Why Bedtime Will Never Be The Same

The nightly climb up the stairs to Bedfordshire is supposed to be a time of parent-child bonding and sleepy tranquility. The little darlings dress themselves obediently in their pyjamas and clutch hot water bottles dreamily to their chests murmuring: "I love you, Mummy and Daddy."

In reality they want "just one more" repeat of Come Dine With Me. When they have already watched three. And, despite it already being several hours past the time they are supposed to be asleep, they now want you to read to them. You intone the words of Peepo, The Gruffalo or The Smartest Giant in Town as if you were a mass murderer.

Now comes the backlash – in the form of children's bedtime books designed for adults. Goodnight Keith Moon by Bruce Worden and Clare Cross published in the UK this week, is already a cult hit in the US. "Morbidly funny," according to the New Yorker, it's a spoof of the children's classic Goodnight Moon, told through the eyes of the Who's late drummer. A trashed hotel room replaces the sleepy child's bedroom. Instead of the bowl of mush featured in the original, there are pills everywhere: "And some whiskey and fish and some more in a dish, And the ghost of Cass Elliott whispering shhh."

It's already a trend with Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortes, on its third print run in the US.

We can expect more of this stuff. There's already Porn For New Moms: photographs of beefcake guys feeding babies in the style of a children's picture book. And there's the "Baby Be Useful" series: Baby Mix Me a Drink, Baby Fix My Car, Baby Do My Banking. My favourite? All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen: "If you're a dinosaur, all your friends are dead. If you're a pirate, all your friends have scurvy." Genius.

- Viv Groskop, The Guardian

The Tiger's Wife: Orange Prize 2011 winner

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Obreht, the youngest of "The New Yorker's" 20 best American fiction writers under 40, spins a timeless novel about a young doctor who confronts the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death.

"... highly original, funny and frightening ... Her writing is remarkable, but she doesn't show off, nor does she ask too much of our imaginations. Like the characters in the story, we are easily drawn to the unbelievable elements of this tale because they sweep us away from the real world" - The Economist

Paperback is available for only R99 from Pulp Books.

Man with a Pan

“Man With a Pan,” edited by the cartoonist, writer and New Yorker editor John Donohue, is a rangy, toothsome, timely and occasionally wince-inducing collection of essays by kitchen dads, men who do most of the cooking in their families.

“Man With a Pan” contains essays (and recipes) by marquee names including Stephen King — isn’t it time he set a scary novel in a Hardee’s? — and Mario Batali. But the best pieces here, the line-caught beauties, are by people you’ve probably barely heard of.

 "Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, delivers a piercing essay about his insecure need to give lavish dinner parties, as seen though the prism of his failing marriage. “Cooking had become a distraction and a source of solace in a marriage that no longer offered its own consolations,” he writes. His painful piece is also funny. When he begins dating a vegetarian and becomes one himself, a friend calls this shift a “sexually transmitted eating disorder.” 

 "Wesley Stace is best-known as a singer-songwriter who performs under the name John Wesley Harding, but he’s also written three novels. If his flinty essay here is any indication of what those novels are like, I need to pack one for the lake this summer. He nails the idiotic gender division of labor at some meals, observing about his family: “The men carved what the women cooked (a remarkable piece of last-minute scene-stealing), as though sharp knives were too dangerous for women outside the kitchen.” 

- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Read the rest of the review here.

Rocking Reads

Do you sometimes feel like taking copious amounts of drugs, drinking whisky with your cornflakes, wearing too much eye makeup and wrecking your hotel room?

You’re not alone. But instead of ruining your health/breakfast/skin/favourite furniture, you can live vicariously through the ones who do it best.

Bringing you the best of the best rock ‘n’ roll biographies ... www.pulpbooks.co.za.  Rock on.

E-readers 'a threat to impressive-looking bookshelves'

ELECTRONIC reading devices are not as good as real books for making you look clever, it was claimed last night.

E-readers like Kindle are rapidly replacing traditional books, but unlike a shelf full of intimidating hardbacks about poetry, string theory and Russian actors who committed suicide, they can never make you look more intelligent than you really are.

