my full review of The Vegetarian here.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
167 pages
In The Alchemist, a young Andalusian shepherd boy learns some pretty tough life lessons over the course of 167 pages. He finds love, and loses it. He makes friends with strangers, and friends become strangers. He searches the world for treasure, only to find that the real treasure was inside him all along (or something). It all sounds very heavy, but it’s actually a very readable allegory, a fairy-tale for adults full of metaphor and meaning. Read my full review of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho here.
Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
213 pages
Coffee is magical, we all know that for sure, but the coffee served in the small Tokyo cafe at the centre of Before The Coffee Gets Cold is especially so. It allows the drinker to travel back in time… but only for as long as it takes for their beverage to cool. People come to the cafe seeking a confrontation, a final farewell, a special meeting, but they don’t always find exactly what they’re looking for. In just 213 pages, Kawaguchi will change the way you think about the past, and what you might change if you could. Read my full review of Before The Coffee Gets Cold here.
Sula by Toni Morrison
189 pages
Sula is a short book that will wrench your heart from your chest. Morrison’s characters are richly drawn and carefully crafted with an economy of language that will blow your mind. Sula and Nel share a bond that withstands all manner of threats throughout their youth, but when their life paths diverge it threatens to sever the ties that bind them. Sula is ostracised by the community, while Nel becomes its shining star. Then, there’s a betrayal – will their relationship survive it, as it has survived everything else?
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
118 pages
The Little Prince is a children’s story that adults can enjoy in equal measure. Complete with beautiful illustrations, it depicts the predicament of a pilot who finds himself stranded in the middle of the desert, with only a precocious little prince for company. As the pilot tries to fix the wreckage of his plane, the prince slowly reveals how he came to land in the desert and what it will take for him to return to his true home. Bring tissues, this book might be short but it will definitely make you cry! Read my full review of The Little Prince here.
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
172 pages
Mrs Dalloway may be short (172 pages), but you’ll be chewing over its contents for a long, long time. In vivid modernist prose, Woolf reveals the turbulent inner life of a society lady as she prepares for a party, and the strange link she shares to a traumatised war veteran. I had a tough time deciphering most of Mrs Dalloway myself, but I figure that’s my fault more so than the book’s; plenty of other readers, who are far smarter than me, have plumbed untold depths in this short novel. Read my full review of Mrs Dalloway here.
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
128 pages
Hemingway is famous for his brevity, and it is on best display in his final novel, The Old Man And The Sea. It only takes a paragraph for him to lay out the story – the old Cuban man who hasn’t caught a fish for eighty-four days, and the young boy who cares for him (even though his family forbids him from joining the man on his cursed voyages). It’s a simple tale, told in short, sharp prose, but one that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
171 pages
It took Charlotte Brontë 590 pages to tell the story of the relatively-privileged young governess Jane Eyre, but it took Jean Rhys just 171 to reveal its other, darker side – that of the wife Jane’s hero Mr Rochester locked in the attic, Antoinette Cosway. In one of the most brilliant re-tellings of contemporary literature, Rhys explores what drove a bright young woman to “madness”, sold into marriage to a wealthy Englishman and forced from her ancestral home. Wide Sargasso Sea a short book, but it packs one heck of a punch.
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
130 pages
With a title like that – Men Explain Things To Me – you’d expect this book to be a multi-volume set. But Solnit has learned an important lesson: that of concision, that her interlocutors seem to have skipped. In 130 arch and funny pages, Solnit explores many of the ways in which the patriarchy keeps women quiet and overlooked: marriage, sex, violence, family, colonialism, and more. Perhaps most importantly, in terms of cultural impact, this is also the book that brought the term “mansplaining” to the mainstream.
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
152 pages
Of all the short books I’ve read (as you can see from this list, there’s been a few!), I don’t think any surprised and delighted me more than A Single Man. It is a blunt but beautiful portrayal of a day in the life of an aging gay man whose partner has recently passed away. Of course, at the time it’s set, their relationship was cloaked in euphemism and forbidden by law, so Isherwood’s protagonist is never recognised as a true widower. It’s not a cheerful read, but it is a deeply moving one. Read my full review of A Single Man here.
Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
103 pages
Of Mice And Men is beloved and bemoaned by high-school students around the globe in equal measure, but it’s frequently assigned reading for them either way because it’s both short and multifaceted. Set during the Great Depression, George and Lennie form what we we might today call their own “found family”, an unlikely pair that care for and protect each other. Sadly, they can’t protect each other from everything. In just over a hundred pages, this book will break your heart (if it didn’t already traumatise you in high school English). Read my full review of Of Mice And Men here.
