This week I went along to the London Review Bookshop to hear American academic James Shapiro answering questions on his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

I was hoping for a bit of argy-bargy, an audience packed with Shakespeare doubters, maybe a bit of refined academic heckling, but Shapiro seemed to be pretty much preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, it was an interesting hour. For the last hundred and fifty years, an ever-growing list of people, invariably royal, noble, distinguished or exciting in some way, have been put forward as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.

It all started when an 18^th Century scholar local to Stratford-upon-Avon went searching for books or papers belonging to Shakespeare and drew a blank. The conclusion he leapt to was that this absence of the trappings of a learned man must mean that Shakespeare was not a learned man, and that as only  a learned man could possibly have written the plays, ergo, Shakespeare, son of a mere glove-maker, was an imposter.

It took a hundred years or so for this theory to catch on, but by the 19^th Century the idea that Shakespeare was an uneducated fraud who couldn’t spell his own name, let alone write the masterpieces of the English language, was rife. Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Wells and Sir Derek Jacobi are among the notable names who’ve signed up to this anti-Stratford camp.

Rather than looking in detail at the contenders for the real Shakespeare, Contested Will instead examines why the question exists at all. It’s a weird one – why is the belief that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare so prevalent, and why does it attract such ardent disciples? Is it down to sheer snobbery –the conviction that such brilliant writing must be the product of an educated, upper-class mind? Is it a modern love for conspiracy and esoteric secrets? Or is it because we have so few details about the life of the best-known English writer that we feel compelled to fill in the gaps using the only material available to us – the plays?

The argument seems to come down to the devil in the detail of the plays. How much of what Shakespeare wrote could he have made up, or got from books, and how much would have to come from experience? Could a man who’d never travelled to Italy have written the plays set there? Or, as another case in point, proponents of the Earl of Oxford as the real Shakespeare use the fact that the earl had three daughters and was once captured by pirates as an indication that he’s a more likely author of King Lear and Hamlet than the man from Stratford.

But Shapiro makes the case for the power of the imagination as the truth behind the mystery of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s a reassuring conclusion for anyone who’s ever hoped to write convincingly about stuff that hasn’t actually happened to them, whether it’s setting a story in a country they’ve never visited, writing from the point of view of a murderer, flying to other planets or turning into a werewolf.

The compulsion to read an author’s life into their work seems a basic one, as rife among modern authors as Elizabethan ones. Shapiro quotes T.S. Eliot, who commented that he was used “…to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books, or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience.”

And Lorrie Moore, quoted in this weekend’s Guardian Weekend talking to the Guardian Book Club, wondered whether there was a current trend for writers, especially women writers, to be routinely suspected of autobiography, with readers “determined to think of fiction as a mere route to memoir.” Moore’s stories, which often deal with marital breakdown and terminal illness, are frequently scanned for evidence of trauma in her own life, a process Moore tries to steer clear of.

It’s as if we’re getting fiction muddled up with the real-life memoir section at Waterstones, searching it for truth in the sense of what a writer has experienced on a literal level, rather than a deeper and more widely applicable truth that can come out of stories a writer dreamed up.

Personally, I come down on the side of those like Shapiro who maintain that you don’t need to have three daughters yourself to write convincingly about sibling rivalry, or have been kidnapped by pirates to imagine such an event taking place. It’s a case all writers who believe in the capacity of made-up stuff to contain truth should get behind.

Emily

The Hugo Awards have been running for over fifty years, and remain the best known literary award for science fiction writing. The nominees for this year were announced recently, so this week I’ve been reading the entries for the Best Short Story category.

The awards are named after Hugo Gernsback, founding editor of the cult sci fi magazine Amazing Stories, which was pivotal in popularising the genre in the mid 20th Century. (Gernsback has also had a crater on the moon named after him – I mean, an awards ceremony honouring your memory is cool and all, but I think I’d go for the moon crater if I had to choose.)

Over that time many of the big names in sci fi have been recognised, and the list of past nominees makes a To Read list stretching back over most of the history of the genre: Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, Anne MacCaffrey, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Ursula Le Guin, Phillip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Brian Aldiss, Kurt Vonnegut, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville and J.K Rowling have all been nominated, to name a few. You can look up past winners on the Hugo Awards website.

You can judge the nominations in the Best Short Story category for yourself – I had no problem tracking down all the stories online for free  (legally, of course). This is a great thing – I doubt it would be so easy to track down other short story prize shortlists. Perhaps it’s something about the science fiction genre which tends to attract writers who are also au fait with websites, blogs, online magazines and e-books and who understand the advantages of making your work available to readers. It meant I read work by writers I’ve not heard of, and probably wouldn’t otherwise have encountered.

It seems a shame though that the five nominees are from only three different sci fi magazines – surely there must be a wider pool of online and print publications to choose from? I can think of several that print great stories – Interzone and Murky Depths, for example.

The entries vary quite widely in quality. The Bride of Frankenstein by Mike Resnick is a mildly diverting but ultimately corny take on an old story, which manages to reheat some of the old clichés enough to give them a vague semblance of life, but not much more than a twitch.

