Here’s another great interview courtesy of Granta online (we’ve already featured their interview with Paul Auster). This time Granta editor John Freeman is in New York to ask Peter Carey about the origins and inspiration for his new book, Parrot and Olivier in America, which we publish in February. An extract from the book featured in Granta 108: Chicago, published towards the end of last year.

Check back soon for a very special Faber Podcast with Peter Carey.

Interview with Peter Carey from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

Dear Morrissey,

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot, I am posting this letter on the Faber website. Forlorn as this hope may be, I can only fantasise that at least you might read my letter through and consider the pleasures and prestige of being an author at Faber, the last great family-owned independent publishing house in the western hemisphere.

I have been trying to persuade you of the virtues and wisdom of this for some years now. You probably won’t remember. We even corresponded at one point via a friend of yours, an author of mine, most famous for his biography of Roxy Music which ends just as the band are getting together. You see, we love the perverse and the contrary at Faber. And we also like to think we are the custodians of twentieth-century Modernist poetry. In fact we are. Our shelves groan and bulge and spill over under the weight of Ezra, Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. And that’s just the surface; deep as it may seem. We feel very strongly that you belong in this company. To me (and to many of my colleagues) you are already in this company. It would be the fulfilment of my most pressing and persistent publishing dream to see that ‘ff’ sewn into the spine of your Life. Just any other publisher won’t do. You deserve Faber and the love we can give you. History demands it; destiny commands it.

I did receive a fax from you once to my invitation. And you responded with interest. I don’t know if at that stage you had embarked on your project but I have recently heard again that ‘it is on’.

Morrissey, the doors of our Georgian Bloomsbury-based publishing house are open to you wherever you may be: Rome, LA, Manchester. We recently published a book of Kevin Cummins’ photographs of Manchester pop which you may have seen. If you read this and would like a copy I will gladly send one to you. Perhaps it could mark the start of a beautiful friendship.

With warm wishes,

Lee Brackstone

Paul Dirac: The Strangest Man

It’s very rare for a science book to win the Costa (or Whitbread as it used to be) Biography Award, but that’s just what Graham Farmelo’s The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac has done this year. The Costa judges said, ‘The extraordinary mind and achievements of Britain’s Einstein are rendered here in the most compelling biography of the year.’ Just as significantly, the reviewers at Physics World named it their book of the year for 2009, though they stressed that you don’t need to be a professional physicist, academic or boffin to understand it and enjoy it. That’s one of the skills of a great biographer – to make a subject available beyond its core audience.

Paul Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum physics, perhaps the greatest theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. Yet little was known about him – his genius went largely unrecognised – largely because of Dirac’s reticence.

Graham Farmelo’s book is a welcome reminder – or an introduction – to an icon of modern thought. Our interview with Farmelo (recorded in January last year) is well worth a listen.

It’s Wednesday 14th October, day three of the Faber New Poets tour and the poets arrive in Oxford, where they spend the day getting ready for the evening’s performance at St Edmund Hall.

They’re to be joined by Bernard O’Donoghue – the Bill Clinton of poetry – and there’s a first sighting (the first of many subsequently) of ‘Faberman’ …

Monday was Norwich; Tuesday was Cambridge; Thursday is Hell, sorry, Hull …

About Kat Banyard

Kat Banyard

Born in 1982, Kat Banyard is at the forefront of a new UK feminist movement, having founded a widely acclaimed series of national feminist conferences – FEM Conferences – in 2004. In 2007 she featured in an Observer Woman profile of ‘The New Feminists’.

Kat was, until recently, Campaigns Officer at the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading campaign for equality between women and men, and is a regular media spokesperson for the organization.

The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Men and Women Today

The Equality Illusion

In The Equality Illusion, campaigner Kat Banyard has written an alarm call, arguing passionately that feminism is one of the most urgent and relevant social justice campaigns today.

Structuring the book around a normal day, Banyard sets out the major issues for twenty-first-century feminism and explores how they are woven into our everyday lives. She also challenges how we think about choice and empowerment – ideas that have been so successfully co-opted by both the beauty industry and the sex industry – and argues against the notion that biology is at the heart of most gender inequality.

Banyard draws on her own campaigning experience as well as academic research and dozens of her own interviews and case studies. The book also includes information on how to get involved in grassroots action and a list of resources.

We publish the book in March but you can stay informed about related events, conversations and features at www.katbanyard.org or at the Equality Illusion Facebook page.

It’s Tuesday 13th October 2009 – day two of the week-long tour, and the Faber New Poets – Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Heather Phillipson and Jack Underwood – say goodbye to Norwich and head for Cambridge.

