Jim Crace
This web site
was launched in January 2000
and has had over 100,000 visitors.
Highlights to
Dec 2008 include:
“A quintessential American story”
The paperback edition of The Pesthouse
was released in the
To read extracts from
of Jim Crace’s novel, click here
The Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center
at The University of Texas at
has acquired the archive of Jim Crace.
The archive contains all of
Crace's manuscripts,
not just of his novels but of stories, plays and essays.
The collection also includes notes and outlines for works,
reviews, trade journals, radio plays, art work,
recordings, press clippings, juvenilia, correspondence
and a proposal for two novels, The
Finalist and Archipelago.
"Earlier this year I had the
good fortune
to pick my way through the riches of the Ransom Center in Austin,
including notebooks and illustrations by my personal favourites
— William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. H. White,"
said Crace, who was Writer-in-Residence at Austin in January 2008.
"It was an enlightening and immensely moving experience.
"So it is with excitement and delight
that I learn that the Center will also provide a home for my own archive,
spanning everything from first childhood attempts at fiction
and teenage poems through 17 years of journalism
and nine published novels
to page drafts of my current ongoing book
(partly set in Austin) and watercolour sketches
for an upcoming fictional memoir.
It is, of course, strange and even a little distressing
to part with so many valued and familiar papers —
but I am certain that it is better that they are available
and cared for in the Ransom Center
than boxed and shut away in the attic of our house
in Birmingham, England.
No writer could wish for more than to be allocated a corner
in such a fine, important and world-class collection."
The Crace materials will be
accessible once organized and housed.
Crace
in
March
2008
“The novel vividly imagines the
Judean desert,
a comfortless place of bleaching light.
But it also creates a strange linguistic space…”
John
Mullan, professor of English at
University College London,
discusses Jim Crace’s Quarantine
in the Guardian book club series.
To
read the first article, click here.
You
can access subsequent instalments in the book club series
including readers’ reactions to Quarantine
directly from the Guardian website.
To
read Jim Crace’s contribution to the discussion,
describing the origins of Quarantine
in a care hostel in
click here.
Feb
2008
“It’s about two kinds
of heroism…”
Jim
Crace discusses writer’s block,
the pleasures of a life in storytelling,
and his projected novel about American and British kinds of bravery
with Shawn Badgley of the Austin
Chronicle.
To
read the interview, please click here.
Jan
2008
A New Year’s round-up
of reflections and memories:
On a childhood Christmas
On the first memorable novel
In conversation with Joan Bakewell
on belief
and see Jim Crace’s pick of bird
books in Best Books
Nov
2007
“We’re all, to some
extent, autobiographical writers…
but I’ve not been my subject-matter before…”
Jim Crace discusses his work in
progress,
his approach to writing,
and the role of literature
in a podcast from the
To listen, please click here.
“This novel…always leaves me in a
state of rapture,
as if I’d received a revelation of my own,”
says
the author and Harvard professor of creative writing
Bret Anthony Johnston of Jim Crace’s
Quarantine.
To find out why, please click here.
Jim Crace will be Distinguished Writer in
Residence
at the
at the
from 20
Jan-20 Feb 2008.
He will give a public reading in
on 7
February 2008.
Picador, who signed a three-book deal with Jim
Crace last year,
will
re-issue seven novels in January 2008.
“I thought this would be my political
statement and finally I would write a political book.
But the moment of abandonment came to me: this is not a lament,
it is a love song…”
Jim Crace talks about the ideas behind The Pesthouse
in an
interview in The Writing Magazine (September
2007).
To
download a pdf of the article, please click here
Reviews of The Pesthouse, Jim
Crace’s 2007 novel
“Readers will certainly note the parallels
between The Pesthouse and Cormac McCarthy’s
recent Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road,”
says
Mark Luce in the San Francisco Chronicle,
but while “McCarthy may have cornered the market on blood-red prose
that captures postapocalyptic violence and horror…
Crace provides an equally intriguing vision
that seems less frenzied but not too sanguine.”
To read the review, click here.
“How surprising of British critics
to so underestimate Crace, who is not a naïve writer…
I’d
imagine that what made the book so satisfying to write
was not the chance to punish
for its sins against nature, but rather
the appeal of making the future reverse the past
in the great eastward migration that Crace charts.”
To read Francine Prose in The (members-only) New York Times, click here
“Crace’s new America,
back to front in space and time,
is completely and rigorously imagined,
a world entire of itself...entirely compelling…
The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale
and Crace’s language
is extraordinary…
simple, often beautiful.”