The Trial by Franz Kafka
204 pages
Franz Kafka’s stories are typically short – ironically, The Trial is actually one of the longest! But it’s also one of the few that you can easily find published as a book in its own right. This tale is terrifying in an oh-my-gosh-it-could-happen-to-me kind of way: a regular man living his regular life finds himself suddenly and inexplicably arrested, forced to defend himself against an unknown crime. Kafka’s twisted premise is pure nightmare fuel, so it’s a good thing it’s not any longer!
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
149 pages
A Clockwork Orange is a short book, yes, but beyond that it’s kind of hard to describe. Is it science fiction? Dystopia? Horror? All of the above? Even if you’ve watched the film and think you’re pretty tough, you’re probably not prepared for the stomach-churning ultra-violence of Burgess’ best-known short novel. In a strange invented language, Burgess describes the tumultuous inner- and outer-world of Alex, a teen confronting the big questions about good and evil far before his time. Read my full review of A Clockwork Orange here.
A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman
198 pages
A Horse Walks Into A Bar is a short but searing story, set in a small dive bar in Israel. A comedian takes the stage for his final show, and his on-stage patter becomes a memoir (long before Nanette made it cool). He is forced to confront the one decision that changed the course of his life, a Sliding Doors moment that led him to this stage, this night, and this audience. Grossman’s book is candid, confronting, and chilling – you’ll barely notice the 198 pages flying by.
Exactly what it says on the tin: here are 100 fun facts about books and authors. Enjoy!
Jane Austen had a knack for brewing her own beer. She used molasses to give her brews a sweeter taste.
Thomas Pynchon’s middle name is Ruggles.
Fredrik Backman was a blogger before A Man Called Ove became a bestseller sleeper hit.
451 degrees Fahrenheit isn’t actually the temperature at which paper burns. Bradbury was misinformed when he was choosing a title for Fahrenheit 451; that’s actually the temperature at which paper will combust.
Harper Lee was Truman Capote’s assistant when he was writing In Cold Blood. She was in charge of managing his 8,000 pages of notes, and interviewed townspeople who were too suspicious to tell him anything.
The Netflix adaptation of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton is the most-watched series in the platform’s history. Over 82 million households have tuned in.
Suzanne Collins claims she came up with the idea for The Hunger Games when she was channel surfing, flicking between footage of the war in Iraq and reality TV.
Agatha Christie disappeared for nearly two weeks in 1926, after her first husband told her he wanted a divorce. Her car was found abandoned, 15,000 volunteers undertook a manhunt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle consulted a psychic. She was found in a hotel under an assumed name (borrowed from her husband’s mistress), and never offered any explanation, not even in her autobiography.
Daniel Defoe was terrible with money. He was in-and-out of debtors prison for most of his life, and died while (probably) in hiding from his creditors.
In her youth, Gillian Flynn worked odd jobs, including one where she was required to “dress up as a giant yogurt cone who wore a tuxedo”.
Hans Christian Andersen was a huge fan of Charles Dickens, but the admiration was not mutual. Dickens begrudgingly accepted Andersen’s request to sleep in his spare room when he came to Britain for a visit, but Andersen drastically overstayed his welcome. Upon his departure, Dickens taped up a note in the room that read: “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seems to the family AGES!”
When Stephen Hawking turned in his first draft of A Brief History Of Time, his publisher gave him some advice. They said that book sales would be halved for every mathematical equation that he included in the manuscript. Hawking went away and removed all equations bar one (E=MC2). The book went on to sell over 25 million copies.
James Joyce wrote with large blue pencils and crayons, laying on his stomach in bed, wearing a big white coat. This is likely attributable to his notoriously poor eyesight, for which he had twenty-five surgeries over the course of his life.
After a severe car accident, Stephen King‘s lawyer purchased the vehicle that hit him, “to prevent it from appearing on eBay”. The car was later crushed in a car yard, and King was reportedly disappointed that he didn’t get to smash it himself.
The Little Prince is the most-translated French book in the world, available in over 300 languages.
David Sedaris’s essay collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was all set to be adapted for the screen, with a completed script ready for production. Sedaris withdrew the rights after one of his siblings expressed concern about how their family would be portrayed.
