Jonathan Coe

Makes sense

And this is why I am not anticipating a phone call from the Nobel Prize committee this morning.

This morning I turned on my phone only to find that it had changed my user name to Shirley, and when I tried to enter a simple Google query it came out as "Do you like gladiator movies?"

Then I realised it was in Airplane! mode.

I know Handsworth well. I love it. The Soho Road is one of the most vibrant streets in the world. I was attached to the library there for a writing project last year and I wrote a whole chunk about it in my book Hope And Glory. Read it if you get a chance

Thanks - and how nice now to be the owner of that review copy! Didn’t he call it a ‘timid experiment’?

TLS or Sunday Times or Obs I think - the review is quoted in my biog.

I do like it a lot but these days I prefer Small World which I find less schematic and much funnier - for me that's David's masterpiece.

... in that Lodge took the central device of switching between different forms but had a sense of how to adapt it for the mass readership BSJ had craved but never found. 2/2

Thank you! I actually think the missing link is David Lodge. Talking about David at an event in B'ham recently, I realised what a large and direct debt Changing Places owes to BSJ's Travelling People (which he'd definitely read) ... 1/2

Well, my selection would be equally wilful as these are my two favourites and apparently they're not liked much by Bley purists.

Tickets for my event at the Bewdley Festival on Saturday are selling like hot cakes.*

*(During the notorious hot cake slump of 1857.)

Jonathan Coe on his favourite, wildly funny, fantastical novel The Rotters’ Club author recommends Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, an amazing graphic memoir and a forgotten classic by Rosamond Lehmann

In which I talk about three of my favourite books - including one by @katebeaton.bsky.social

Jonathan Coe: ‘I have a fascination with the right’ The author on keeping his liberal instincts in check, his love of breaking the literary fourth wall, and not fitting comfortably into the world

In which I talk about anxiety as a motivating force, never being considered for the Booker, and an early novel that's become problematic.

To make a very obvious point, this is the second Nigel Farage takeover of the Conservative party. Twice he has made what were once relatively niche and hard-right opinions – leaving the EU and effectively ending asylum in the UK - the default view for Tory MPs.

Wilfully esoteric selection.

Encountering the strange mixture of sadness and riotous absurdity at the heart of this show at the age of 15 changed my life.

This is a wonderful and nuanced assessment, almost fifty years later.

"Still a handful of tickets left" (I think that's the preferred BlueSky euphemism) for my event here next Friday.
www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org/book-tickets/

Quelle surprise, @wtfrench76.bsky.social

I can’t believe I’m watching interviews of city mayors talking about how they are coordinating with other mayors to discuss how to protect their residents FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

I know we are “used to it” but it is absolutely insane

'I like the racism, but can I have a less expensive kind please?'

I have no influence! But am sure Persephone will do their utmost to bring them out, given the success of this one.

Peaceful morning by the side of Lac d’Annecy, reading Sally Carson’s novel of rising Nazism. What a book! No need to point out the many parallels with today. Thanks to Persephone Books for rediscovering/reissuing it.

It’s an option.

Good comparison!

I love it too and think it works best but am beginning to feel out on a limb.

Writing fiction in the third person past tense is starting to feel as stubbornly anachronistic as making studio sitcoms with a laughter track.

We’re living in an era of radical subjectivity. Truth has become much less important than what people feel to be true.

Saw it myself in Barnt Green a few weeks ago. Chilling.

Thank you! Great to hear from a happy reader.