The Moment by Lawrence M. Shoen is more interesting, because it contains a genuinely sci-fi “what if” idea about the relationship between tiny moments and huge stretches of time. But it verges on a Douglas Adams imitation tour of a universe populated by crazy beings and made-up alien-sounding words, which teeters close to losing the reader’s interest at some points.

Bridesicle by Will McIntosh deals with the idea of a future technology that can bring the dead back to life, and what that might mean for the speed dating scene. It’s funny and moving in places, and delivers a nice sense of the claustrophobia of being a brain in a dead body desperate to be reborn.

Non-Zero Probabilities by N. K. Jemisin is a well written story, sci fi set in a colourful present day New York where the laws of probability and chance have gone dangerously wrong.

But Spar by Kij Johnson is by far the most imaginative and intriguing piece, a story that grips you right from the start, partly because it’s so starkly horrible, taking a possible interaction between an alien life form and a human to intimately physical and nasty extremes. But it’s also a meditation on what the differences between two life forms might actually encompass, and what an ability or inability to communicate might mean. It’s also got a great ending, which the other entries rather lack. I think it’s Spar that will stick with me as a story, and I hope it wins.

Emily

In the first of a series of plugs for my favourite short stories, this week I’m enthusing about Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Axe. Managing to be funny and genuinely creepy all at once, it’s a story where the mundane minutiae of office politics grumble steadily towards a lip-lickingly satisfying and nasty dénouement.

Fitzgerald entered The Axe into a ghost story competition run by The Times newspaper in 1974. It didn’t win first prize (although it’s much better than the story that did) but it was selected with twelve others to be published in the Times Anthology of Ghost Stories the next year. Fitzgerald was unknown as a writer at the time – she published her first book, a biography of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, in 1975 at the age of 59, and her first novel two years later. I love it when an author I admire turns out to have made it big a bit later on in life. It’s much more inspiring (and reassuring) than tales of twenty-somethings striking three-book deals.

The Times anthology is an interesting collection in itself, containing a first publication for another now well-known writer, Julian Barnes. But it’s Fitzgerald’s story that stands out. Sebastian Faulks wrote that reading Penelope Fitzgerald “is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window”, and The Axe is a good example of that ability to completely disquiet the reader.

The first great thing about it is the structure. It’s a letter that starts abruptly, mid-sentence; a meandering, confusing sentence at that, full of business jargon that loses its meaning in a jumble of commas, hyphens and sub-clauses. The intended recipient seems to be the board of an unnamed company; the writer a middle-manager who has been asked to make redundancies. Specifically, he has been told to put his assistant, W.S. Singlebury, out of a job.

That name, with its precise and insistent initials, encapsulates the character of the man who becomes the initially pathetic but quickly menacing heart of the story.

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he wore a blue suit and a green knitted garment with a front zip. On Tuesdays and Thursdays be wore a pair of grey trousers of man-made material which he called ‘my flannels’, and a fawn cardigan. The cardigan was omitted in summer.”

The socially awkward situation that develops, in which the narrator alternates between sympathy for Singlebury and embarrassment at the man’s abject failure to deal with the loss of his job, crawls towards a grisly conclusion.

Less adventurous writers of ghost stories might let their plots cower unadventurously in run-of-the-mill cobwebby castles or creaky manor houses, but a modern setting can make a good ghost genuinely unsettling, as the unfamiliar becomes the uncanny. (The Freudian concept of the uncanny, das unheimliche, is that of the familiar turned strange.)

The Axe is great – track it down and devour it. The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories, 1975, is pretty easy to get hold of secondhand, or the story can be found in Penelope Fitzgerald’s collection The Means of Escape, which is still in print.

Hello, and welcome to my new blog for Litro.  I’ll be posting here every Friday, so check back then for all the latest.

I’ll begin by introducing myself and talking about what sort of things you can expect to find here in the coming weeks.  I’m the author of The Girl with Glass Feet, which you can check out at my website here.  I keep a blog there too, which is proving to be a ramshackle affair covering whatever I’m currently finding interesting, magical or moving.  I want to keep the two blogs distinct, so here I’ll mostly stick to what Litro’s all about: writing.  I’m going to talk about the world of books and the worlds in books, and the strange goings on therein. 

When it comes to reading, I’m a real magpie.  I like short stories, novels, poetry, comic books, dusty old second hand books about weird subjects that I have no knowledge of, children’s books, the lot.  I know a little about a lot of things and am left an expert in nothing.  I’m bad at keeping just one book on the go at once, and I am prone to the sin, in many people’s eyes, of giving up on books I don’t enjoy.  Life’s too unbearably short, and there is a lot out there to read.

At the moment I’m obsessed with fairy stories and folklore.  I’m sure I’ll end up talking more about that further down the line.  And having said I’m going to keep this about books, I’m really intrigued by the way stories spread across culture, so if it’s relevant I might find ways to shoehorn comments about records, stop-motion films, countryside museums and so on into this blog.

I hope it’ll make for an interesting read…

Ali