To read Peter Bradshaw’s review of The Pesthouse in the New Statesman,
click here.
“Crace builds his effects from the bottom up
with careful details…Crace’s originality
is refreshing, his voice commanding”
Toby Lichtig
in the Times Literary Supplement
finds much to admire in The Pesthouse,
but is it the epic it might have been?
Read his review in the March 9 2007 edition
(online publication is usually one month behind)
Tew on Crace
Read an extract from Philip Tew’s study of Jim Crace
Jim Crace by Professor Philip Tew
is the first full-length study of the work of the
“one of the most imaginative...adventurous and challenging”
authors of the last three decades.
Philip
Tew is Professor of English (Post 1900 Literature)
in the
He examines Crace’s career as a novelist
from Continent (1986) to The Pesthouse (2007).
The
book is published
by
To
read an extract on Signals of Distress,
click here
“Here
is the happiness that I had counted beyond reach,
sentimental, English and suburban to the core…”
Jim
Crace returns to his childhood home in Enfield
Read
his account for the Sunday Times here
A phantom book by Jim Crace
Jim Crace’s new novel, Useless America,
is climbing up Amazon’s sales list…
There’s only one problem: the book doesn’t exist.
Read Jim Crace’s account of his ‘phantom book’ here
A preview
of Jim Crace’s new novel
“This used to be
Jim
Crace’s new novel The Pesthouse
is set in the “medieval future” of
To
read the first chapter click here
New novels and a new
Jim Crace has agreed a new three-novel contract in the
with the exclusive and prestigious literary imprint Nan A Talese.
A part of the Doubleday/Random House group,
Nan Talese already publishes Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan,
Thomas Keneally, and Peter Ackroyd,
plus celebrity writers such as Mia Farrow, Helmut Newton,
and George Plimpton.
“I have followed Jim Crace ever since I
read The Gift of Stones many years
ago,”
of being his publisher. The
Pesthouse is a brilliant novel,
as I am certain the two books to follow will also be.”
In an interview in January 2004 Jim Crace spoke of his plans
for an “adventurous retirement” from writing,
implying that The Pesthouse might be
his last book.
All readers will be delighted with the prospect
of more novels to follow The Pesthouse.
The two new projects are
The Finalist and
Archipelago.
”The Finalist”, says Crace, “is, on one level only,
a thriller of action and ideas, but its overarching intention
is to be a metaphorical critique of both political individualism
and the innate complacency of Western liberal democracies…
Archipelago
is an autobiography of the imagination,
with no plainly factual elements at all.”
To
visit
May
2006
“An altogether kinder, odder, safer
universe”:
Jim Crace revisits James Wilcox’ comic novel Modern Baptists
To read Jim Crace’s introduction
to the new Penguin edition of Wilcox’ book,
click here
March
2006
Doubleday
including M.G. Vassanji, Mark Haddon, Margaret Atwood, and David Adams
Richards,
and will publish The Pesthouse in
Doubleday editor Nick
Massey-Garrison said:
”We’re delighted to be Mr. Crace’s first Canadian publisher and excited
by this chance to introduce him to many new readers in
The Pesthouse is built on themes that
will be familiar
from Jim Crace’s previous books, and the world he creates
is every bit as vivid, but I’d say that it takes a generous narrative
direction
that will appeal to readers who may not have come to the earlier books.”
Please visit this page
again soon for more details
of the upcoming publication of The
Pesthouse.
Jan
22 2006
“The volunteer farmers who bare their skin throughout the night and
offer their blood
to the mosquitoes of Pailin
are taking grave risks for a good reason…”
Last fall the charity Médecins Sans Frontières
commissioned Jim Crace to report
on their activities in
To read his account, click here
or
go to the Sunday Times site
where it appears in slightly edited form
Nov
18 2005
Picador will publish The Pesthouse
Jim Crace’s new novel, in spring 2007.
Picador – publishers of John Banville and Alan
Hollinghurst,
winners in 2005 and 2004 respectively
of Britain’s most important literary award, the Man Booker Prize –
have announced that they will publish Crace’s next three novels,
beginning with The Pesthouse next
year.
The deal was concluded earlier this week.
On behalf of Picador, Andrew Kidd said:
‘Jim
Crace’s gift for dramatic compression,
combined with his astonishing imaginative range,
makes the experience of reading his books unique and unforgettable.