Phillipson is sceptical; Martinez de las Rivas has long eye-lashes; Benson knows what’s going on; Hollis is charming …

Cambridge is great. Each of us is almost killed by a bicycle at least once. They are like Hell’s Angels, only silent and deadly …

We are at the bottom of the intelligence food chain …

The Faber New Poets video diary continues:

Yesterday: Norwich. Tomorrow: Oxford.

A round-up of just some of the recent coverage online for Faber books and authors, and anything else that catches the Thought Fox’s eye …

• Garrison Keillor (whose latest book, Pilgrims, has just been published) interviewed on the BBC World Service’s The Strand and Radio 4’s Excess Baggage.

• Marcus Chown is everywhere – on Twitter, at a Book Swap, on an international blog tour, speculating in the New Scientist, and explaining the pull of popular science writing in the Independent on Sunday.

• Great first review by Lionel Shriver in the Financial Times for Maria McCann’s long-awaited second novel The Wilding, which we publish next month. More on that soon.

• ‘The funny and peculiar world of the cleaner turned comic sensation’ – Roald Dahl Funny Book Prize-winner Philip Ardagh interviewed in the TES.

• The Philip Larkin trail in Hull – the BBC’s short film clip on the forthcoming six months of Philip Larkin events in Hull, complete with archive footage of him – and also his bicycle – and a brief reading by Jean Hartley, his first publisher.

• Tom Stoppard talks politics, famous muses and the true meaning of “Stoppardian” in this Telegraph interview.

• Peter Carey to appear on a stamp.

• Danny Boyle to make National Theatre debut – around the time we’ll be publishing Amy Raphael’s biography of the Oscar-winner.

Funded by Arts Council England, Faber New Poets set out with the aim to identify and support emerging talents at an early stage in their careers. As Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis puts it, it’s a traditional, three-pronged publishing package, comprising:

1. Mentorship
2. A Bursary
3. First publication in pamphlet form

The Tour Begins

The first four Faber New Poets are Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Heather Phillipson and Jack Underwood (with another four being published in May).

For publication and to launch the scheme back in October last year, the four poets – with Faber Editor, chauffeur and part-time pizza chef Hollis at the wheel of their blue minibus – embarked on a UK tour: 1000-plus miles taking in Norwich, Cambridge, Oxford, then north to Hull, Durham, Lumb Bank, Ilkley and across to Manchester, armed with four Flip cameras to document life on the road.

What Goes On Tour Stays On Tour

Except when everyone’s armed with digital cameras … So here, in eight instalments for seven days, we see the poets as they visit the hillside cottage of Ted Hughes and the hometown of Philip Larkin, trespass on university lawns, perform at sold-out events, appear in a BBC ‘Culture Show’ film, bond over beer and Italian food, get lost on the Moors and master rock-star poses.

Day One: Norwich (12th October 2009)

Day One of the Faber New Poets tour sees the poets arriving in Norwich, ‘capital of mutants and mustard’. They’re to be joined by George Szirtes for their evening event at Norwich’s Writers’ Centre & Cafe.

Next stop: Cambridge.

2009 marked Faber and Faber’s 80th anniversary and throughout the year Faber staff were encouraged to spend an hour or so in the Archive, pick out three books, and explain their choices. For some it was like being a kid in a sweet shop; others knew exactly what to choose. The books selected, which we’ll post up as we go along, span all sorts of genres (cookery, children’s classics, modernist design, photography, and even medical textbooks – types of books that many might not have expected from Faber). The choices of books say a lot about Faber and its history, but also a lot about the people selecting them …

Faber’s London (and beyond) Account Manager Jeremy Wood picks his three favourites from the Archive:

Larkin at Sixty edited by Anthony Thwaite (1982)

Larkin at Sixty

An obvious choice of author and a fairly recent publication (1982), Larkin provided my formative Faber moment, when I purchased his Collected Poems back in 1988, so had to be included here.

This collection gathers together the prose and poem tributes of twenty of Larkin’s fellow writers, who celebrate the man and the poet on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1982, just three years before he died. The contributors include Kingsley Amis, Andrew Motion, Alan Bennett, Seamus Heaney and Clive James.

The pieces here range from examinations of his professional life as a librarian; his jazz writings; his editing of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse; and an examination of the relationship between his poetry and his fiction.

It would be great to see it made available again in some form, (retitled Larkin Recalled?) to coincide with Anthony Thwaite’s forthcoming selection of Larkin’s correspondence with his long-term lover, Monica Jones, and to mark the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death in 2010.

