The Penguin Blog

The cinema of the theatre of the absurd

So, after some thought, I have decided to confess something to you good Penguin Blog readers.

I have mentioned my lowbrow tastes before – specifically my love of robots – and more specifically those robots that are in disguise. But I don’t just like populist trash. Recently I read Eugène Ionesco’s plays ‘Rhinoceros’, ‘The Chairs’ and ‘The Lesson’ (not for work, just because I'm, you know, classy). They are funny, startling and probably the best thing I have read all year. ‘The Lesson’ in particular left me stunned and upset and just amazed by how good it was.

But that isn’t the confession. After I had finished them, I was looking on Wikipedia and saw that a film based on ‘Rhinoceros’ came out in America in April. It is called Zombie Strippers! and features porn star Jenna Jameson (which I mention mainly to try and up our Google ranking a few notches) along with Robert Englund (who's most famous as Freddy Krueger).

So I got hold of a copy.

I don’t know what your first reaction is to a film called Zombie Strippers! I imagine it’s probably a bit of an opinion splitter. But I have a lot of time for comedy horror – things like Army of Darkness, Re-animator and From Dusk Till Dawn (which, actually, it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to rename Zombie Strippers!). So I approached it with an open mind.

Boy, it’s not good.

The play is about a French town where people start giving themselves over to a craze of turning into rhinoceroses – great, lumbering, destructive rhinoceroses – to the dismay of Berenger, the central character.

The film is about zombie strippers.

‘Based on’ might be a bit of a stretch.

In fact, the film’s desperate to let you know that it’s not the dumb, silly trash it actually is, and thinks it can prove it has book smarts by calling the town it is set in Sartre, Nebraska and showing Jenna Jameson reading Nietzsche. This is like a proud parent trying to convince you their moron child is a genius by putting him in a paper hat made from a page of Das Kapital. And the claim that it’s ‘based on’ ‘Rhinoceros’ is pretty much just another part of this desperate grab for credibility.

Perhaps the most significant impact ‘Rhinoceros’ has on the film is that Englund’s strip club owner is called Ian Essko. (Ian Essko – Ionesco. Get it? DO YOU GET IT?) And while the play’s a comic satire about fascism, the film fumbles clumsily with some message about the zombies being conformists. And the one hope you’d have for a film called Zombie Strippers! – that it’s surely not going to be horribly pretentious – is ruined.

And while they were worried about looking smart, they didn’t put in any good jokes, so they managed to make a film that’s not funny, smart, scary or sexy.

That’s okay. Watch Army of Darkness instead, read ‘Rhinoceros’.

The problem is that about half way through it I realised that thanks to a TV series called Masters of Horror, it was actually not the first, but the second time I’d seen Robert Englund play the owner of a zombie strip club. Which says something troubling about my viewing habits.

So that’s the confession.

Alan
Copywriter

..............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Two weeks, thirty-six stores and fifty-three elephants

Last year we endured countrywide flooding, cancelled trains and a swan that attacked our car on the banks of Lake Windermere – so it was with some trepidation that I embarked on this year’s tour with Gervase Phinn to promote the publication of the paperback of ‘The Heart of the Dales’.

This year, as well as signing at 36 bookstores, performing at 8 events, we ate rock in Blackpool, saw dozens of plastic sheep in Liverpool, then dozens more plastic elephants in Norwich. We got lost in midnight Leeds (that one way system…), scared away a fox in a Secret Garden at dusk (that tiny brown smudge at the back of the garden is the exiting fox), and had to contend with some fairly adverse weather conditions on the road once again. I even managed to get Gervase into Lancashire, which for a Yorkshireman still smarting about the War of the Roses, was no mean feat. It turns out the best thing to come out of Lancashire ISN’T the road to Yorkshire after all – it’s the extremely lovely booksellers and bookshops there. 

To say that I used Gervase’s time well is an understatement – the two week tour ranged across most of the length and breadth of the country, and Gervase signed at an average of 5 stores a day, followed by an event each evening. When I said goodbye to him yesterday at Exeter Station, I joked that I’d lied to him that this was the last day of the tour, and that in fact we had another 3 days of the tour to go.  It turns out that only one of us should be making the jokes – and he’s the one selling out venues across the country each year, rather than the one holding the lead balloon.

