Festival Books list.co.uk/festival
TOM CHATFIELD By the end of 2008, the annual sales figure for video games was $40billion, outstripping the movie business by some way. Here’s another stat: 99% of teenage boys and 94% of teenage girls have played a video game. Tom Chatfield’s Fun Inc takes apart the notion that staring at screens and endlessly clicking away to the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid or Halo (pictured) is fundamentally a bad thing for both the mind and society, instead seeing games as a realm amassed with difficulties, obligations, judgments and allegiances that will actually help the player in their interactions with the real world. Exploring this further with Chatfield is Pat Kane, ‘writer, musician and play theorist’. (Brian Donaldson) ■ 27 Aug, 4pm, £10 (£8).
5QUESTIONS 14 THE LIST 26 Aug–9 Sep 2010
With his latest project, Ewan Morrison is taking snapshots of life from within the walls of our shopping malls. Here, he takes a wander around our Q&A Can you give us five words to describe Tales from the Mall? Anecdotes, confessions, myths, underbelly, consumerism. Which authors should be more famous than they are now? Wishing fame on a writer is tantamount to desiring their demise as, invariably, fame cuts them off from the source of their creativity and forces them into the processing factory of literary sausage production. What do you love about book festivals? Getting the chance to witness eccentric individuals unleashed on the general
public. DBC Pierre and John Banville have been exemplary in this respect in the past. Which dead author do you wish was still alive today? David Foster Wallace. It’s tragic that the respect and adoration shown to DFW after his suicide might have been enough to save him had he experienced it when he was still alive. What would you change about the publishing world? I’d get publishers and authors to trade places. Give authors salaries and give publishers advances with short-term contracts. Authors would be freed from financial worries and could focus on writing while publishers would get a chance to be ‘creative’. (Interview by Brian Donaldson) ■ 26 Aug (with Simon Crump), 8.30pm, £10 (£8).
Hitlist FESTIVAL BOOKS *
✽✽ Will Self The former enfant terrible of British letters saddles up for a pair of events, a solo gig revolving around the imminent publication of a kind of memoir, Walking to Hollywood, and a joint event with Shetland-based writer Donald S Murray in which they chat about St Kilda and its people. See online feature, list.co.uk/festival. 29 Aug, 9.30pm; 30 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8). ✽✽ Vidal Sassoon Having fought in his youth against the street fascists of London before joining the Israeli Army, there’s more to Sassoon’s life than a cut and blow dry. See feature, opposite. 27 Aug, 6.30pm, £10 (£8). ✽✽ Simon Armitage The Yorkshireman many see as a shoo-in for future Poet Laureate will be discussing Seeing Stars, his anthology of snapshots from ‘ordinary lives’ including a balloon-trader who sells his soul, a man who loses weight the less he eats and a dog that believes itself to be a horse. See page 16. 28 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8). ✽✽ Nick Kent This was the man who not only reported on the rock business for the NME during its 70s heyday, but actually took part in it, often creating the stories with his connections to Chrissie Hynde, the Sex Pistols and Adam Ant. See page 16. 27 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8). ✽✽ Leanne Shapton With Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, New York artist and writer Shapton created a moving history of the beginning, deterioration and ending of a relationship. See page 16. 29 Aug, 8.30pm, £10 (£8). All events are based in Charlotte Square Gardens. The box office number is 0845 373 5888 and the website is edbookfest.co.uk