Robert Louis Stevenson deliberately left out the definite article (“the”) from his title of Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Most editions now include it, to make the title grammatically correct.
Hanya Yanagihara, her editor, and her agent all expected that A Little Life “would not sell well”. It defied their expectations.
After publishing The Book Thief, Markus Zusak was able to support himself and his family on the royalties alone, for thirteen years. His next novel, Bridge Of Clay, is the only book he has published in his children’s lifetimes.
Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis died on the same day, 22 November 1963. Unfortunately, their deaths were overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance holds the world record for being the most-often rejected book to go on to become a best-seller. Robert M. Pirsig received 121 rejections before a publisher agreed to buy his book.
Louisa May Alcott criticised Mark Twain for The Adventure Of Huckleberry Finn‘s crudeness. She said that if he couldn’t “think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them”.
Edith Wharton’s father’s family was very wealthy and influential. Their surname was Jones, and it is said that this is where we get the saying “to keep up with the Joneses”.
Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist in just two weeks. He said he was able to get it down on paper quickly because the book was “already written in his soul”.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a “great admirer of Bob Dylan”, who won the Nobel Prize the year before he did.
Tayari Jones had the idea for An American Marriage when she was eavesdropping on a nearby couple in a shopping mall. She told The Paris Review: “I overheard a young couple arguing in the mall in Atlanta. The woman, who was splendidly dressed, and the man—he looked okay. But she looked great! And she said to him, “You know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” And he shot back, “This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.” And I was like, You know, I don’t know him, but I know she’s probably right.”
William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying over the course of six weeks, between midnight and 4AM, while working at a power plant. He said that he did not change a single word of the draft between completion and publication.
Andre Aciman was raised in a multi-lingual household, speaking predominantly French. Family members also spoke Italian, Greek, Ladino (Old Spanish), and Arabic.
The Call Of The Wild was inspired by Jack London’s own extended stay in the Klondike (where, he said, he “found himself”). He was forced to leave when he developed scurvy, as a result of the lack of fresh produce available in the Arctic in winter months.
Despite the anti-war and anti-capitalist themes of Catch-22, Joseph Heller spoke positively of his own time in the army during World War II, and said that he “never had a bad officer” during his time of a bombardier.
J.D. Salinger became a vegetarian after his father tried to pressure him to enter the meat-import business, and he spent a short time working in slaughterhouses in Vienna and Poland.
Protesting the Government of Portugal’s decidedly negative reaction to his book The Gospel Of Jesus Christ, José Saramago left his home country and lived the rest of his life in exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote.
Anaïs Nin wrote her erotic short stories – published posthumously in the collection Delta Of Venus – for the “personal use” of a “private collector”. The collector paid her a dollar a page, and told her to stick to the pornography, “no analysis, no philosophy”.
John Green foolishly promised to personally sign every pre-ordered copy of The Fault In Our Stars. He ended up having to sign every single copy of the first print run. He even polled the public as to what colour Sharpie he should use, and divvied up the 150,000 copies according to the proportion of the vote that each colour received.
Today, Bram Stoker is best known as the author of Dracula, but during his lifetime he was only known as the “personal assistant of actor Sir Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre, which Irving owned”. He also (probably) died of syphilis.
Veronica Roth wrote her debut novel, Divergent, while on winter break from her studies at Northwestern. She sold the book before graduation, and film rights sold before the book’s release.
Alice Walker coined the term “womanist”, in 1983. She intended it to mean simply “a black feminist or a feminist of colour”.
V.C. Andrews insisted (even after her death, via a surviving relative) that Flowers In The Attic was based on a true story. She claimed that she developed a crush on her doctor, who – along with his siblings – had been locked away for 6 years to preserve his family’s wealth. This claim has never been verified, and is widely disputed.
George R.R. Martin has said that comic book legend Stan Lee is “the greatest literary influence on [him], even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien”.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford. She adopted the name Toni for her saint – Anthony – at age 12, after converting to Catholicism. Sadly, she came to regret using a pen name. She worried that it made her sound “like a teenager” and it she felt “ruined” by it. Still, her closest friends and family continued to call her Chloe until her death, and the pseudonym allowed her to keep her professional and personal lives separate.
Stephen Chbosky not only wrote but also directed the film adaptation of his young adult novel The Perks Of Being A Wallflower. It premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and received a standing ovation.
Anita Loos was Hollywood’s first salaried screenwriter.
Thriller author Paula Hawkins has written romantic comedies under the name Amy Silver.