It’s always nerve racking in those 2 minutes before the scheduled signing, approaching the bookstore not really knowing how enthusiastically the bookshop has been promoting the event in advance of the author’s visit.  I won’t post mortem each signing and event – largely the signings were really well attended and really well promoted by the various wonderful booksellers at each store, but there’s always the inexplicable exceptions, where despite the hundreds of leaflets which have been picked up by enthusiastic book buyers, the posters everywhere, and the ads and author interviews going out in the local paper – you’ll get 4 people turning up with a large tumbleweed following along close behind. But these quieter ones were definite exceptions to the more general tour madness, and were in the most part linked to bad weather rather than a lack of enthusiasm by customers and/or booksellers. Sold out events and massive book sales in each evening venue testify to Gervase’s countrywide and long lasting general appeal. 

A further few specific comments about the tour: to the friendly waiter in Pocklington who was sure that he knew me – I’m afraid we lied to you – you don’t know me off Casualty and I have never been swathed from top to toe in bandages on the telly.  To Gervase and Barry – it turns out that Nobby Clark is also an accomplished musician as well as Morris Dancer, bell ringer, pub landlord and all round keen bean - who knew? And to the author sharing the stage with Gervase at one event, having read from his novel for 45 interminable minutes, and asked at 10pm ‘have I got time to read any more?’ – the answer is always going to be a resounding NO! Good lord…

The nice chart position in the top ten of last weekend’s bestseller lists is gratifying, and solidifies the raison d’etre for the 2 weeks away from home, however it’s meeting Gervase’s enthusiastic fans in every town that really makes it all worthwhile. Most people who meet Gervase tend to thank him for cheering them up; from the lady in Christchurch who had a brain haemorrhage last year and was kept going for many long weeks in hospital by listening to all the Dales audio books, to the woman in Derby who was pulled over by the police for suspected driving under the influence, but was in fact listening to Gervase and laughing so hard she was swerving all over the road. The policeman, it turned out, was also a fan, so let her off without charge.

Going on a book signing tour with an author is one of my main reasons for wanting to work in the publicity department of a company like Penguin.  It’s incredibly hard work, but ultimately rewarding and, when you’re on the road with someone like Gervase, full of helpless laughter. Note: Evil Knievel was NOT the guy riding that bike in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’.

Katya Shipster
Press Officer

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

 

Five in Mind part eleven

Distilling a life's worth of reading into a top five is, as the previous posts on the subject have revealed, pretty tricky. So to help with the task I decided to impose some limitations on my choice and pick my favourite five from my favourite genre ... The Great American Novel. So apologies to Rushdie, McEwan, Smith, Coetzee, Borges and co, but here they are ...

First up is Infinite Jest by American brainiac David Foster Wallace. This book is a beast. For a man that needs almost the entirety of a back cover to fit his endorsement for A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, it comes as no surprise that his GAN is 1000+ pages. The book is a hilarious and terrifying indictment of modernity and DFW (he's a man in love with acronyms) explores pretty much everything from obsession and addiction to tennis. Simply put, this is the best thing I've ever read.

Picking just one Don Delillo book from the former adman's oeuvre is hard work. Underworld is a phenomenal achievement, but it's White Noise that is closest to my heart. Jack Gladney is the poster boy for postmodernist malaise as Delillo confronts consumerism, media, violence and death in this three act masterpiece of modern fiction.

I'm going to cheat a little here and go with Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. While technically three books (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities on the Plain - all worthy of GAN status in their own right) The Border Trilogy as a whole gives a subtle, bleak, violent and beautiful look at the disappearing West. The penultimate scene in Cities on the Plain killed me.

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is completely unique. The lonely sadness of the loser son meeting his deadbeat dad for the first time is painstakingly played out in inventive Technicolor. Interested parties should also check out his monumental McSweeney's 13 (the signed cover of which hangs proudly on my wall at home).

And finally, another cheat. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is not technically a novel, but then it is not technically an autobiography either. McSweeney's mastermind and all round good egg Dave Eggers relates his formative years with gusto in a breathtaking reimagining of his parents death and his life thereafter. He is a real hero of mine, and in this book we see an explosion of ideas, narratives, passion and talent grounded in very a real tragedy, that truly justifies that rather extravagant title.