He is one of the finest British writers at work today,
and we are thrilled to welcome him.’
To
find out more about Picador, click here.
The Pesthouse, a novel about medieval
To find out more, click here.
The Devil’s Larder wins the Best of
Congratulations to Grid Iron, whose production of The Devil’s Larder has won the 2005 Best
of Edinburgh award
at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
The award means Larder will now
transfer to
To read more on the award, please click here.
Grid Iron production of The
Devil’s Larder
transfers to Edinburgh
Innovative theatrical company Grid Iron have made a number of
explorations of the impact of food on human society, including Gargantua and Fermentation. Now Grid Iron have adapted Jim Crace’s novel The Devil’s Larder (2001) for
performance:
“This promenade production winds a sinuous and treacherous path from
narrative episode to story-telling, from installation to song, with live music
performed by David Paul Jones and award-winning harpist, Catriona McKay. Grid
Iron examine how food can act as a catalyst for unleashing our fears, desires
and taboos.
Jim Crace’s teasingly dark novella is the basis for a journey into a culinary
underworld; an uncanny, uncomfortable examination of the envy, love, revenge,
hypocrisy, loss and lust which seethe beneath the false calm of the menu, the
shopping list and the recipe…”
The Devil’s Larder premiered in
European Capital of Culture celebrations.
It will be in
Debenham’s,
To find out more, please
visit Grid
Iron’s site.
For more
about other theatrical adaptations of Crace’s work,
please visit Quarantine on stage and Signals of Distress on stage.
“Darwinism is one of the most exciting narratives
we can encounter…I wanted
to test the Darwinian thesis of success”
- Jim Crace in conversation with
To listen to an interview with Jim Crace on Six
by Canadian broadcaster
Jim Crace talks to online magazine Three Monkeys
about why America is the right place
to set his new novel of the ‘medieval future’
_
Advice for aspiring writers
“One of the rewards of being a novelist
of even limited success is that several times a week,
by phone, by email, in person, you will be approached
by complete strangers - unpublished writers -
keen to obtain your help and advice.
It would be truculent and unfriendly not to respond…”
Jim Crace’s practical advice to aspiring authors,
contained in a series of hilarious letters,
is published in the Guardian Review. Click here.
November 2004:
Crossing Borders is an
extremely interesting and exciting new scheme developed by the British Council,
Professional novelists and poets act as
mentors to African writers using email and the Internet to share their work and
comment on it. Crossing Borders aims to break the
isolation of young African writers, promoting writing development, library
usage, cultural exchange and a greater knowledge of contemporary literature in
English. It also aims to support writers in the
To find out more, click here.
Jim Crace is one of the programme’s “Writers
on Writing” contributors. The site contains
a link to his short story “The Prospect from the Silver Hill”, an analysis of
his technique and an account of the writers who have inspired him – London,
Coleridge, Frost, Calvino, and others. From the home page, follow the “Writers
on Writing” link.
“The winners are likely to be
adventurous writers prepared to take the greatest risks.
Much better to have aimed high and fallen short
than to have produced a spotless story
that offered you no challenges…”
Congratulations to Dorene O’Brien, Janey Runci,
Emma Darwin and the other winners
of the prestigious Bridport prize for 2004,
judged by Jim Crace.
To read his report on the competition, click here.
“I’ve been told Six is my woman’s book…
I’m telling women things that men under 40 don’t want them to know”
Jim Crace interviewed in Ink
magazine
In the January 2004 issue of Ink, a magazine
for fiction, movies, sport, and other entertainments,
Jim Crace talks to Scott Anthony about mixed reviews,
Unfortunately Ink is no longer available on the Web and has ceased publishing.
“When I’m with friends I never talk about books —
if someone raises the issue of my writing
I almost rudely snuff the subject out…
I don’t seem able to escape the Pilgrim Estate
where I was mostly brought up, where I was the grammar-school boy
who was too nervous to mention books.
All of these rational and irrational things are
telling me,
‘Don’t talk about your novels to anybody.’ ”
Jim Crace opens up in The Art of Fiction
interview for The Paris Review
The fiftieth anniversary issue of The
carries a long-awaited interview by Adam Begley,
Books Editor of The New York Observer,
with Jim Crace.
To read an extract from this interview,
click here.
This will take you to The Paris Review site.
I hope to bring you the full text of this absorbing interview
once I’ve checked any copyright issues.
