Sometimes flexibility is the key to success: to stop struggling and work with the resistance you are encountering…thus it is with some Salons when there is a lot of interest but a difficulty in aligning schedules. I know how rich this study can be: I know that Faulkner’s language struggles to communicate all that is agonising and destabilising in human relationships: his particular focus in The Sound and The Fury is how family and cultural context combine to constrain the development of boys into men–and how the lost daughter becomes the image of all that is gorgeous and ruined in a crumbling world.
We start meeting next Tuesday October 1st; if you have ever been interested to understand the gothic world that Faulkner paints, this is a great work to explore.
Please visit the event page to register; upon receipt of your registration confirmation, we will send you the opening notes and meeting details….
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
Contemporary painters revel in the world of James Joyce
At The Francis Kyle Gallery until September 25th…don’t miss it.
I am always a bit hesitant about attempts to translate one art form into another: although there have been a few successful films based on great works of literature, the bulk of these collapse the narrative richness into a thin and emotionally manipulative vision of shining moments. The more entwined and complex the writing, the greater the challenge to capture this energy in another medium.
Yet, if you are playful…if you allow the words and images and voice of the writing to dance together with the idiosyncrasies of the writer—and if you choose a writer as wide and deep as Joyce—well, then there are possibilities. Since so much of Joyce’s work was autobiographical and located in specific places as seen from the obsessive perspective of an exile, there is much to work with when trying to visually present Joyce’s vision as wrapped around his words.
Francis Kyle challenged some of the best-known contemporary painters to respond to Joyce’s work and vision in their art. The result is exhibited in his gallery—it is bountiful and diverse and charged with large beauty of Joyce’s vision in exuberant and myriad ways. But look, here I am trying to put words to the saturation of images I experienced last Friday when I toured the exhibit—so much better to experience it for yourself! Even if you have not spent time in Joyce’s universe (gritty, sexy, musical, urban, mythic…), I think you will come away from the works with your brain humming. The 2013 Ulysses study celebrated the vitality and beauty of Joyce’s art in our discussion. One of the participants happens to be an exhibitor; Psiche Hughes’ crafted Leopold Bloom’s cat: a sculpture that reflects the way humans slide into their pets—and the pets reflect back their humanity. We are all overlapping into each other: Joyce’s work shows this in both his characters and our response to them.
IN describing the project he offered to the artists, Kyle focuses on Joyce’s lightness in contrast to the ‘apocalyptic cast’ of many of the modernists:
Not so James Joyce, whose experiments in ‘modernism’, pursued on a solitary basis rather than part of a group effort, have a far more positive character. It is this joyful side to Joyce’s creativity, the ambition to chronicle comprehensively but sympathetically nothing less than the human condition, which has appealed to the twenty contemporary painters…
See website for opening times and information…and you might even get a libation –Joyce’s preferred—if you get there at the right moment. http://www.franciskylegallery.com
“After doing my first Salon, I will never read the same way again: this study has made reading an active and inspiring experience for me…”
After several months away, the Salon is swinging back with wonderful previous studies and new works. For the moment, please email the Salon Director at litsalon@gmail.com with any questions or queries. The studies below are designed to support both readers who desire a shorter commitment and those who are looking for an extended immersion. The Salon welcomes requests– if there is a great work you would like to study in depth with a gathering of other perspectives, let us know! If you know of another hungry mind looking to join a lively community of readers, please pass along their email so they can be included in the newsletters.
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (trans. J. Woods) 14 week study starting November
Ulysses 2014– starts in January…
Moby Dick February 2014
Summer Reads
It was a tough summer– I was pulled out of my life in London in the beginning of June to spend the last days with my mother …what followed was a few months of total immersion in the twilight world of death and dementia. These epic moments blast high beams back onto life as one lives it–suddenly revealing the gaps and jagged edges. I come back to the Salons and London with a deeper knowledge of the realm of shadows and great appreciation for the communities that coalesce around a family in need. I did find time to run some Salons in the Adirondacks where I spent the summer; from those and the final spurts of energy given from the gorgeous Ulysses 2013 Salon, we roll forward into a new season of great words and vital connections.
One of my buoys this summer were some beautiful books– Mark Doty’s Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and Rebecca Solnit’s The Far Away Nearby.