Though Nora Ephron was “culturally and emotionally Jewish”, she said that she was not religious. While promoting her final film before her death (Julie & Julia, based on Julie Powell’s blog and memoir of the same name), Ephron said “You can never have too much butter – that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it.”
John Steinbeck’s wife was the one who came up with the title for The Grapes Of Wrath.
Liane Moriarty wrote season two of the mini-series adaptation of her novel Big Little Lies with Meryl Streep in mind specifically for the new character Mary Louise. Streep didn’t even read the script before agreeing to sign on for the role.
Italo Calvino’s mother chose his first name to commemorate his Italian heritage (he was born in Cuba). However, as the family moved back to Italy while Calvino was still quite young, he effectively grew up with the same name as his country, which he thought sounded “belligerently nationalist”.
Douglas Adams claimed that the concept and title of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy were inspired by a bender. He was hitchhiking around Europe and one night, lying drunk in a field (if I had a dollar), he got to thinking about his mate’s copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Europe and mused that there should be a version written for the galaxy.
Cormac McCarthy wrote on the same typewriter for over 50 years. It later sold for $250,000.
When Ernest Hemingway’s favourite bar was scheduled for demolition, he reportedly tore a urinal from the wall in the men’s room and took it for his own, saying that he had “pissed so much money into it” that it was his by rights.
William Golding’s manuscript of Lord Of The Flies was initially rejected by his eventual publisher, Faber, with their in-house professional reader calling it an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in the jungle near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.
Australian scientists were such great fans of Andy Weir’s science-fiction novel The Martian that they named a new species of bush tomato after the main character: Solanum watneyi.
Samuel Beckett completed the final edits on his novel Murphy from a Parisian hospital bed. He’d been stabbed after declining an offer of companionship from a notorious French pimp (who went by the street name Prudent). James Joyce paid for Beckett’s medical care.
Despite reaching the peak of international literary fame, Elena Ferrante has remained anonymous for nearly two decades. She has said in (rare) interviews that anonymity is a pre-condition of her work.
Sally Rooney was the star of her university debate club, and was top debater at the European University Debating Championships in 2013.
Jack Kerouac didn’t learn to drive until he was 34 years old, and he never held a formal driver’s license.
Gulliver’s Travels is the most-widely-held book of Irish literature in the world’s libraries.
Ayn Rand dedicated her novel Atlas Shrugged to her husband, and her lover – two different men! In her author bio, she added that her husband (Frank O’Connor) had the values of character she sought in a man, while her lover (Nathaniel Branden) was her “intellectual heir”, an ideal reader with as rational and independent a mind as she could conceive of, whom she met through a fan letter he sent her.
Victor Hugo really struggled with procrastination. While writing The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, he had his servants take away all of his clothes so that he wouldn’t be tempted to go out during the day when he was supposed to be working, effectively forcing him to write in the nude.
In an essay, Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn admitted to sadistic childhood impulses like “stunning ants and feeding them to spiders”.
Travel writer Bill Bryson has been eligible for British citizenship, but avoided it for most of his life, claiming that he was “too cowardly” to take the citizenship test. When he eventually worked up the courage, he passed.
Jennifer Egan has said that her book A Visit From The Goon Squad was inspired by two main sources: Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and HBO’s The Sopranos.
The mathematics textbook that Charles Ludtwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used in school has survived the intervening years intact. An inscription in the front, written in Latin, translates to: “This book belongs to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: hands off!”
Neil Gaiman and musician Tori Amos are very close friends; he is godfather to her daughter, and they have referenced each other in their work often.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, The Danger Of A Single Story, is one of the top ten most-viewed TED Talks of all time with more than fifteen million views.
James Joyceloved the work of playwright Henrik Ibsen so much, he learned Norwegian in order to send Ibsen a letter in his native tongue.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was named for Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics for The Star Spangled Banner.
John Steinbeck wrote a werewolf novel. It’s called Murder At Full Moon, and it has never been published. A copy of the manuscript is held in the archives of the University of Texas. It will enter the public domain in 2043.
A French soldier claimed that a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim saved his life. He had the book in his pocket when he was shot, and said that the bullet stopped “twenty pages from his heart”.
Mark Twain was once the next-door neighbour of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Walt Whitman wrote a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, for the money. He admitted later that he was drunk when he wrote it.
The musical Cabaret is an adaptation of a play called I Am A Camera, which in turn is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye To Berlin.