But – with Paul Auster, new fiction,
reviews and poetry, and founding editor George Plimpton’s
look back over fifty years – it’s well worth buying.
Jim Crace on holidays
(hellish and heavenly)
and the champions of 2003
“Customers who bought Six also bought Genesis…”
A difference of opinion between publishers
led to Jim Crace’s new novel being published under different titles
on different sides of the
To read more, click here
Jim
Crace’s new book Six
(ISBN 0670881163)
was published by Viking
in hardcover on September 5,
price £16.99.
To order Six from amazon, click here.
July:
For details of Jim Crace’s upcoming appearances
please click here
The new novel by Jim Crace, Six, will be published in September.
I’ve had the privilege of reading the novel in proof
and it is excellent.
The writing is quite concentrated, with strong dialogue and lots of Cracean observations
and ‘original proverbs’. The story is set in the
“once-famous ‘City of Kisses’, with its deep parks,
its balconies, and its prolific and disrupting river”,
a place at once fully specified, familiar and unsettling.
The main character, the actor Dern,
seems as hemmed in by the people he has brought to life
in countless plays and movies as he is by the children
he has unwittingly fathered,
whether or not he even meets them.
And the women he loves are very sharp, alive, and believable,
both in their passion for Dern and in their sometimes prickly individuality.
I will be posting selected reviews to the site when Six
is published.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already sampled
the first chapter, of Six, follow the links below…
Moved to tears
To read Crace on Ian McEwan, click here
May 2003
An uncollected short story by Jim Crace
“I used to be
wild once, for a year or two.
But I lost the habit, going after love.
I sometimes pick on those birds who can’t decide what they are,
wild or domestic…”
‘Helter Skelter, Hang Sorrow, Care’ll Kill A Cat’,
by Jim Crace,
was first published in 1975 in The New Review.
Click here to read it.
‘Helter Skelter…’ completes the web site’s project
of making Crace’s uncollected short fiction easily available.
For more of Crace’s writing outside his published books,
follow the links from Other Writings
April 2003
Jim
Crace’s forthcoming novel
to be called Six in the
and Genesis in the
The
work is now with publishers Viking in the
and FSG in the
“To
be so fertile is a curse…”
In the novel a
man recalls the settings and the details
of the conceptions of his seven children.
Six/Genesis will be published lather this year.
To
read chapter 1, click here.
To
see a preview of the cover, click here.
Congratulations
to Jakub Stemporowski,
recently awarded his Masters
by
for his thesis on Jim Crace’s novel
Jakub draws on theories of culture and society to locate
in the pastoral tradition,
as a post-modern fiction,
and as a novel of
To read ‘The City and the
Country, the Myth and the Reality
in Jim Crace’s Novel
(It’s a substantial – 80 page – paper, so
be prepared to wait while it opens.)
With
thanks to Jakub Stemperowski.
Adam
Begley makes a pilgrimage to Craceland
“We started to talk about
specific novels — something he claims he just wouldn’t do
if it weren’t for journalists who ask him questions.
‘I’m not introspective about the things that I write,’ he said…
I remember asking him about how the death of his father, whom he loved,
could have inspired Being Dead, in which death descends with exceptional
brutality.
Crace looked at me, a bit startled, and said
‘I wasn’t thinking about my father when I was writing,
I was dealing with the prose on the page.’ ”
This
excellent review-cum-interview by Adam Begley
(Books editor of The
appeared in Southwest Review.
I am grateful to the editors for permission to reprint
the article here.
Southwest Review is one of the longest-running literary periodicals
in the
You can sample the Review (and request a
subscription) by clicking here.
“To
be so fertile is a curse…”
In Jim Crace’s forthcoming novel Genesis
a man recalls the settings and the
details
of the conceptions of his seven children.
Genesis will be published in 2003.
To read chapter 1 of the new work, click here.
Jim Crace
awarded Doctorate
by the
“For Jim Crace the writing of fiction is a decidedly moral business –
not in the crude sense of telling his readers how to live their lives
but in the more ambitious and more difficult task
of convincing them of their own richness as finite human beings
in a world deprived of transcendental consolation…”
To read the full text of
the Oration by Professor Michael Butler, click here
“Modest,
lovely and resourceful”, with a “versatile and winning cast”, the Flying
Machine’s adaptation of Signals of Distress has been well-received
Scripted
and directed by Joshua Carlebach, the play “re-imagines Crace’s
chilling and hilarious vision of good intentions gone awry” when the survivors
of a shipwreck are forced to take refuge with the inhabitants of a coastal town
in nineteenth-century
A
To
read the
To find out more about Signals
of Distress (the play):
click here
To find out more about
Signals of Distress (the novel):
click here
“The trick is to place yourself in an imaginative and testing
environment where unusual events are likely to occur and then to be responsive
to any idea that offers itself”
Click here to read a new interview with Jim
Crace.