Listen:
An emergency is an accelerated phase of life, a point at which change is begotten, a little like a crisis. Quite a lot of suffering often comes along with it, of mourning for what will be left behind–an old self, an old love, an old order–and of fear for what is to come, of the wrenching difficulty of change itself. The poet Jon Keats once referred to earth as “this vale of soul-making,” and its in emergencies and difficulties that souls are made. If an emergency is an accelerated emergence, merge is the opposite condition, “to immerse or plunge (a person, esp. oneself) in a specified activity, way of life, environment, etc.” or “to immerse or plunge into liquid” or ” to cause to be incorporated, absorbed, or amalgamated.”
–Rebecca Solnit, The Far Away Nearby p. 250
I hope the summer days have left you merged and emerging. See you in the pages…
There has been a dearth of literary offerings and Salon happenings in London and Paris the past two months– life interrupted and I had to leave London for an extended time with my family of origin–but if you are going to have to return to an old life and support your mother as she dies, well, this is lovely and heartbreaking place to do that.
The motion of living cuts through the grieving but I carry forward some hard-earned clarity as I look towards the autumn. There will be new Salon studies and some previous offerings given new breath…and there is a Ulysses study that has not heard the final– and terribly important–voice sing her song.
Please contact me or email toby@litsalon.co.uk to put in your requests starting in September…Faulkner? Woolf? Rushdie? Ralph Ellison? Moby Dick? What would you like to read with an energized group in a dynamic study?
Meanwhile…there are Salons happening by the lake in southern and northern Lake George–minds opening, fluid thoughts emerging.
Read deeply- be well- see you in the pages…
We are in the throes of Ulysses and the end of our study, sadly, is in sight – and what a journey we have had!
I am joining a group of the Ulysses Salon members in a trip to Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday on June 16th. After that, the Salon schedule is open with Salon studies finishing for the summer on July 1st– so WHAT would you like to read? And what schedule appeals? Available times for any of the studies listed below include Tuesday and Thursdays day time (1-3 PM) & evenings (8-10 PM).
Please email your preference by email either in reply to the newsletter or using the contact me page.
Next weekend (Sunday 18th of May), I will announce a schedule based on reader preferences. Set yourself off into the more reflective rhythms of summer with some time for the mind…
In other news: the Salon website is in the process of being re-built (with thanks to LJ Filotrani of Muswell Hill Media) so in the coming weeks there will be a new look– we may have pictures again! And dazzling lights! And song! Feedback and suggestions always welcomed…
Possible studies: Brief Poetry
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
As one Salon member offered: ‘I have messed up my life in coffee spoons… do I dare to eat a beach?’ A lively group broke the surface of this poem at The Fields beneath Poetry Salon last month– but there is so much more to say and consider… and we could visit Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in reflection.
Walt Whitman– selections from Song of Myself a vast, galloping and exuberant style infuses Whitman’s work–but there is more than noise here: Whitman’s attempt to embrace human experience in words creates a gorgeous song.
Short Stories
“The Liar” by Tobias Wolf
“A Distant Episode” by Paul Bowles
or…?
Short(er) novels
The Great Gatsby with the Luhrman film just about to crash into the theatres, this may be a good moment to engage in the gorgeous words of this provocative read.
To reserve a seat please email: lucyjpop@gmail.com
Amanda Craig is the author of six novels, Foreign Bodies (1990), A Private Place (1991) A Vicious Circle (1996), In a Dark Wood (2000) and Love In Idleness (2003). Her novels and short stories carry characters on from one book to the next, and her last novel, Hearts and Minds (2009) is a sequel to both A Vicious Circle and Love in Idleness. She lives in London, is a reviewer and broadcaster, and is also the children’s book critic for the Times. She will be reading from her two novels: A Private Place, about school bullying, recently reissued by Abacus, and Hearts and Minds about London’s migrant workers.
Suzi Feay is a critic, writer and broadcaster. She was literary editor of the Independent on Sunday for 11 years and currently lectures in journalism at Brunel. She has judged many literary prizes, including the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the National Poetry competition. She will be reading from The Holy Innocents, a cycle of 12 poems about the life of Gilles de Rais, vastly wealthy marshall of France, companion in arms of Joan of Arc, warrior, devout Catholic, necromancer and serial killer, eventually executed for his crimes in Nantes.
Emran Mian is a civil servant working in the Cabinet Office. He is a frequent contributor to Prospect magazine and the author of an acclaimed non-fiction book about the lives of autistic adults, Send In The Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism. He will be reading from his debut novel, The Banker’s Daughter, a tense thriller, set in Lahore, Beirut and London, that charts the rise and fall of a banker and explores the moral ambiguities of our money-dominated world.
