Monday, February 06, 2006

Kenneth J. Harvey on fact and fiction

Many and wonderful, as I have remarked before, are the ways which authors will find to publicise their works. And one way, also as I have remarked before, is to pin a newspaper article (or letter, a la Sylvie Nickels) on to some aspect of the current news, mentioning your own book at the end.

Kenneth J. Harvey, for instance, has a piece in Saturday's UK Times. In it, he complains that, after reading John Banville's Man Booker prize-winning The Sea, a slim volume trumpeted as fiction, he was startled to discover, upon perusing his hefty atlas, that this supposedly fantastical place named Ireland was an actual island. What is more, there are lots more facts and truths in this alleged piece of fiction. And it ain't good enough. He suggests various remedies.

Well, of course, this has been done before, quite recently by Tim Hall. But if you can get a plug out of it, why not?

Meanwhile, the Frey affair just goes on and on and on. It's beginning to look as if newspaper and magazine editors just need something to fill up the space between the adverts. That can't be true, surely.

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