On
October 3 Jim Crace was onstage and ‘in discussion’
with Nick Hornby
in
support of the proposed
National Academy of Writing (NAW).
To find out more about the NAW, which numbers Jim
Crace,
Matthew Kneale, Doris Lessing, Philip Pullman,
and many other leading writers among its patrons, visit
http://www.writingacademy.org .
Click here for other
appearances, readings, and workshops
Philip Tew, author of a critical study of English
novelist
B.S. Johnson, is preparing a book-length study
of Jim Crace’s works
Dr Tew has confirmed that
he is in discussion with
about this project. I hope to have more information soon.
Jim
Crace: summer reading
At
this time of year the papers are full of summer reading lists compiled by the
good and the great. Jim Crace is looking forward to a mixture of “duty and
pleasure: I’ll be rereading all of Nick Hornby’s books as we’re on stage and ‘in
conversation’ in October in support of the proposed National Academy of Writing
in
Click
here to take part in the new site survey…
Revealed: the real Mondazy?
Jim Crace kicks off a ‘baton story’ to raise
money
for writers’ scholarships
Jim Crace has contributed
the first chapter of a ‘baton story’ (that is, a story in which different
authors write successive chapters, ‘passing the baton’ to one another) called
“The Moving Finger” and featuring a certain Felix Mondazy, novelist,
playwright, poet, and translator. Is this the Mondazy of Being Dead and The
Devil’s Larder? The story was published online at www.hayfestival.co.uk. It will soon
come out in print, with profits going to fund writers’ bursaries at next year’s
Hay-on-Wye Festival.
To
coincide with Jim Crace’s tour of
a paper by Karoly Rozsa of the
In May Jim Crace took part
in a conference on British Literary Studies in
An edition of Quarantine will follow.
Karoly Rozsa, a graduate of
the University of Debrecen in English and Hungarian linguistics, has kindly
allowed this site to publish his perceptive reading of Jim Crace’s The Gift
of Stones. Rozsa’s close reading of the text of the novel identifies
patterns of imagery associated with the stonemasons’ village and the heath
beyond and suggests that ‘what is indispensable for the birth of storytelling is
the clash between two antagonistic forces (two opposing worlds)…the subject who
suffers the outcome…and who is sensitive enough to realise its significance,
that is the storyteller.’
To read Karoly Rozsa’s paper ‘The Gift of
Stories’ click here.
To
view this site’s page for The Gift of Stones click here.
Click here to read ‘Refugees’, a Crace story from 1977
and find out what John Fowles and Terry Eagleton had
to say about Crace’s work
I’m pleased to be able to ‘re-issue’ this early, uncollected story of
Though
supportive of what he called “a great festival”, Jim Crace nevertheless decided
to withdraw from Hay
in protest over Nestlé sponsorship of the event
Citing their concern over
Nestlé’s marketing of powdered baby milk in the
Jim Crace and Germaine Greer this week announced
that they were cancelling their appearances at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival,
which has accepted sponsorship from Nestlé.
Crace,
who was to appear on Saturday June 1, said that
Nestlé’s failure to observe the World Health Organisation’s code on
“so-called breast substitute milk has been
ignored for a long time...It’s a great shame.
The festival has a wonderful programme and I
would hate to see it damaged by this.
But the
organisers must have known Nestlé has been the subject of a boycott
for a
long time and that the creative community would be likely to feel uneasy
about
this association. They have only got themselves to blame.”
For
a list of Jim Crace’s upcoming appearances, click here
To
coincide with Jim Crace’s tour of
a paper by Karoly Rozsa of the
In May Jim Crace took part
in a conference on British Literary Studies in
An edition of Quarantine will follow.
