Literature

Jonathan Franzen: the path to Freedom. John Steinbeck's bitter fruit. I read The Grapes of Wrath in that fierce span of adolescence when reading was a frenzy. I was all but drowned in the pity and anger John Steinbeck evoked for these people, fleeing Oklahoma to seek work but finding nothing save cruelty, violence, the enmity of immoral banks and businesses, and the neglect by the state of its own people in the Land of the Free. The novel was published in 1939 and delivered a shock to the English reading world. But for years I did not read him. Earlier this year, when asked to make a film about Steinbeck for the BBC, I went back with apprehension. The peaks of one's adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. Life moves on; not all books do. But 50 years later, The Grapes of Wrath seems as savage as ever, and richer for my greater awareness of what Steinbeck did with the Oklahoma dialect and with his characters. We started filming with a small crew in Oklahoma, near the spot where the novel begins.

Undercover on the bread line. Mark and Delia Owens, poachers, Zambia shooting. In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark and Delia Owens, two graduate students in biology at the University of Georgia, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. They organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way air tickets to Johannesburg. When they arrived, in January, 1974, Delia, the daughter of a Georgia trucking executive, was twenty-four years old. Mark, who grew up on a farm west of Toledo, Ohio, was twenty-nine, the divorced father of a four-year-old boy named Christopher.

Mark and Delia had scoured the map of Africa, searching for a site so isolated that its wildlife would have no knowledge, and no fear, of humans. They eventually found their way to a place called Deception Valley, in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. It was a perfect spot for the Owenses to make camp. But eventually the complexities of the human world would intrude.

Top 50 Literary Magazines. Find a complete listing of literary magazines here. Our criteria for this list has changed and we feel the literary magazines on this list are much better ranked than our previous list. It's always hard to build this list, but we looked about close to 20 data points in coming up with this list. The most important criteria we used this time was date of founding, number of national anthologies publications (and we looked at a lot of them), and the quality of work of and names of passed greats published in the magazines. The purpose of this list is to help writers find a place to publish their writing that will get them some recognition. We feel when a magazine is published over a long period of time and is recognized nationally we feel it gives the authors more opportunity for exposure. Also these magazines tend to have a very good name in literary circles.

This list also includes BOLD type where literary magazines take online submissions. Top 50 Literary Magazine New Yorker Ploughshares Agni. Björk: 'Manchester is the prototype' Originally formulated by scientist Edward O Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that human beings have an innate affinity with the natural world – plants, animals or even the weather. Yet it's not biophilia but good old-fashioned fandom that has drawn a small band of Björk obsessives to queue outside Manchester's Campfield Market Hall since 10am this morning. Not that there's anything old-fashioned about the woman they are here to see. Biophilia is the Icelandic singer's new project – the word means "love of living things" – and promises to push the envelope so far you'll need the Hubble telescope to see it. A collection of journalists have already had a preview at a press conference in the Museum of Science and Industry over the road.

It's a journey in the opposite direction from the one most music fans make, and one which speaks volumes about the complexity of Björk's work. At the museum, Snibbe is demonstrating the apps. Ghosts of Gone Birds: exhibition enlists artists to save endangered species | Environment. They are all, alas, bleeding demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, bereft of life and resting in peace. Like Monty Python's dead parrot, the great auk that author Margaret Atwood is knitting probably shuffled off his mortal coil, ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible 150 years ago. But the loss of species also including the Hawaiian crow and Jamaican red macaw may yet help currently endangered birds, hope the organisers of an ambitious multimedia art project.

The project is called Ghosts of Gone Birds and is the brainchild of film-maker Ceri Levy and creative consultant Chris Aldhous. If all goes to plan, they will have persuaded more than 80 artists to submit work based on extinct birds for an exhibition to be held in November. Levy, best known for his film Bananaz about the pop group Gorillaz, said he got into birds quite recently following a holiday on the Isles of Scilly with his wife. Top writers tackle climate change in short stories. Novelists from Margaret Atwood to David Mitchell are hoping to bring the dangers posed by climate change to life, through a new collection of short stories tackling the climate crisis.

I'm With the Bears, taking its title from environmentalist John Muir's comment that "when it comes to a war between the races, I'm with the bears", will also feature stories by TC Boyle, Helen Simpson, Toby Litt, Paolo Bacigalupi and Kim Stanley Robinson. Out this October from radical press Verso, it is a response, said the publisher, to the absence of creative fiction dealing with climate change, an issue raised by Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year. Mitchell, twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, has imagined a near future in which oil sells for $800 a barrel in his story The Siphoners.

Acclaimed short story writer Boyle has written an account of early eco-activists in The Siskiyou, July 1989, while Nathaniel Rich's Hermie is a comic fantasy about a marine biologist haunted by his youth. Why don't we love our intellectuals? | Books | The Observer. One of the distinctive aspects of British culture is that the word "intellectual" seems to be regarded as a term of abuse. WH Auden summed it up neatly when he wrote: "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/ A man who's untrue to his wife. " Auden wasn't alone in thinking that intellectuals suffer from ethical deficiencies. The journalist and historian Paul Johnson once devoted an entire book, Intellectuals: from Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (2000), to proving that some of the 20th century's most prominent thinkers were moral cretins.

And in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber, 1992) the literary critic John Carey argued that most of our culture's esteemed thinkers over several centuries despised the masses and devoted much of their efforts to excluding the hoi-polloi from cultural life. Both Johnson and Carey were pushing at an open door. But at least Posner did his own research. Carol Ann Duffy: 'Poems are a form of texting' Hardly a week goes by without a warning about how educationally detrimental it is for children to spend hours of every day screen-gazing and message-sending.

But now there's a note of dissent – from the poet laureate, no less, who says she believes texting is an ideal springboard to good poetry-writing. "The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. "It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them.

Duffy, who became Britain's first female poet laureate in 2009, is passionate about the teaching of poetry in school. So, if texting is preparing children for a lifetime of poetry, are today's youngsters better at poetry than children in the past? Duffy says when she realised how much she loved poetry, she started to keep a notebook with her favourite poems in it.