Publisher Tom Logan said: "Compared to electronic devices, books have a physicality that is magical and timeless. Plus they can get you blow jobs.

"You go to a coffee shop with a Kindle, intellectual girls don't know whether you're reading Foucault's Pendulum or playing Tetris.

"Tasteful books, especially big thick ones without pictures in, are vital indicators of your brainy sexiness.

"You don't even have to read them, just leave them strewn around the public areas of your house in a seemingly haphazard fashion. It's like having A Levels, but without doing all the essays and shit."

The popularity of electronic reading also threatens the future of high street book shops full of wistful looking young women hoping to strike up a conversation with a sexy stranger who is terribly fond of Balzac.

Logan added: "And without bookshops, pale socially-awkward English Literature graduates will have to work in PR or public sanitation.

"Unable to write florid 'staff reviews' of Alan Moore comics and obscure paperbacks about Japanese sailors with two penises they would be forced to retreat from society altogether, possibly to create a diabolical and short-lived indie music sub-genre."

- from www.thedailymash.co.uk

Killing Kebble now in its 3rd print

Killing Kebble

Mandy Wiener

Paperback, 386 pages

EAN 9781770101326

Pan Macmillan

Available to order
R146

In September 2005, Brett Kebble, a prominent South African mining magnate, was killed on a quiet suburban street in Johannesburg in an apparent “assisted suicide”.

Read the first chapters of the Orange Prize shortlist

Browse the synopses of the shortlisted titles and read the first chapters here.


Room - Emma Donoghue
Jack is five and excited about his birthday. He lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures eleven feet by eleven feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside...



The Memory of Love - Aminatta Forna
Adrian Lockheart is a psychologist escaping his life in England. Arriving in Freetown in the wake of civil war, he struggles with the intensity of the heat, dirt and dust, and with the secrets this country hides. Despite the gulf of experience and understanding between them, Adrian finds unexpected friendship in a young surgeon at the hospital, the charismatic Kai Mansaray, and begins to build a new life just as Kai makes plans to leave.


Grace Williams Says It Loud - Emma Henderson
This isn't an ordinary love story. But then Grace isn't an ordinary girl. 'Disgusting,' said the nurse. And when no more could be done, they put her away, aged eleven. On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, an epileptic who can who can type with his feet, fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond.


Great House - Nicole Krauss
During the winter of 1972, a woman spends a single night with a young Chilean poet before he departs New York, leaving her his desk. It is the only time they ever meet. Two years later, he is arrested by Pinochet’s secret police and never seen again. Across the ocean, in the leafy suburbs of London, a man caring for his dying wife discovers a lock of hair among her papers that unravels a terrible secret. In Jerusalem, an antiques dealer has spent a lifetime reassembling his father’s study, plundered by the Nazis from Budapest in 1944; now only one item remains to be found.
Connecting these stories is a desk of many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or have given it away. As the narrators of Great House make their confessions, this desk comes finally to stand for all that has been taken from them, and all that binds them to what has disappeared.


The Tiger’s Wife - Téa Obreht
A tiger escapes from the local zoo, padding through the ruined streets and onwards, to a ridge above the Balkan village of Galina. His nocturnal visits hold the villagers in a terrified thrall. But for one boy, the tiger is a thing of magic - Shere Khan awoken from the pages of The Jungle Book.
Years later, in a Balkan country ravaged by conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, is visiting an orphanage when she receives word of her beloved grandfather’s death far from their home in mysterious circumstances. Remembering fragments of the stories her grandfather told her as a child, Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for ‘the deathless man’ a vagabond who was said to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man, would go on such a far-fetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger’s wife.


Annabel - Kathleen Winter
In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador in the far north-east of Canada, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once.
Only three people share the secret – the baby’s parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult decision: to go through surgery and raise the child as a boy named Wayne. But as Wayne grows up within the hyper-male hunting culture of his father, his shadow-self – a girl he thinks of as ‘Annabel’ – is never entirely extinguished, and indeed is secretly nurtured by the women in his life.
As Wayne approaches adulthood, and its emotional and physical demands, the woman inside him begins to cry out. The changes that follow are momentous not just for him, but for the three adults that have guarded his secret.