Karoly Rozsa, a graduate of
the University of Debrecen in English and Hungarian linguistics, has kindly
allowed this site to publish his perceptive reading of Jim Crace’s The Gift
of Stones. Rozsa’s close reading of the text of the novel identifies
patterns of imagery associated with the stonemasons’ village and the heath
beyond and suggests that ‘what is indispensable for the birth of storytelling is
the clash between two antagonistic forces (two opposing worlds)…the subject who
suffers the outcome…and who is sensitive enough to realise its significance,
that is the storyteller.’
To read Karoly Rozsa’s paper ‘The Gift of
Stories’ click here.
To
view this site’s page for The Gift of Stones click here.
Jim
Crace in Oz
“I imagined writing a didactic political
fiction
that would change the hearts and minds of men and women,
but I didn't know what the next sentence was.
When I discovered the magical realism I would write,
I immediately could tell you what the next three books were.”
To
read an interview with Michelle Griffin of the Melbourne Age, conducted
during Jim Crace’s recent tour of
The
structure and craft of Being Dead
Kate Mayfield, who is
completing her MFA in Creative Writing
at the University of Arizona,
has mapped the “fluid plot structure” of Being Dead
in a chart which shows “how certain themes,
especially sex and death, interact throughout”.
To see her chart click here.
There is a discussion
devoted to Being Dead at ConstantReader.
To take part, follow the link to the ConstantReader homepage,
go to the WebBoard, where you will need to register,
and then to the
http://www.constantreader.com/
BookMuse.com is also well
worth a visit.
Although targeted at book discussion groups, with features such as
‘Leaders tips’ and ‘Topics for Discussion’,
the site is a great resource for lone readers too!
Click here for the extended response to Jim Crace’s
National Book Critics’ Circle award-winning novel
If
you can’t make it to one of Jim Crace’s appearances, you can still hear and see
the author discuss The Devil’s Larder via a ‘Bookwrap’.
Bookwraps are a new Web-based promotional tool coming soon to sites like Amazon
and on-line library catalogues. This one is brought to you courtesy of Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux, Jim Crace’s
It is based on an interview prepared by Charles Halpin.
To view the Bookwrap for The Devil’s Larder
click here.
‘A book that changed me’
Jim Crace has several times (most recently at Readerville.com) referred
to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel In Evil Hour as a book that changed him
and helped him to find his own voice. Visitors may now read what Crace wrote in
his original review of the novel by clicking here.
December 2001:
Click here to read ‘Refugees’, a Crace story from 1977
and find out what John Fowles and Terry Eagleton had
to say about Crace’s work
I’m pleased to be able to ‘re-issue’ this
early, uncollected story of
Jim Crace on the unwritten legacy of activist Alice
Howells,
who died in September this year
and on The Talmud and the Internet, his choice
for Book of the Year
Click here to read
these and other occasional
pieces on a range of personal and literary subjects.
Jim Crace discusses his working methods, ‘honesty’ in
fiction,
the difference between English and American readers and editors, and many other
topics with friends from Readerville.com
To read the discussion, click
here
November 2001:
The North American reception of The Devil’s Larder has been
extremely positive.
In
at the Harbourfront International Festival,
the critics had this to say about The Devil’s Larder:
James Grainger, Toronto Star (Oct 21, 2001):
"Fit for a king…Crace…has an almost uncanny ability to nail down a
dramatic situation, and the characters to enact it, in one or two sentences…
one of the best writers around."
Kevin Connolly, Eye (18 Oct 2001): "the
tone moves from the morbid to the tender, the dark to the whimsical…it reads
like a classic." This article contains extracts from a new interview with
Crace in which he discusses his "European" ambitions in writing The
Devil’s Larder, his commitment to "traditional" story-telling as
opposed to the "very recent" idea of realism, and why he "would
not be seen dead" reading the UK edition of The Devil’s Larder, with
its "sexy" cover, in public. Well worth reading: click here.
My thanks to
E.P. Hewitt for forwarding these reviews.
October 2001:
The
Devil’s Larder published in the
"Crace is a a great writer of whimsical,
fastidious, poetic prose," says Adam Phillips in The New York Times.
"Even by Crace’s standards, The Devil's Larder is an extraordinary
book…"
To read the review, click here (you may need to register)
"Jim Crace is one of the best novelists in
Britain," says Brooke Allan in The
"Crace’s fictions rise up and unfold in a
beautiful, unhurried way, like the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales," writes
Richard Wallace in The Seattle Times. To read the review, click here.