I could go on. It's a shame I didn't get a chance to mention Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon.

Matt Clacher,
Marketing Executive

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Are Penguins Baked Beans?

Imaginatively titled London paper, The London Paper, yesterday ran an article listing 10 types of company deemed to be recession proof (baked beans manufacturers, dating websites…) and the 3 worst hit (estate agents…). Publishers didn’t appear on either, and we’re not about to diversify into baked beans as far as I know. So, with terrifying words such as recession and credit-crunch everywhere, what happens to the UK book industry? And what questions are we asking ourselves?

 

There are two schools of thoughts, easily labeled optimistic and pessimistic. I like the first - most at Penguin Towers would agree - we’re a sunny bunch. Penguin surely ought to be well prepared, we’re certainly well connected – our cousin apparently knows lots about this sort of thing. The optimism comes from the same logic as The London Paper used in arriving at the good news for Messrs Heinz and Branston. Books are broadly speaking cheaper than the alternatives, in this case the wider entertainment industry. Book prices to the consumer are fairly stable over the last few years – any upward inflationary pressure being neutered by the attractive customer offers particularly from supermarkets and online retailers. So we should be fine yes? Our entertainment offer is well priced compared to alternatives, people will go out less – books will keep selling. We should bury our heads in the sand (not a Penguin trait) and carry on.

Certainly this was true last time the UK was in recession, I’m assured by those with more Penguin years in the bag that we came through reasonably unscathed. But is it my imagination or are CD prices falling, cinema tickets getting cheaper if you have the right mobile phone and DVDs going from £20 to £5 within weeks of release into stores? Add to that the fact that many people have about 800 more TV channels to choose from than they did during the last recession and we might start worrying.

And we are. Books are getting more expensive to manufacture. The best way to bring down the cost of an individual book is to print a higher quantity, spreading set-up costs over a larger volume. But if people do actually buy less this will lead to a warehouse full of unsold books, never a good thing. We have a product which is heavy in bulk and - with rising oil prices - our transport and distribution costs are going to rise rapidly. Very generally speaking, we can print more cheaply in Asia than closer to home, especially when colour is involved, but the rising cost of bringing them all back here is reversing this. Our wonderful Penguin production team have gone a little pale but they keep coming up with brilliant ideas around paper and format – the more we stick to a few standard formats the better price we can obtain. There’s a new kind of creativity emerging – finding a way to keep our books looking and feeling as good as ever, but within a few new economic constraints

If we can’t keep our costs stable then we start thinking about other levers. And the biggest one is the cover price of the book, we certainly wouldn’t be the first or only industry to be putting prices up right now. Publishers everywhere must be feeling the same. We want our books everywhere, we want them to reach as many people as possible, but we need a profit as well. The trick is to be brave with prices but sensitive to market sectors. It’s easier to be brave when you have a premium product or brand than when you are competing for shelf space in a competitive area like women’s fiction where an extra £1 can mean a bookseller will choose to stock a similar substitute.

So we’re all thinking harder. Our editorial, marketing and design teams are still the creative hub. But there’s new creativity springing up all over the place in response to the challenge. Production have their thinking caps firmly on, the sales team are finding new ways to differentiate our offer and yes, even my colleagues and I in finance are bracing ourselves to plot a course for this old bird to get through any storm.

Mark the Bean Counter

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Why we buy

There have been some interesting discussions at Penguin Towers about consumers' decision-making processes.

The fiction manager at Waterstones asked me a deceptively simple question: "Why do people buy more Penguin Classics than other publishers'? What is the customer decision-making tree?" I could talk about the qualities of the brand until I'm blue in the face, but what do people actually do in the shop? How do they decide that out of the 8 (count them!) editions of Pride and Prejudice on the shelf, that they are going to buy the black Penguin edition?

More generally, questions about why we make the decisions we do have been the subject of several key books including Paco Underhill's seminal Why We Buy -- based on research watching what people actually did in store, rather than what they said they did (these are not the same thing, so caveat marketeer). More recently, books on behavioural economics such as Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely offer plenty of food for thought for publishers and retailers.