Lloyd Shepherd is a former journalist and digital producer who has worked for the Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC and Yahoo. He will be reading from his first novel, The English Monster, based on the real-life story of the gruesome Ratcliffe Highway murders that takes in piracy, early colonialism and the slave trade, spanning different continents and centuries.
Meike Ziervogel is a writer and publisher living in north London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London in 1986 to study Arabic language and literature. She has worked for Reuters, Agence France Presse, Financial Times and Routledge. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an award-winning independent publishing house. She will be reading from Magda, her debut novel based on the life of Magda Goebbels, published by Salt in March 2013.
Come and meet the authors, hear them read, buy their books
The Salon conversations often feel like effervescent glimmers against the chugging engine of schedules and time. The study of words and ideas plunges through the rigid patterns of work to glimpse the wholeness of what we are, of what we could be…at the same time the conversations are so much a reflection of where the individual participants are at any given moment in their lives, and where they meet the language and each other. This unpredictably feels risky–and potent. My head is still full (and this writing is influenced by) the strong work we did on Woolf’s Between The Acts this past Friday evening. Even at the end of the week, readers can come together and find their own framework reflected and sharpened through the vision of the artist of language.
From a Salon participant: Re the salon, what I’ve found especially appealing – and stimulating – is the way it brings together such a vivid variety of viewpoints and stances and gives each one a space. And allows them to spark off one another and create the most wonderful, unlikely correspondences – a real meeting of minds, as it were. I’m also impressed by the way that, if anyone is struggling with the text (all of us at some point, I imagine), the support and encouragement provided by the group – and, of course, yourself – generate energy flashes that give you the stamina and confidence to continue. Bravo, bravo.
The crunch of family needs, work, depleted energy and resources requires a postponement of the Paris Salons until September. The conversations that happen in those weekends are magical…I do not want to approach them with less than a full load of energy and focus. I am looking towards the second week of September and am taking requests now for readings…on the top of the charts at the moment: Between The Acts and a second consideration of Moby Dick.
As Ulysses takes over my mind and hints of summer starts to scatter us to the world around, there will be fewer Salons on offer in the coming months. I am starting to look towards September offerings and hope to post these in the coming weeks to fortify your summer reading. Some suggestions so far include: Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Moby Dick, The Odyssey….There may be a few casual evening studies in the second half of June– ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, anyone? for a bit of Salon gathering fun…let me know where you are, what you are reading and what words move you.
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
The experience of the Salon resists easy definition–but to help those new to the studies, here are some words from recent Salons:
Thank god! This chapter really did not give me a steady place to hold on, but rereading (again, again, again!) on the train on the way back tonight, I can get the vibe coming through. Strange how a reading group unlocks that extra energies (something which the scientific mind cannot explain!)
I can now see the battle with the mother too, which shouldn’t be a surprise, as it is Stephen after all. (The battle with the father was more obvious, to me. ) It’s all there right at the beginning: A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.
Thank you again for this journey, it has made my year. –Ulysses participant, 2013
Thanks for being such a calming but persevering Captain Rehab–ever ready to straighten somewhat tossed limbs of thought and help us stand firm but open in our reflections. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
thanks infinitely for the salon. Not only was it fun, interesting, revealing, enlightening etc, but you have such a gift for
leading the group gracefully & intelligently. It’s not an easy or obvious thing to be able to do, & I for one really appreciated it.
A great evening. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
It was a most enjoyable session and thank you for making us love such intimidating classics as Moby Dick, which we look at on our bookshelves, feigning to have read them … and for making those sessions so rich, so lively, so entertaining in spite of the themes.
Thank you, B. for welcoming the whole crew of whalers with a wonderful dinner in your beautiful place.
Thank you, companions in whaling for your bright and enriching insights.
Looking to the next session, whatever may be the topic. Moby Dick participant, Paris 2013
This is why I read too or engage with the “objects” people make… I believe it is a duty and a privilege to witness and share in the lives of others, the people one loves or hates we are all on the same path, life itself is the great equaliser. There is no question that each text changes as one lives life, meaning is not fixed.
I ask this question all the time yet, with Ulysses I feel/see that there is a higher power which must have moved Joyce along for all the reasons you state below… xenophobia, hatred, alienation, all traits humans find so easy to conceive…. being “good” or “self aware” is the challenge. Clearly Joyce’s compulsion to bring the ancients to us, to see if we will learn from history and allow the “strangers” to dwell in our hearts with the hope that some of us will have the courage to change. –Ulysses participant, 2013
Though it is tempting to subscribe to the idea that the novel form is dead, (particularly when some literary studies seem to focus on works written in the last few centuries- none recently…) there are some interesting innovations happening in the form that give new energy and possibility. The work below particularly strikes me as a re-imaging of fiction– and a novel (he-hee) approach to this structure of art that has always struggled between what is true and what is imagined. My view is that we read in part to understand ourselves and our relationships to others more broadly–fiction can stray from realism but needs to provide some fresh view on what we are…I like how Heti is using her writing to collage truths she has learned in relationships–and dispensed with the façade of the imagined.
