friedensreich hundertwasser:
nice post!
i cant share this link : https://www.theraconteur.info/2009/10/01/john-keats-...
Lucio Harvick:
I love it when people come together and share opinions, great blog, keep it up....
Willard Plautz:
whoah this blog is excellent i love reading your articles. Keep up the great work! You kno...
bert:
Thanks Matthew, really appreciate that.
I've not heard of Blake Butler but will check him...
alwyn parry:
annwyl gyfaill
noting your interest in Welsh literature I just thought you might like to ...
The ‘America’ issue promises a transatlantic treasure trove of the freshest fiction and poetry from both sides of the pond, ruminations and reminiscences of the writing life from American writers working in Europe and European writers ‘over there’, travel pieces and reportage from across the United States, an eclectic mix of interviews and features as well as an all-but-definitive A-Z of American Letters. INSIDE THE AMERICA ISSUE: Ever since Captain John Smith, founder of Jamestown in 1607, enchanted English [...]
“The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long distilled; its unexpected striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. The poems open slowly in your mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water.” William Burroughs Despite Burroughs’ impressive puff Sinclair Beiles would often fall asleep during his own poetry readings due to a hefty diet of prescription drugs – usually placed beside him on-stage in a carrier bag to be within easy reach. This was a pity since Sinclair’s poems, [...]
Susie Wild talks to the Dylan Thomas Prize winner 2010. Elyse Fenton is a 29-year-old American poet. Her debut collection of war poetry Clamor sees a woman reflect on her lover fighting in Afghanistan. The personal collection charts Fenton’s experiences of her husband serving as a medic in the War on Iraq, the long stretches of distance between the couple, and the contrast between the harsh realities of his day-to-day and her life writing and working on organic farms on the homefront. [...]
As a 10-year-old living in the Rhondda valley, getting up at 4.a.m on weekends and sneaking out of our terraced house to go ghost-hunting with my Alsatian dog at the chapel at the bottom of the street, I understood that genius was something which came from somewhere else, and bypassed Wales completely. This had become apparent a few weeks earlier when Kylie Minogue announced a worldtour that neglected to incorporate Cwmparc Community Hall, and it was a notion that would [...]
The ultimate goal for so many of our greatest writers has been to create the perfect short story. And for many this means presenting the grand themes of the novel in as few pages as necessary. Gary Raymond explores the short fiction of Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize winner, master of the longer form, but expert in the smaller, too. The American audience has always had a very healthy respect for the shorter form of the game (to use a [...]
Wander through any town or city centre at dusk, and there you will find Walt Whitman. Or, perhaps, several Whitmans. They won’t be shouting from the rooftops ‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’ You might have to seek them out, but they’ll be there. Probably, they’ll be drinking toxic white cider out of plastic flagons, blanking their brains as they roll out their sorry blankets outside tube stations and bus shelters [...]
The tackling of Bohemianism is warranted today because it is the wrangling of an outsider movement that has long since been co-opted by popular culture. It has moved from the margins to become, for want of a better term, alt.generic. Due to this, a lot of people will claim Gnostic access to ‘realness’, will swear to have ‘the true spirit’ with them; they will want to claim some kind of ownership over the Bohemia they know and love and make [...]
Herman Melville published his first short story ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Stree’t in 1853, anonymously. By that time, the author already had behind him seven years of novel writing, culminating in his great work of allegory: Moby Dick. Republished in 1856, under the author’s name and an abbreviated title, Bartleby is a miniature masterpiece, all the more captivating for its evocation of the uncanny. The enduring fascination it exerts is that of the cipher, as represented by the enigmatic character [...]
SHELF LIFE | WORDS: DYLAN MOORE San Francisco is one of the world’s truly great cities; there is no doubt about that. It is me I worry about. After an epic drive up Highway 1, all the way from San Diego and the Mexican border, what kind of person shuns the Golden Gate Bridge, Pier 39, the dubious delights of Alcatraz and even the flower power generation’s countercultural hub of Haight-Ashbury for a medium-sized independent bookstore? I’ve even brought with [...]
SHAME, MISTAKES, COMPROMISES: MARK GREIF Let me first say, these are purely personal memories and reflections: anyone else at the magazine would recall things differently, and I’m not speaking ex cathedra. It’s a stupid act to start a magazine. Before n+1 was started, I tried to find out from people just how stupid it was. My friend Keith Gessen and I admired Joshua Glenn, who had edited a journal in Boston called Hermenaut for 10 years. Glenn welcomed me into his living room in Jamaica [...]
A selection of photos from our Cardiff launch at Chapter Arts Centre. It ended up so busy that we ran out of chairs! To see all the photos from the night visit our Facebook album. If you’d like to see inside the covers, you can buy The Raconteur: America for £10.