Two of his arguments seem particularly relevant to me as I think about selling Classics:

1. Context is key.
(a) Give people too much choice and conversion from browsing to buying reduces (how many editions of P&P do we need on the shelves?).
(b) People find it difficult to judge the value of something in isolation. He tells the story of the first bread-maker on the market. It didn't sell until they introduced a second, bigger and more expensive model and positioned it in store next to it -- then the cheaper model flew off the shelves as customers had a context and could put a value to that product.

2. Imprinting habits. Once we start to buy something (say, coffee from Starbucks, or Classics by Penguin), it becomes much easier to do it again and again. It becomes a habit.

(Read more here.)

The implications for me include how to bring new readers to the Classics as well as reminding people of how much pleasure they have had from reading them and reminding them that more people buy/read Penguin Classics than any other brand, therefore appealing to what psychologists call the herding (hate that word) mentality. And here's the confessional part -- I love selling Classics, because I love Classics. I have never had a poor experience from choosing to read a Classic (wish I could say the same of every book I pick up). If I were selling cigarettes, or weapons, or Celine Dion CDs, I might feel more morally conflicted.

We've just bought the paperback rights to Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge which explores "choice architecture" and how to improve your decision-making and we'll publish in January (check out their blog). I'm quite seized by this as you can tell. I warn you, this won't be the last time you hear about this.

Fiona Buckland
Sales Manager

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

London goes Luxe

If you were wandering through the West End yesterday, you may have been lucky enough to spot (or even snap) a beautiful girl wearing the most INCREDIBLE Victorian-style pink dress. A dress that made you gasp with awe, a dress that made you turn a very slight shade of envious green as you pondered whether, maybe if you went on the Atkins, you might one day be able to fit into it (I tried - it’s impossible), a dress that made you stop every single ever-so-important thing you were doing to stop dead in the middle of the street and just go ‘Wow’.

A dress that actually looked very much like this:

Yes, yesterday was the day that London went Luxe to celebrate the launch of the most fabulous, glamorous and utterly irresistible read this summer, The Luxe by Anna Godbersen. Crowds of Londoners gathered outside Selfridges to see a replica of the incredible pink dress which features on the book’s cover, modelled by our ultra-Luxe competition winner, 17-year old Faye Edwards.

Faye then paraded the dress around the city and was snapped by swarms of Londoners across the West End, including on Waterloo Bridge, on the Strand and in Trafalgar Square, evoking much jealously (and that was just from me!) everywhere she went.

If you live in London and weren’t lucky enough to snap the incredible Luxe dress yesterday, then it will be on exhibition in the Foyles department of Selfridges from 14th-27th July, so catch it while you can!

Glittering with jewels, brimming with secrets and loaded with eligible young men, The Luxe is the most delicious, tantalising and completely addictive summer read. Think The O.C. meets 19th century New York. High society, beautiful debutantes, buckets of scandal – in short, it’s just completely irresistible! So if you’re looking for an addictive and delicious beach read this summer, why not step into The Luxe? But don’t expect to put it down.

Sophie Stott
Penguin Publicity

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

............................................................................

Lose yourself in the Great British countryside

 

Today we publish a beautiful new book, Britain and Ireland’s Best Wild Places by Christopher Somerville, and we do so with a wry smile. Full of maps, photographs and directions, and spanning the full length of the British Isles, this book is the ultimate companion to discovering the secrets, wildlife and history of the countryside. It also brings a whole new meaning to the notion of losing yourself in the great outdoors, not least because one of the wild places in question doesn’t actually exist. And we hereby challenge you to find it.

 

Christopher Somerville claims that he has learnt the importance of most things whilst out walking, and a sense of humour is amongst them. Because somewhere in between the rare and gorgeous places of The West Country and East Anglia, The South Midlands and Central Scotland, lies a place that sounds unbelievable for a very good reason. Not unbelievable enough, however, to prevent the book from having been edited and published without anyone at Penguin actually picking up on the practical joke. Which might explain why several members of the Penguin Press department haven’t been seen around much lately.

So you’ll need to read quite closely and carefully in order to find the wild place in question. Then, once you've found it, go to www.penguin.co.uk/callofthewild to find out how to enter the competition, as there are prizes to be won: for the winner, a luxury picnic hamper - and for the loser, a weekend away they won’t forget in a hurry.

Natalie Ramm
Marketing Manager

.............................................................................

