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Live webchat: Jeanette Winterson at A Room for London22 February 2012, 4:31 pm
The author will be here on 24 February from 1-2pm to take part in a live Q&A. Post your questions nowJeanette Winterson will be the second author to join us for a live webchat from A Room for London. For four days each month an author takes up residency in the boat which teeters on the edge of the Southbank Centre, London, enjoys the peace and quiet, writes a specially commissioned piece and on this occasion, puts aside an hour to answer your questions.Jeanette needs no introduction, she is publ...
Performance poetry - your reviews21 February 2012, 3:27 pm
You asked: Can we have an open thread for performance poetry?Last week, books site regular DanHolloway said:I'd love to see more poetry [on the site], and especially from outside the confines of the recognised poetry presses – dare I say it even more (any?) performance poetry. The talking head poetrycast series was great but a real missed opportunity to include at least one performance poet (with a straight to-camera there really is no place to hide and some of those readings really did demons...
Tips, links and suggestions: the books we're reviewing this week21 February 2012, 9:38 am
Tips, links and suggestions: the books we're reviewing this week and our favourite reader reviewsEach week we publish a list of some of the books our critics will be reviewing during the week, and invite you to tell us what you're reading and reviewing on the site. Last week, many of you did just that.HeleneM told us that she was reading Your Voice In My Head by Emma Forrest, dirtywhitecandy, although published a while ago was reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, and SeaGrassLight 'ventured ...
Redesigning Lord of the Flies18 February 2012, 3:30 pm
A competition inviting teenagers to come up with a new cover for William Golding's classic novel produced some stunning resultsThe cliché warns you should not judge a book by its cover. But can you judge a cover through what you already know about a book? That is what Judy Golding, William Golding's daughter and author in her own right, Eleanor Crow, senior designer at Faber, graphic artist Neil Gower and Kate Abbott, art and design editor at the Guardian, were about to find out.Their task was...
The 100 best children's books. Really?16 February 2012, 5:26 pm
A new ranking of the greatest children's books has some welcome surprises, but there are of course some glaring omissionsWhat cheering news, to discover this morning that EB White's heart-wrenching, wonderful story of a spider and a pig, Charlotte's Web, has topped a US list of the best 100 children's books, edging out more modern fare from JK Rowling and Suzanne Collins. The list, compiled by Parent & Child Magazine editors after 500 titles were suggested by literacy experts and "mum bloggers" ...
How to name a publisher16 February 2012, 3:25 pm
Three new publishers make clear the dilemmas facing anyone trying to brand a new imprint"Coming up with a name was far more difficult than we expected," says co-founder Rosalind Porter of the birth-pangs of new publishing venture Union Books, also headed by Alex Clark and David Graham and due to be launched next week. "The three of us went round in circles for months pushing our favourites.Alex's Bloomsbury sensibility informed all her suggestions; David's love of dogs was never far from his; I ...
What you're reading – in pictures16 February 2012, 12:42 pm
We asked our readers show us what they've been reading. Here's a selection of the photos they submitted to our Flickr groupGuardian readers ...
The 100 greatest novels re-covered16 February 2012, 10:43 am
Belgian artist Tom Haentjens is encouraging readers to redesign the covers of the Observer's list of all-time best fictionThe Observer's 100 greatest novels of all timeAbout seven years ago, as a Sunday newspaper stunt, I compiled for the Observer a list of all-time great fiction. Obviously, the list was shaped by my reading preferences, but it also contained a measure of informal polling. In other words, I asked about 100 colleagues on the Observer for their nominations, and developed the list ...
Are books and the internet about to merge?15 February 2012, 4:00 pm
The difference between ebooks and the internet is minimal, and we should be glad the two are growing closer and closerIt's easy to forget that the world wide web as we know it today evolved from an early attempt to put books on the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee envisaged what would become the world wide web, it was with the idea of making academic papers and other documents widely available. To this end he devised a simple way of laying out text and images on a page, inventing what we now call ...
Unusual suspects: Literary photo-fits15 February 2012, 12:39 pm
An intriguing web project is using forensic profiling techniques to picture fictional charactersBrilliant, and refreshingly unsentimental in the wake of Valentine's Day: a project launched by author Brian Joseph Davis in which he uses "law enforcement composite sketch software" to producing images of literary characters, based on their creators' descriptions.He's set up a tumblr entitled The Composites, and is inviting the rest of us to submit suggestions for lines that would lend themselves to ...

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