Sunday, 20 March 2016

#LadLitSunday: GQ 30 best books for men, Danny Wallace and the Passport to Poetry, and Sreemoyee Piu Kundu on lad lit

Keep Calm It's Lad Lit Sunday, Lad Lit, Lad Lit news, #LadLitSunday,
GQ staff this month chose their 30 of the best books for men. The list had a selection "from drunken poets to record-breaking boxers, from sci-fi pioneers to master stylists, these are the books you should be reading for the rest of the year."

Included in the list was Quicksand by Henning Mankell, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, Ask The Dust, by John Fante, On Writing by Charles Bukowski and Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari.

Danny Wallace is taking part in a new lyrical initiative at Heathrow airport called Passport to Poetry. The lad lit author will be joined by performance poet Laura Dockrill and fellow authors M.G. Leonard and Michael Rosen, as they all write poems to entertain the record number of people setting off into the skies for Easter.

Wallace is focusing on aiport codes for his ditty ("My friend once flew to CLA / He came back tanned and A-OK"). Speaking in The Guardian, Wallace said the project "sounded like a lovely thing to be a part of" and the amount of travel he had done with his family inspired his creative rhymes. "There’s so much to work with at an airport. A million stories in and out every day,” he said. “But I decided to focus on one of the things that makes being there exciting – those thousands of possibilities all tied together by a few letters.”

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu was talking to the The Telegraph in India this week about her new novel You've Got The Wrong Girl, describing her book as lad lit and flying the flag for the genre. She said: "We need more of it (lad lit) because in literature today, which books celebrate men? We hear so many feminist voices and kudos to them, because we need the feminist voice to be kept alive. But we need the male voice to be represented as well."

Quick Bits
  • In his column in GQ this month, Tony Parsons addresses the mindless atrocities carried out by radical Islamic terrorists and urges the West to unite on home soil.
  • I posted my review of Adrian Simon's Milk-Blood today. I gave the memoir "Growing up the son of a convicted drug trafficker" a five-star rating - check out it here.
Tweet of the Week

Irvine Welsh pulls no political punches with this assessment of Iain Duncan Smith's resignation from the Conservative Party.

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