The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell (1945)

The Folded Leaf

I had no idea that Faber had ever published Maxwell until I stumbled upon this in the archive. A celebrated editor of The New Yorker magazine, Maxwell helped shape the literary careers of John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever and Eudora Welty, amongst others.

Whilst being an influential editor, his understated stories and novels have not earned him the recognition or appreciation he deserves. The Folded Leaf, Maxwell’s third novel, was published in 1945 to widespread praise.

It is a sensitive coming-of-age tale, an autobiographical study recollecting boyhood triumph and tragedy set in an all-boys college in the Chicago suburbs of the 1920s.

Stanley Spencer at War by Richard Carline (1978)

Stanley Spencer at War

Spencer was one of the leading British painters of the two world wars, from a generation of talented war artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Carline, himself an artist, whose sister, Hilda, Spencer went on to marry, first met Spencer in 1915.

First published by Faber in 1978, Carline’s study draws on Spencer’s letters; his numerous notebooks; and Spencer’s reminiscences of his war experiences.

Although brief, Carline’s biography provides a detailed account of Spencer’s first twenty years of adult life, taking in his pre-war days and charting the rise to prominence of a major artist. Spencer saw active service in Macedonia in WWI. His war experiences became the subject of his first important commissions, his paintings of social realism bringing home the consequences of battle.

Tobias Jones’s first book for Faber was The Dark Heart of Italy (2006), his critically acclaimed exposé of the darker side of Italian life, the flip side of la dolce vita, a nation riddled with corruption and political skullduggery – an anti-tourist guide. For his second book Tobias went in search of the good life – Utopian Dreams (2007) investigated alternatives, both religious and secular, to a 21st-century way of life obsessed by materialism and selfish gain. Again, a travel book with a difference.

The Salati Case

In his third book Tobias has returned to Italy, pursuing its dark heart, but this time through crime fiction. The Salati Case is the first in a series of crime novels set in the northern Italian city of Parma, featuring a new detective on the block, Castagnetti.

In a 20-minute interview for our December Faber Podcast, a Crime double-hander with Nicola Upson, Tobias Jones introduces his new detective and explains his fondness for bees; he reveals which writers and characters left their mark on him as a writer, in particular the influence of American crime writer Ross Macdonald; he outlines just what the Salati Case is; and he lets us in on what’s lined up for the second outing for Castagnetti, White Death.

You can download our interview with Tobias Jones here. Our interviewer, George Miller, also filmed this short piece.

The Salati Case is available now in paperback.

Jonathen Lethem’s fiction is infused with popular culture references – films, music, comics and superheroes. For Chronic City, at the request of the Washington City Paper, he’s compiled a Perkus Tooth-inspired playlist for your listening pleasure.

A round-up of just some of the recent coverage online for Faber books and authors, and anything else that catches the Thought Fox’s eye …

• Who will win the T. S. Eliot Prize?
  The Sunday Times speculates on the outcome – Faber interest lies in Alice Oswald and Hugo Williams, as well as our former Poetry Editor (and Costa winner) Christopher Reid and a number of poets we’ve published in the past.

• ‘A geographical form of insanity.’
  Brooklyn’s finest, Jonathan Lethem, takes the Observer’s Gaby Wood on a tour of the neighbourhood – a very different past and present. His new novel, Chronic City, takes place over the river in Manhattan, but they’re all New Yorkers …

• ‘Lethem is one of the greatest living writers we have.’
  More Jonathan Lethem – this review in The Scotsman is one of many impressive reactions to his new novel Chronic City.

• ‘Unrequited love makes fools of many of us.’
  This week Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk told a packed Southbank audience that his new novel The Museum of Innocence (translated by Maureen Freely) was not a book about obsession – so what’s the reason for building a museum to house your beloved’s intimate and disposable possessions? Mirroring the novel, a real museum opens this year.

• Orhan Pamuk on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week.
  Available to Listen Again.

• The Ticking is the Bomb.
  Nick Flynn follows up his 2005 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (soon to be a film starring Robert De Niro and Casey Affleck) with a meditation on his impending fatherhood, against a background of painful personal memories and the darkness of humanity.

• ‘The Rootless Cosmopolitan.’
  An early review in the New Yorker of Michael Scammell’s huge biography of Arthur Koestler, which we publish in February.

In this short film – shot by Podularity’s George Miller after he’d interviewed Marcus Chown for our Faber Podcast – the author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin and Afterglow of Creation (now reissued in a handsome new edition) responds to the question first posed by Enrico Fermi – the Italian physicist who developed the first nuclear reactor – about the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life: “Where is everybody?”.