Chris Power
@chris_power
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Wrote A Lonely Man & Mothers; words in @LRB @guardian @thetimesbooks ; presents Open Book on @BBCRadio4 ; agent Emma Paterson @AitkenAlexander
Hackney, London
Joined December 2008
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Pinned Tweet
In the last days of his life Kafka, suffering tuberculosis of the larynx, was ordered not to speak. He communicated by scribbling notes on scraps of paper.
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Italo Calvino lists his favourite authors and why he loves them, 1959
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Deborah Eisenberg on Wallace Shawn: “It’s an interesting feature of human life that 1 shrinks & expands according to whom 1 is talking. Talking to Wally, I discovered in myself large reserves of mental energy & emotional activity that had simply been unavailable to me before.”
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Gabriel García Márquez’s daily schedule (in 1999):
5-7 am: reading
7-10 am: breakfast, newspapers and email
10-2.30 pm: writing
2.30 pm: lunch
Afternoon and evening: “appointments, family, and friends”
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Boyfriend to girlfriend in secondhand bookshop: "You've got enough books." She could do better.
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Today marks 3 years since the death of Denis Johnson, who wrote the best final page of a short story I’ve ever read.
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Samuel Beckett died 33 years ago today. His New Year’s resolutions for 1984, sent to the Times by telegram: 'RESOLUTIONS: ZERO. HOPES: ZERO. BECKETT’
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It’s Raymond Chandler’s birthday, which means it’s time to revisit the greatest ever list of unused titles.
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Until 10 days ago this novel, one of the great reading experiences of my life, had sat unread on various shelves in various houses for 20 years, patiently minding its business. Just sitting there!
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These are the books I’ve been buying over the last year to help me write my next book. I’ve read half of one of them.
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JG Ballard died 11 years ago today. Here he is in 1988 predicting that at some point we might all self-isolate by choice.
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Stewart Lee once asked Alan Moore why he began his first novel with 20 pages of unintelligible Neanderthal speech. ‘To keep c***s out,’ he said. Happy 70th, Alan.
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Alasdair Gray was born today in 1934. This line from his masterpiece, Lanark, seems more appropriate than ever:‘The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied.’ People like nurses, ambulance workers and RMT members.
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"They only murdered him once": Raymond Chandler's list of titles for books/stories he never wrote:
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“Andrea is not God. She must come to terms with this.” Andrea Dunbar’s school report, 1976
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Italo Calvino with one of the all-time responses to ‘where do you get your ideas from?’
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He also wrote one of the greatest descriptions you’ll find of being a writer.
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In his new book George Saunders spends some time discussing whether literature boosts empathy, & is therefore a force for good. He begins in favour, then picks holes in his own position (he’s always careful to do this, which I admire), & then writes this wonderful passage:
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Several years after abandoning The Trial, Kafka was staying at a hotel where he was mistakenly called Josef K
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I don’t like epigraphs, but my god Bolaño was great at them.
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My last day of chemo. Thanks to everyone in the
@NHSuk
for doing impossible jobs for too little pay. You deserve so much more.
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It’s Samuel Beckett’s birthday. I was going to write something about the prevalence of isolation in his work, but all I really want to do is admire his Gucci man bag.
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I love this: JG Ballard on the future of the novel/the unknowability of others (from a Guardian book review, 2002, and included in Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007)
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The conversation I have every time I send someone a copy of my book.
Post office worker: Nothing of value inside?
Me, internally: On the contrary, contained within is a book I spent years writing, into which I poured my very essence.
Me, externally: No, nothing of value.
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A single sentence was the inspiration for Henry Green’s novel Loving. And what a sentence.
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Chairs built by my wife, shelves built by her and her stepdad, books largely unread by me.
#ShowUsYourShelves
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“Most of the books I have written... originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it.” Italo Calvino.
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Bolaño wasn’t messing around (from his last interview, with Mónica Maristain, in 2003)
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My book has been published and is on bookshop shelves. That’s a sentence I’ve wanted to be able to say since before there was an internet on which to say it.
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The same story told by Chekhov, Hemingway, Kafka and Borges. From Ricardo Piglia’s Theses On the Short Story (1988).
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Unbelievable news: Mothers has been longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. I can’t believe it. Thanks to the Academy (probably the only chance I’ll ever get to say that) and congratulations to all the nominated authors. Did I mention this is unbelievable?