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THE RACONTEUR ABC SUBSCRIPTION BUNDLE FOR £20. The Raconteur is a biannual magazine of new writing, available as a quality paperback. The Raconteur aims to discover and publish the best new writing around. Whether fiction or poetry, travel writing or reportage, longform nonfiction or creative criticism, all that matters is that it is writing with insight and passion, skill and wit. Subscribe to The Raconteur ABC and get three issues for the price of two. Save £10. Subscribe to the first [...]
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The America issue is out now. All 314 pages of it. See all the photos from the Swansea launch in our Facebook album. Buy America for £10.
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How We Are Bored. I am reading Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man. It is a novel written during the Second World War in which a man waits to be drafted into the army, he quits his job but due to a series of delays, he ends up spending a year doing nothing. It is a novel about what Tom Wolfe called ‘anaesthetic solitude’. About passing time, desperately, being bored, being idle in a time when that kind of thing was deemed [...]
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Out this month in a new paperback form, our ‘America’ issue promises a transatlantic treasure trove of the freshest fiction and poetry from both sides of the pond, ruminations and reminiscences of the writing life from American writers working in Europe and European writers ‘over there’, travel pieces and reportage from across the United States, an eclectic mix of interviews and features as well as an all-but-definitive A-Z of American Letters. The Raconteur ‘America’ is over 300 pages long, and [...]
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Russell Celyn Jones is a novelist and critic. His novels are: The Ninth Wave; Ten Seconds From The Sun; Surface Tension; The Eros Hunter; An Interference of Light; Small Times; Soldiers and Innocents. He has won a Society of Author’s Award, a Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize, David Higham Prize and the Weishanhu Award (China). He has been a Man Booker Prize Judge and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. lloyd robson is [...]
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We will be hosting two launch parties in Wales for our America Issue this autumn: The Swansea Launch will be held at the Americano Jazz Cafe near the J Shed in SA1 on Wednesday 30 November 2011 from 7pm. Visit the Facebook Swansea launch event page to find out more. The Cardiff Launch will be held at Media Point in Chapter Arts Centre on Wednesday 7 December 2011 from 8pm. Visit the Facebook Cardiff launch event page to [...]
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Nigel Jarrett is a freelance writer, a former newspaper reporter and a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize for short fiction. His debut collection of short stories Funderland was recently released through Parthian Books. Interviewed by Susie Wild At what age did you start writing, and at what point did you regard yourself as a writer? I started writing when I became a newspaper journalist in my late twenties. Fiction came later. There’s a joke in there somewhere. [...]
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Bridgend poet and America issue contributor Rhian Edwards has had a top week. She got engaged in New York, and then four days later she won both the Audience Award AND the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry in Tuesday’s final. We’re pleased as punch for her, and celebrated all her good news at our launch party last night. The runner-up spot went to Cardiff University Student Naomi Alderson. Here is a lovely picture of all the finalists on the [...]
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Dylan and Susie went to Hay Festival in Kerala this month and had a fantastic time. You can read their blogs on the Hay Festival site. Whilst there they coerced Jung Chang, Simon Armitage and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra to contribute to the Beauty Issue. Out in May 2012. Read Susie’s blog Read Dylan’s blog
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The Belfast-born author and playwright Lucy Caldwell has won the £30,000 University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize 2011 for her second novel The Meeting Point which tells the story of a Christian minister and his wife moving to Bahrain. Caldwell is the fourth recipient of the international prize, which is awarded annually to a young writer under 30. The London-based writer beat competition from short-listed authors from around the world including Orange Prize winner Tea Obreht, New Yorker Benjamin Hale, Yorkshire-based first time novelist Annabel [...]
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“The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long distilled; its unexpected striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. The poems open slowly in your mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water.” William Burroughs Despite Burroughs’ impressive puff Sinclair Beiles would often fall asleep during his own poetry readings due to a hefty diet of prescription drugs – usually placed beside him on-stage in a carrier bag to be within easy reach. This was a pity since Sinclair’s poems, [...]
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SHELF LIFE | WORDS: GRAHAM TOMLINSON ‘No problem,’ I’d said. ’I’ll do a piece for Shelf Life on Shakespeare & Co in Vienna when I’m there in the summer. It’s another branch of the place in Paris.’ In retrospect, it was an easy mistake to make. I’d read about the shop as part of plans for a day-trip to the city from Hungary, and automatically assumed that it was a Central European cousin of Shakespeare and Company in Paris. The shop in France, [...]
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A selection of photos from our Cardiff launch at Chapter Arts Centre. It ended up so busy that we ran out of chairs! To see all the photos from the night visit our Facebook album. If you’d like to see inside the covers, you can buy The Raconteur: America for £10.
Continue Reading →
WORDS: GRAHAM TOMLINSON Hull, 1991. I’m standing in Page One Books and the man with the ginger dreadlocks behind the counter is wondering if he’ll make a sale. The end of my first year at university is approaching and after slogging through a demanding six hours of tuition a week, I’ve decided I can live a little and tackle something other than a title from the reading list. Wedged on a rack between the TLS and Marxism Today is [...]
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