 

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

It's the way he tells it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘I’m a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I’m a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I’ve been in jail more than once and I don’t do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don’t like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I’m a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.’*

This is Philip Marlowe in the raw, stripped of his wisecracks and telling it like it is. Bleak, sharp and cynical, it tells you almost everything you need to know about the private detective and his world.

Raymond Chandler is one of the great stylists. As good as, if not better than, PG Wodehouse, who also created an equally extraordinary world or way of viewing the world in Bertie Wooster (and who shared with Chandler the Alma Mater of Dulwich College).

You don't read Chandler or Wodehouse for the stories. What happens, and to who, is not why we're reading. The plot is not really the point, whether it might be good, bad or indifferent. Like Shakespeare the plot might be borrowed or secondhand or become secondary to the author's real concern (or, in Chandler's case, made up as he went along). What matters to these writers is the telling of the story.

This is what separates the truly great writers from the mere scribblers.

A few months ago I had a brief discussion with a science-fiction editor-cum-writer over at his blog. He was saying that he'd been told by his agent to alter the style of the story he was working on as big publishers weren't buying that kind of thing: it simply wouldn't sell. He did as his agent advised and they made the sale to one of the majors. I wanted to know what he'd been told to change, which he found difficult to answer, but this led to a discussion of whether readability or a good story was at the heart of these things. He concluded by saying that telling a good story was ultimately what mattered in getting published.

Perhaps this is the case with genre publishing. If so, then it's a shame. Because that suggests the telling of the story - the author's voice - has become a secondary concern. It's the voice that transports us into the author's world, not the story - which is what happens (or 'a narrative of incidents' according to my Chambers). Chandler made his novels up as he went along, famously claiming that when he didn't know what to write next, he'd have someone walk in holding a gun. (Which perhaps explains why there is a murder that goes unaccounted for in The Big Sleep.) The effort went into the words, into bringing Marlowe and his Hollywood neighbourhood alive. This might explain why Marlowe is a more human character than, say, James Bond (who Fleming once described as a blunt instrument) and Sherlock Holmes, who looks at humanity like a scientist might a freakish bug in a petri dish. Marlowe is a man, he has failings. But those failings come out of his strengths: his wits and his morals.

Trouble Is My Business is released on July 31st. This, at last, completes Penguin's reissue of the Philip Marlowe stories (excluding the tantalizingly titled 'Philip Marlowe's Last Case', which I've never read). Eight books to match the eight books featuring the other greatest private detective in the world recently released by Penguin.

If you like crime fiction you should read Chandler. If you like fine writing and sneer at genre fiction then read him and learn to revise your opinion.

And if you still think the story is more important than how it is told, then this might just be the book for you.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

* I can't for the life of me remember which title this comes from since I scribbled this piece down to go on the page one of these eight editions (great Saul Bass-influenced covers by former Penguin designer Steve Marking) about three years ago.

..........................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

...........................................................................

Five in Mind part ten

What is your favourite book? Perhaps weirdly and worryingly – considering I work at Penguin – that question fills me with dread. Not because I can’t think of books that I like, but because the query always seems so loaded – as if my answer will somehow forever define or mark me as a certain type of person. That is probably why I often blank out on recent loves and fall back on childhood favourites, which, incidentally, are the only books I have ever really re-read numerous times. For the purposes of this blog, however, I’ll limit myself to one children’s book and attempt to carefully and honestly select four other ‘faves’. My criteria when judging a stand-out book is simple: it must be ‘transcendent’ and I must want to read another by the author.

1. THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE/ C. S. Lewis
I can’t count how many times I read this book as a child – on each occasion it completely captivated and drew me into its fairy-tale world. Secretly I would shut my eyes and walk slowly into my cupboard, pushing through layers of clothes, desperately praying that I would somehow find my way into Narnia. When I hit the back wall, I was genuinely disappointed. On a recent re-read, I raced through it in a couple of hours, happily reacquainting myself with Mr & Mrs Beaver, Tumnus, Lucy, Susan, Edward and Peter, but the story seemed much shorter than I remembered, and Narnia a bit further away. Still, it remains my no. 1.