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Too many books? Why not try the Gerald Murnane method of downsizing your library.
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Bolaño said he could “live under a table reading Borges”. I think I could live under a table reading Chekhov. I’ve written about his influence on the modern short story in this week’s
@NewStatesman
:
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My first novel, A Lonely Man, is being published in April. Right now, I'm very happy for it to be judged by its cover (designed by
@jonnypelham
).
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“‘The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied’” - from Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
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This Sunday’s Open Book is an episode-long discussion of the life & work of Katherine Mansfield, the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of. With biographer
@claire_harman
, short-story writer & expert
@beingvarious
, & modernism specialist
@CMourant
@BBCRadio4
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Yesterday I found this James Kelman novel in
@OxfambooksN1
(a great shop). I would have loved to buy a new copy and give Kelman a royalty, but like most of his books it’s out of print. It’s unbelievable to me that a writer of his talent and importance should be so neglected.
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I can’t quite believe that yesterday morning I got to interview one of my favourite writers: Gerald Murnane. Gerald has never worn headphones before so it was a day of firsts all round. You can hear our conversation on
@BBCRadio4
’s Open Book this Sunday afternoon at 4 pm.
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Happy birthday Samuel Beckett, who left me forever haunted by this short story
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It’s a bittersweet week to have a
@guardianreview
cover story. Thanks to all the writers who took the time to speak to me about their reading habits during lockdown. Buy the
@guardian
today if you can, and consider a subscription or regular contribution.
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Crónicas are something between reportage, narrative non-fiction & short stories, & now we have 12 of them by the brilliant Fernanda Melchor set in her native Veracruz. One of the books I’m most excited about reading this year.
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Very glad to see this brilliant novel - one of Murnane’s best, and most puzzling (and his own favourite) - being reissued in January ‘24
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'RESOLUTIONS: ZERO. HOPES: ZERO.' Samuel Beckett's hopes and resolutions for 1984, published in the Times, 31/12/83
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Elizabeth Taylor died 43 years ago today. She’s not lost to oblivion or anything, but not nearly enough people read her. Especially given she could write like this.
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Publication day. Here’s a very valuable text from a couple of years ago when I was in despair about how to write my novel. It didn’t solve everything but it helped a lot; I finished the book & I’m proud of it. Now you can read it if you want & see if
@leorobsonwriter
was right.
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It's time to stop talking about how long War and Peace is.
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Roberto Bolaño died 18 years ago today. I needed to dip into 2666 earlier this year for a piece I was writing and ended up rereading the whole thing. What a novel.
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I interviewed Claire Keegan yesterday and she told me she wrote “at least” 40 drafts of this book. Time well spent. Hear the rest of our conversation on
@BBCRadio4
’s Open Book, 4 pm Sunday afternoon
#r4openbook
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Happy 82nd birthday to Gerald Murnane, who among other things has devised the greatest book-reducing system known to humanity.
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I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but if I did I’d steal them from Anna Kavan’s diary entry for 30/10/26: “I want to sleep a long time, eat a lot, sit about in the sun and be sexual pretty often.”
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“The novel always wins on points, while the short story must win by a knockout.” (Happy birthday Julio Cortázar.)
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Happy birthday Thomas Bernhard, a writer I never want to be away from for long
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The most miserable story I’ve ever read, from Georg Büchner’s Wozzeck via Randall Jarrell (translator unknown).
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Love this shot of Thomas Bernhard getting photobombed in Vienna.
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Happy 70th birthday that might have been to the great and missed Roberto Bolaño
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‘like every writer, he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do’ - from ‘The Secret Miracle’ by Borges
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How to begin a novel, by Javier Marías, 1951-2022 (from Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me)
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Anyway, he was a genuine and unique artist and it makes me so sad that he died in his 60s. It sounds like hyperbole, but I think ‘Emergency’ is the best story anyone’s written in the last 30 years:
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Happy birthday Donald Barthelme. With these words you won my heart.
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I’ve just sent off the copy edited version of my novel, having defeated this final boss.
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Bolaño would have been turning 65 today. 65! Imagine all the novels and stories (and poems and essays) we might have had. As it is, he’s given me some of my most indelible reading experiences. Feliz cumpleaños, Roberto.
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Karl Ove Knausgaard on dreams, Russia, the end of death and The Wolves Of Eternity, coming next month to Open Book on
@BBCRadio4
and
@BBCSounds
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