Thoughts?
Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be?, has taken the States by storm. Dubbed "HBO’s Girls in book form", it’s a mash-up of memoir, fiction, self-help and philosophy.
The book, published here this week, has divided critics. The New Yorker‘s James Wood applauded Heti’s "freedom from pretentiousness and cant", but called the book "hideously narcissistic". Margaret Atwood described it as a "seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity"; while artist and film-maker Miranda July declared it "nothing less than groundbreaking: in form, sexually, relationally, and as a major literary work".
How Should a Person Be? is structured like a literary version of reality TV. The narrator, Sheila, is a playwright, recently divorced, who is suffering from writer’s block. In real life Heti had just divorced her husband of three years, and was trying to write a play for a feminist theatre company – which instead became How Should a Person Be?.
Set in Heti’s native Toronto, the book is based on the author’s own conversations with her artist friends (the character Margaux is Heti’s real friend, painter Margaux Williamson), her analyst and her relationship with Israel, the man with whom she has intense, brutal sex.
But, in the spirit of the 19th-century bildungsroman, the book also asks questions such as: What does it mean to be an artist? What is ugly and what is beautiful? And how do we live a moral life?
Heti studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. Her short-story collection, The Middle Stories, appeared in 2001, then came Ticknor, a historical novel about a 19th-century biographer.
She collaborated with Misha Glouberman on a book of "conversational philosophy", The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which the New Yorker chose as one of its best books of 2011.
Heti looked set for a distinguished career as a writer of "difficult" literary fiction. But How Should a Person Be? was a surprise change of direction, as she plundered her own life. Writing fiction alone in a room, she felt isolated from the world and began taping conversations with friends, and bringing them to life. "It seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story," she told an interviewer in 2007.
Many editors turned the manuscript down – it didn’t receive a US release until two years after publication in Canada. But How Should a Person Be? has made her a literary sensation.
Written from 2005 – when Heti was 28 – through to 2012, the book explores the messiness, self-consciousness and doubts of young women who have been told the world offers them unprecedented opportunities, but find themselves working as unpaid interns, living in grimy bedsits and dating loser men.
There are strong links with Lena Dunham’s brilliant TV series Girls (Dunham has called Heti one of her favourite writers). Both their heroines have a masochistic sexual relationship that causes pain, but also self-revelation.
Like Dunham, Heti faces criticism for being part of a privileged (white) North American elite; but her writing asks important questions about roles for young women in late-capitalist society, and celebrates the power of female friendship.
In How Should a Person Be? you interview your friends, reproduce their emails. But you call it a work of art, not your journal? Part of writing this book was "Can I write a book where I’m not the sole author?" Or rather, I am the sole author, but my vision is influenced by what I encounter in the world, and what I learn from other people. The creative process was far more public – I showed it to Margaux and many of my friends, all the way along. I was thinking of open source software and writing a book that had more of that "open source ethos" rather than, say, Microsoft where even the people who understand computers can’t break into it because it’s so closed. There’s an essay on the internet that I was inspired by early on called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". I didn’t want to make a cathedral, I wanted the book to be a bazaar.
So it’s more colloquial? Your impulse as a writer is to make the sentences as beautiful as possible, but that wouldn’t have made any sense at all for this book. It is like a performance or a monologue; Sheila’s talking to you. It has to feel like spoken language. Some people might think I don’t know how to write. [Laughs heartily.] But it’s just silly that this kind of language should be put beneath literary language. I spent a lot of time capturing the sloppiness of the way people actually talk.
Did you worry about hurting real people by putting them in a book? I’d never write a book in this way again. I understand why people write fiction now. A lot of complications can arise. Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!
For an autobiographical novel, there’s very little about your parents. Can you tell us more? My dad came to Canada in 1956 from Hungary as a boy, and my mother came in the 1970s when she married my dad. They’re both Jews, and my Jewish heritage comes into the book. I don’t know how much you know about Hungary, but they were so horrible during the second world war. It’s still a very, very antisemitic country, so you tend to feel closer to the Jewish part than the Hungarian part, or you’d be in so much conflict.