Interview
on ABC Tales
"A medium
British seaport, turned on its side and relocated on the Med,
but peopled by a bunch of citizens whose dominant gene is mischievous…"
is the description Andrew Pack elicits from Jim Crace
of the setting of his stories in an excellent interview on ABC Tales.
The interview is especially good for what it reveals about Jim Crace’s working
methods
and contains some advice to aspiring authors.
To read it click here.
September 2001:
Critical
acclaim for The Devil’s Larder.
Some
highlights from the reception of Jim Crace’s new book:
"In his
novel Quarantine, Crace
explored the temptation of Christ in the desert and the effects of starvation
on the mind, body and spirit. Though The
Devil’s Larder is not a sequel, the two books are different sides
of the same coin. To fast is to remove oneself from the daily rhythms of food
preparation and consumption. To feast is to heighten those rhythms, and raise
them to glory." To read Helen Dunmore’s review in The Times (1
September) click here.
"Perched
intimately alongside sex and death, Crace celebrates the imaginative sustenance
of unknown ingredients." To read David Vincent’s review of The Devil’s
Larder in The Observer (2 September) click here.
"Crace is a
writer of ‘exactitude’ – Italo Calvino’s term – in that he evokes big themes by
concentrating on the minute definition of empirical detail," writes
Christopher Tayler in The Times Literary Supplement ("Perfect
Monday soup", September 7, p. 8). After a discussion of The Devil’s
Larder in the context of the sources and style of Crace’s fiction thus far,
Tayler concludes that the new book is "more entertaining and in some ways
more adventurous" than previous works.
This article is well worth reading – unfortunately I’m not able to offer
a link to it until it is archived on the TLS site in approximately six months’
time.
"I write
books about questions to which I want answers," Crace says. "So with Being
Dead there is a narrative of comfort about death which will serve atheists
as well as Christians. With The Devil’s Larder, recognising how central
food was to my imagination, to our culture and sense of self, I wanted to find
out what I would discover about the place of food in our lives."
To read Dominic Bradbury’s interview with Jim Crace in The Times
(September 5), click here.
Will
The Pest House be Jim Crace’s last book?
"I’m eager for adventures of a different kind…" he tells Ong
Sor Fern,
Books Editor of the Singapore Straits Times.
To read the text of this interview,
find out about the genesis of The Devil’s Larder
and what Jim Crace feels about cyberspace,
please click here.
August 2001:
"There are no bitter fruits in Heaven nor is there honey in the Devil’s
larder."
Visitations IV.3
Jim
Crace’s new book The Devil’s Larder
(ISBN 0670881457)
is published by Viking
in hardcover on September 6,
price £12.99.
In an interview
with Robert Birnbaum conducted last year, Jim Crace described The Devil’s
Larder:
"The
quotation that introduces it—and I invent everything including the epigrams—is
from that non-existent famous book of the Bible, Visitations, Chapter IV, verse
3, ‘There are no bitter fruits in Heaven nor is there honey in the Devil's
larder.’ This book goes into the Devil’s larder and takes the different foods
that are in the larder and makes fictions out of them. In the same way that
Calvino makes fictions out of different towns in Invisible Cities or
Primo Levi makes fictions of all the items in the periodic table from his book Periodic
Table. So they are a hundred short fictions about food. Not about cooking,
not about eating and not about restaurants and not about taste. It’s the last
taboo subject that not enough people deal with in literature. Food is a subject
so central to our sense of selves: our mortality, the shapes of our bodies, our
intimate relationship with our own insides. Sexuality, all of those
things...this thing is a cumulative book about food and it’s very playful and
it’s a lot of fun and it’s very dark also. I have to admit it’s dark, I can’t
stop my books being dark."
To
read the full text of this excellent, engrossing and revealing interview, click
here.
To read extracts from The Devil’s Larder, click here.
To order a copy
from amazon.co.uk, click here.
July 2001:
A new adaptation by New York’s Flying Machine of Signals of Distress
From September
27-30, 2001, The Flying Machine, an acclaimed theatre ensemble, will present
their adaptation of Jim Crace’s Signals Of Distress at Soho Rep. in
The following Press Release (21 July
2001) gives some details and I will keep you posted on this latest foray into
theatre for Crace’s work.
Announcing an upcoming production of
an adaptation of Jim Crace’s SIGNALS OF DISTRESS...