Aldous Huxley taught George Orwell’s French class at Eton College in 1917.
Gabriel García Márquez never sold the film rights to One Hundred Years Of Solitude, because “(t)hey would cast someone like Robert Redford and most of us do not have relatives who look like Robert Redford.”
Oscar Wilde’s last words were reportedly about the wallpaper in the room where he was confined to his sick bed, which he hated. He reportedly said something to the effect of “my wallpaper and I are fighting… one or other of us has got to go.”
On the eve of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy gave his wife-to-be his complete and unabridged diaries, detailing his sexual history (including his illegitimate child by a serf on his estate), and insisted she read them.
One of Ali Smith’s part-time jobs prior to writing plays was “lettuce cleaner”.
The iconic 2000 film Coyote Ugly was based on an essay written by Elizabeth Gilbert, about her time working as a bartender at the Coyote Ugly table dancing bar in the East Village. Gilbert married a man she met at that bar, and it was her divorce from him that inspired the memoir for which she is most famous, Eat Pray Love.
Joyce Carol Oates said she trained herself to be a writer by “writing novel after novel and always throwing them out when I completed them”.
E.B. White has never revealed his inspiration for writing children’s classic Charlotte Web, saying “I haven’t told why I wrote the book, but I haven’t told you why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze,”.
Stella Gibbons was ostracised from literary circles in her time, mostly because she dared to parody D.H. Lawrence. Virginia Woolf in particular took issue with her, writing to Elizabeth Bowen after Gibbons won a literary prize: “I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons; still now you and Rosamond [Lehmann] can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book? And so you can’t buy your carpet.”
As he was writing, Kevin Kwan shared an incomplete draft of Crazy Rich Asians with an editor friend, who complained that he had “ruined her Thanksgiving dinner” because she couldn’t put the manuscript down to finish preparing the meal.
To avoid the ire of Soviet censors, Boris Pasternak had to smuggle his manuscript of Doctor Zhivago out of the country to his Italian publisher. He is reported to have quipped “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad,” as he handed it over.
We also get a lot of proverbs and idioms from Don Quixote, like “tilting at windmills” (taken from one of the character’s early adventures, where he attacks windmills believing them to be sentient giant enemies), and also from mis-translations of Quixote. The proverb “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” is widely attributed to Cervantes, but it didn’t actually appear in Don Quixote until a 1700 English translation. The original phrase is translated more literally to “you will see when the eggs are fried”.
Alexander McCall Smith put his significant royalties from his prolific literary career to good use by purchasing a chain of uninhabited islands, the Cairns of Coll. He intends to hold them in trust, to ensure that they are “kept in perpetuity as a sanctuary for wildlife – for birds and seals and all the other creatures to which they are home.”
Zadie Smith’s two younger brothers are both rappers.
bell hooks decided to use the “unconventional” lower case for her pen name to distinguish herself from her great-grandmother (from whom the name is taken) and to emphasis what she considers to be most important (the work, not the writer).
Gone With The Wind sold a million copies in its first year of publication (1936), despite its “unprecedented” high price of $3, and widespread hardship in the wake of the Great Depression.
Yuval Noah Harari does not own a smartphone.
Maya Angelou used a hotel room as her study. She asked management to remove all paintings and decorative items from the room (too distracting), and forbid housekeeping staff from cleaning the room (lest they inadvertently throw away a scrap of paper containing a line of genius). She stocked the room herself with a thesaurus, a dictionary, the Bible, and a few crossword puzzles.
The publication of Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil led to an increase of 46% in tourism to Savannah.
Jodi Picoult has written several issues of Wonder Woman.
Diana Gabaldon believes that time travel is possible, and on that basis that the Loch Ness monster could exist: “All you need is a time-portal under Loch Ness, which would occasionally allow a prehistoric creature to pass through it.”
Isabel Allende once had a job translating romance novels from English to Spanish, but she was fired for changing dialogue to make the heroines “sound more intelligent”. She also changed the ending of Cinderella.
When he was ten years old, Amor Towles threw a message in a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean. It was found by Harrison Salisbury, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor of the New York Times, who responded. The two of them kept up correspondence for many years.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s maternal ancestors were tried in New England on the charge of incest; among other things, they were sentenced to appear at the village church on the following lecture day with signs bearing the word “INCEST” pinned to their caps. This may be where he drew his inspiration for the famed punishment of his protagonist of The Scarlet Letter (to wear a scarlet A, for Adultress, on her chest).
