Jim Crace
“Inimitably excellent, Jim Crace stands on his own ground
among living English novelists...”
– Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
Jim Crace
at Festival of Chichester
Jim Crace
will give a talk
and sign copies of his books
at the Festival of Chichester
on 25 June.
The month-long Festival features literature,
classical music, cycling, beer, walks, jazz and more.
An Evening
with Jim Crace takes place at Waterstones, West
Street, Chichester
on Tuesday 25 June from 6-8pm.
Tickets
£3.50 (£3 discountable against book purchase).
Please visit www.festivalofchichester.co.uk
for more details or contact the Box Office:
Chichester Tickets, Cloisters Shop, Chichester Cathedral
tel 01243 813595
www.chichestertickets.co.uk
How the Light Gets In
Jim
Crace will be taking part in two debates
at this year’s edition of the UK’s largest and
most stimulating
festival of music and philosophy,
How
the Light Gets In,
which runs from 23 May to 2 June
in Hay-on-Wye.
·
On Sunday 26 May at 10:30am, Julian Baggini
chairs ‘The Prejudice of Intellectuals’.
We openly discriminate
in favour of intelligence while denying or limiting the role of physical
beauty.
Might this be a mistake? Should we accept the many different qualities of
individuals and prize them equally,
or would this undermine our society and lead to ruin?
LSE Sociologist and Erotic Capital theorist Catherine Hakim and
historian of ideas Hannah Dawson
join acclaimed novelist Jim Crace
to debate the values of the mind and the body.
·
On Sunday 26 May 2013 at 1:15pm, Angie Hobbs chairs ‘Live
Fast, Die Young’.
Our culture is geared
towards the avoidance of risk and danger in the pursuit of long life.
Is this an error? Should we seek new adventures by adopting a risk-taking,
heroic attitude to life,
or would this be irresponsible and selfish?
Adventurer Paul Rose and sociologist Frank Furedi
join Jim Crace to ask
whether it is better to live for a day as a lion than a lifetime as a mouse.
For more information
about the festival arts programme:
http://howthelightgetsin.org/2013-programme/event-tickets/art-literature-film/
Harvest, Jim Crace’s new novel,
was published 14 February, 2013
Read a selection of
reviews...
Told over the
course of seven dramatic days, Harvest
evokes the tragedy of land pillaged and communities scattered,
as England’s fields are irrevocably enclosed. Already hailed as Jim Crace’s biggest novel since Being Dead,
Harvest transports us to a bewitching
world in which the landscapes, people and myths of a vanished England live
again.
“A
powerfully resonating fable about the destruction of a village, the enclosure
of England’s fields
and the lost rhythms of the natural world that is likely to garner prize
nominations.” – The Guardian
“Everything new worth having
is paid for by the loss of something old worth keeping...”
Read an interview
with Jim Crace
by Stephanie Cross
from the Independent on Sunday, 10 February 2013
Photograph © Tim Wainwright.
'A writer of hallucinatory skill'
John Updike
***
Please visit the Highlights page for archived material
January 2000-January 2013
Jim
Crace’s 140-character novel
Jim Crace
responds to The Guardian
newspaper’s challenge
to write a story within the 140-character limit of Twitter.
Read it here.
Jim
Crace on modern myths:
a video from
2012’s How the Light Gets In festival
In
a panel discussion hosted by Justin Mahboubian-Jones
of the Institute
of Art and Ideas
Jim Crace
was joined by postmodern cultural theorist and writer Nicholas Royle
and science fiction author Justina Robson
to investigate the role of myths in our modern lives.
Please visit the IaI’s site to view the video of this stimulating
encounter:
http://iai.tv/video/myths-for-modernity
In a video
talk published by the Harry Ransom Center at
the
University of Texas at Austin
Jim Crace speaks about the creative process.
Please view this
and other videos from Jim Crace’s 2012
residence
at the Ransom Center on the University of Texas
website.
With thanks to the IaI and the Harry Ransom Center
for making these links available.
“Does
literature dwell with the living, or with the dead?”
Daniela Brockdorff, ‘Writing Death’
Jim Crace’s prize-winning novel Being Dead (1999) continues to attract
criticism and research.
Daniela Brockdorff’s paper ‘Writing
Death’ considers Crace’s novel and Graham
Swift’s Last Orders
as two “provocatively
poignant depictions of the interval between the instance of death and the
laying to rest”.
Although both novels reject “spiritual fictions of the hereafter”,
both recognise that a “narrative needs be found to accompany a corpse to
its final resting place”.
Are Crace and Swift extending the traditions of elegy
to prose?
How can one write a comforting narrative “in the godless universe of Crace’s and Swift’s novels?”
Brockdorff finds that Crace’s
novel “thrives on liminality” and
considers whether this
“endows Being Dead, most particularly, with a potential for the
sublime”.
To read Daniela Brockdorff’s paper ‘Writing Death’, click
here.
Read the first chapter of
Jim Crace’s new novel
Harvest
“Two twists
of smoke at a time of year
too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light...”
Rural England is on the brink of change
in Jim Crace’s new novel of the Enclosures,
to be published by Picador in spring 2013.
Visitors to this web site can read the first chapter here.
Please
see Note on copyright at the bottom of this contents page.
This
site is for information about the writer Jim Crace.
Much
archived material, including interviews, uncollected short stories, excerpts
from novels,
journalism and comment, can be found by following the link to Highlights,
or using the section headings in the left-hand frame.
This web
site was launched in January 2000.
To read archived material from this site click
News and highlights to Jan 2013
This
site also contains the following 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: notes
(where available) on forthcoming publications
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.
Jim Crace
I would
like to hear from anyone with ideas for content and links.
Please email me, Andrew Hewitt, at aghewitt@yahoo.com.
Last update: March 2011
Note on
copyright:
Original
material on this web site is © Andrew Hewitt 2000-2009
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.