From September 27-30, 2001,
internationally acclaimed ensemble The Flying Machine (http://www.theflyingmachine.org)
will present their adaptation of Jim Crace’s SIGNALS OF DISTRESS at Soho Rep.
in
The Flying Machine is a highly
acclaimed international collaboration formed in
The Flying Machine’s work has been
performed in the
Crace’s work has appeared on stage
before: click here for information about the Birmingham
Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of Quarantine.
June 2001:
Portuguese journalist José Prata has kindly sent this web site the text
of his interview with Jim Crace for Livros magazine. Portuguese speakers
may read the article here.
Many readers
have asked about the references in Being Dead to "Mondazy’s
Fish". In the Livros article Crace confirms what many of you have
suspected – that Mondazy’s Fish is his invention, intended to contribute to the
realist texture of a work that is "fiction from beginning to end… The
non-existent insect life, the imaginary zoological phenomena, and the
fictitious citations from imagined books" all give depth to the world of Being
Dead.
May 2001:
The New Yorker serves up a
mouth-watering appetiser
The
May 7 issue of The New Yorker magazine featured six stories
from Jim Crace’s forthcoming ‘cumulative novel’, The Devil’s Larder.
Selections from the book have already appeared
in print in The Slow Digestions of the Night, a small-format paperback
from Penguin,
and on this web site (click here
for a taste).
The extracts in The New Yorker are titled, rather than simply numbered:
"Mussels on
the House"
"George’s
Magic Cookies"
"Monday’s
Soup"
"Wild
Fungi"
"Ashes and
Spice"
"Boysie
Tart"
The
book will be published in the
My thanks to Jim
Morrison for this information.
*
The
Japanese edition of Being Dead
is published on June 10 by Hakusui-sha,
In a postscript, the translator, Sachie Watanabe,
makes kind mention of this web site.
Sachie Watanabe’s other translation credits include
Will Self’s Cock and Bull and Irvine Welsh’s Filth.
A translation of Quarantine is in preparation.
My thanks to
Miyahara Kazunari, whose paper on Quarantine appears here,
for this information.
April 2001:
"Buddhism seems to possess some agreeable qualities for
Crace":
A new and thought-provoking contribution
to the discussion of Quarantine
from Miyahara Kazunari,
March 2001:
Click here for
extracts from Jim Crace’s
new work, The Devil’s Larder
and for an exclusive
preview of the luscious cover artwork…
Being Dead wins the American NBCC
award
Click here for Jim
Crace’s speech to the NBCC
Click here for cities/dates of
Crace’s upcoming North American tour
February 2001:
More accolades for Being Dead
American readers and critics continue to heap praise
on Crace’s 1999 novel. This month, Being Dead was nominated for the
prestigious National Book Critics’ Circle Award and listed as a Notable Book by
the American Library Association. For the NBCC’s final decision, please check
back here in March.
‘Public culture and the postmodern city’:
click here for an essay on Arcadia by Dr Doris Teske
January 2001:
Jim Crace’s ‘Narratives of Comfort’
Click here for an
essay by Michael Farren
December 2000:
Being Dead chosen as Book of the
Year
by the New York Times
Click here to read the
editors’ comments
The Devil’s Larder manuscript
now with the publisher
Click
here
to find out more about Jim Crace’s forthcoming works
Reluctant storyteller:
Jim Crace
interviewed in The Guardian. Click here
For
the most recent updates to this site, please go to the Home
page.
This
site is organised into the following main sections:
Chronology:
a brief biographical and literary chronology.
Books:
a discussion of Jim Crace's novels,
with extensive links and pointers to reviews and commentary about them.
This is the main section of the site. I invite ideas and contributions
from anyone with an interest in Crace's work.
Other writings:
a list (and some e-texts) of other writing by Crace,
including his first published stories, plays, journalism, reviews and opinions.
Forthcoming:
a list of forthcoming publications, appearances, etc.
Context:
links and pointers to information and discussion about
themes present in Crace's work, including exclusive interviews with
Jim Crace.
Feedback:
where you tell me about yourself and how to improve the site.
I
would like to hear from anyone with ideas for content and links.
Please email me, Andrew Hewitt, at aghewitt@yahoo.com.
Note on copyright:
Original material on this web site is © Andrew Hewitt 2000-2006
and is available for literary non-commercial uses only.
Repurposed material is copyright as shown.
Please feel free to contact me if you want to reproduce any material
from this web site, I will try and help arrange permission if you require it.
Jim
Crace's books are available from Blackwell's Online Bookshop
who have agreed to list this site on their page of author links.