2. MRS. DALLOWAY/ Virginia Woolf
I slightly loathe choosing this, it seems such a cliché, but in my first few years post-university, it struck a chord – in fact, more than that – it changed me, developed my perspective on life. Throughout school and university Woolf was merely a name; I only came to her through David Hare’s THE HOURS, then Michael Cunningham’s novel and finally, to the source – MRS DALLOWAY. It wasn’t until the third reading (admittedly, I struggled to cut through Woolf’s often convoluted prose), when I considered the book for an MA essay, that Clarissa Dalloway’s inner life made perfect sense.

3. THE NEW YORK TRILOGY/ Paul Auster
My flatmate calls Auster a pretentious, self-absorbed git, but I enjoyed his searing, dark take on the human condition and its weaknesses. The three stories in this novel could seem pointless and the lack of definitive or satisfactory conclusion frustrating; however, I found the characters’ struggle with self and the meaning of life profoundly moving. Auster describes so well the bottomless pit that many people find themselves in at some point in their lives and, happily, he doesn’t attempt to sugar-coat it.

4. THE HEART OF DARKNESS/ Joseph Conrad
A journey into the mind, into one’s self, into the deepest dark depths of the soul. Marlow’s journey towards a forbidding end captivated and terrified me in equal measure. But ultimately, my heart is privy to truth, and this novel does not shy away from the darkness inherent in the world nor in human nature. As a novel of the mind – it takes the gold.

5. VILE BODIES/ Evelyn Waugh
Rarely do I get so stuck on an author that I want to read every one of their books, yet Waugh is one whose list I am steadily working my way through. I frequently laugh out loud at his biting wit and am always left cheered. VILE BODIES stands out in that it trumpets a world that although ridiculous, makes one want to go out, buy a fancy frock, crack open a bottle of cava and party to sunrise. And for me, that is more than enough reasons to read it.

Emily Hill
Publishing Coordinator
Penguin Press

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

'It's the call of the wild.'

By the end of this year over half the world's population* will be, for the first time, living in towns and cities.

For most of us in the West we have long accustomed ourselves to the idea that splitting with the rural in favour of an affair with the urban makes for a more exciting life. Like crazed moths we are drawn towards the hot, flashing lights. Merrily, we continue to cover the earth in blankets of houses connected by knots and loops of asphalt ribbon, put up tower blocks to hide the hills, plug up rivers with slabs of concrete, and generally behave as if nature was a bloody inconvenience.

Aren't we silly?

I'd like to say that we're beginning to see the error of our ways. But even now that green is the new black - I mean even the Tories have replaced their burning torch symbol with a scribble of a tree - we prove reluctant to get in touch with nature. This isn't just a shame but looks rather short-sighted since the best way to understand what effects our activities are having on the world is to get out there and take a good look.

What's that I hear? No, listen carefully. I do believe someone or something is calling us . . .

Perhaps there is something in the air, but here at Penguin we suddenly find ourselves publishing, over the next seven months, eight books on the subject of the wild world. From May (yes, yes, I should have posted this last month, I'm running late, sorry and all that) through to November we have a book a month - two in October - which delves into a particular aspect of the wonderfully various lives of nature. These are books that not only tell us but show what we're missing.

We got quite excited about this. In particular Rosie did and came up with the idea of Call of the Wild. This is a web page on penguin.co.uk where each month you can read an extract from the featured book and also discover some exclusive material on the author or the book itself. It might be a podcast, a Q&A, a new piece of writing. You'll just have to check back regularly and find out.

So what are the eight titles?

May is Wild by Jay Griffiths; June is Wildwood by the late Roger Deakin; July is Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places by Christopher Somerville; August is Wild Trees by Richard Preston; September is Out of the Blue by Chris Yates; October's are Hugh's Hedgehog by Hugh Warwick and Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin; and in November we'll have Consider the Birds by Colin Tudge.

I've never forgotten Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon where a moose wearing curlers is handing a telephone to another moose – her partner/husband? – who is sitting in an armchair looking surprised. She is saying to him: 'It's the call of the wild.' Still makes me chuckle. No doubt it loses something in my translation of Larson's picture into words.

There are no such shortcomings with these authors. They write and you are transported, finding yourself deep in the wild places of the world. It's the next best thing to being there, which, unfortunately, is the closest most of us will get.

Check out Call of the Wild now.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

* I mean, of course, the human population.

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................