Stuart Kelly: Fortune favours the brazen once again

Published on Tuesday 15 December 2009 13:19

Just when you start thinking that the world's returning to sanity, Jeffrey Archer swans along with his unconfirmed kasquillion pound book deal for a five volume saga about an 'umble lad who makes kasquillions of pounds. Then the news come through that Julia Neuberger is to be a judge on the Orange Prize this year – the very person who once denounced the winner of the Booker Prize, James Kelman, right, when she was on the panel that voted for him. Lady writers better keep their fingers of

Eyeless in Gaza

The Americans rarely need an opportunity to promote the future of philistinism, but Liesl Schillinger, right, writing in the New York Times Review of Books, ought to get an award for her contribution to the field. Apparently, the rest of the world just doesn't get what America wants to read. The French are all clever-clever, the Germans and Scandinavians are just get-out-here gloomy, and (brace yourselves) "Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership". I think the Middle East at the moment has more pressing concerns than the exact steps of the quadrille. But Ms Schillinger might try Emile Habiby's The Secret Life Of Saeed, a truly fantastic book.

Brown's plot thickens

Since Dan Brown revealed that La Scala might be the setting for his next "novel", the Browser has been using his precognitive powers to figure out the rest of the book. With the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Knights Templar all done, he'll need a new tentacular organisation. So how about the Vehmic Tribunal? They have hoods, arbitrary executions and a really cool "V" in their name, and best of all, Walter Scott's already done them in Anne Of Geierstein, so the research would be a doddle. If these ideas appear in "The Caravaggio Conundrum" or "The Misplaced Cipher" or whatever, I wants me cut.