Growing up you say you always felt "really afraid" of culture – adding, "I think it’s being a child of immigrants". I wasn’t allowed to watch music videos as a kid. It was just that kind of environment. And I felt overwhelmed by pop culture. It was too loud and too much. Before this book I could never have imagined setting a book in the present. I don’t really know any more about pop music than I did 10 years ago. I live in a silent world except for conversations and certain podcasts.
And yet the TV series The Hills inspired some of the dialogue for How Should a Person Be?… I transcribed a few episodes and I was like, "Oh, these characters are talking the way people really talk." It was like Beckett, so open and mysterious. In the first season they didn’t talk about anything – there was no subject to their conversation, it was just words, just their relationships.
Are you religious? One of the first things I started reading when I was working on the book – not that I was quite sure it was a book – was the Bible. I was reading the Old and New Testament and turning emails from friends into text in the manner of biblical passages. I had the idea that Sheila and her friends are wandering in the desert, because this is the generation that doesn’t reach the promised land. That’s why there’s no answer in the end. "How should a person be?" is the question Moses answers for the Jews with the 10 commandments. If Sheila could give the answer, she’d be like Moses. But she has to accept she’s not. I’m not a religious person but I do think the biblical stories, like all great stories, continue to resonate in our lives.
Sheila’s friendship with Margaux is very important in the book, yet she confesses she had no friends before the age of 25. Was it the same for you? Did you have to learn the art of friendship? Yes, and I have found it to be a more beautiful art than the art of relationships, because there is enough of a distance. I find that when I’m in a relationship, I’m just so "in it", you couldn’t even call it an art, it’s such embroilment. With a friendship you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.
Can you tell me about the photo of you and Margaux, recreating Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, with your friends Ryan and Sholem? That was really fun. For all my fear of paintings, I love Manet. When he showed his work at the Paris salon, he was criticised for being so sloppy and his work being so ugly – but look at it now, and you think: "What were they talking about?" The way things have changed is because of him, it looks beautiful to us now. I only have one bathing suit so I had to wear that in the photo. For some reason I had to be the girl. I don’t think Margaux would have wanted to be it.
The sex scenes are very powerful. Even though Sheila is in a submissive relationship with Israel, there’s a muscularity to your writing. I love Henry Miller and reading people who write well about sex. I love dirty books! I think there’s a way of talking about the human that can be quite profound. I tried Fifty Shades of Grey but three pages in I realised I just couldn’t read it. It was like every sentence was written by a different writer.
Sheila gradually realises she’s in a destructive relationship… She eventually gets out of it but I wanted to show her lose control; it’s also part of her fantasy of wanting other people to tell her how to be – she thinks Israel is going to be this promised land and it turns out to be a place of real destruction and pain.
You say women have more freedom than ever before and yet at the same time we’re in a climate that’s more degrading to women. Yes, just in terms of internet porn and stuff like that – that backlash against our freedom. Look at the way these women like Lindsay Lohan are experiencing public shaming. For what? You could say for being brats, but men are brats, too. These women are being made examples of. And I’m not even sure what everyone thinks they’ve done wrong.
Sheila talks about feeling androgynous at times. Is there a third sex? I think there are 17 sexes! I even think having children versus not having children is a different sexuality. Having the inclination to be a parent, or not having the inclination, goes that deep. A friend had a baby recently and she said to me: "I feel something is coming over me and I’m not going to be able tell you the truth about my experience."
In the book you debate the nature of female genius – presumably because we haven’t enough famous examples yet? Yes, we’ve just had a exhibition in Toronto about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And these banners outside the museum said: "He painted for the people; she painted to survive." The implication is he painted the story of his country and she painted her life. You think: "Come on, that’s so insulting. She was painting the story of people, too, not just herself."
How do you answer criticism that you write from a position of privilege? I think we have a lot to feel guilty for; the world is a horrible place for most people. Obviously there’s inequity, I think any of us could do better at helping to resolve that in our lives… But art is not social justice. Art is art… Look at Lena [Dunham]. She’s just supposed to make the TV show she wants to make. She doesn’t have to solve the racial problem in America. Why is the problem between black and white in America laid on Lena Dunham’s shoulders? No one made that complaint about Bored to Death, another HBO show about a group of white guys with a writer at the helm. It’s so wrong. If people want to complain that HBO doesn’t have enough shows directed by black women, I would agree. But let’s not put that on Lena.
Will there be a film of How Should a Person Be? I was approached but I didn’t want to do a movie because I don’t think that narrative is the most important thing about a book. I didn’t want people to see this or that actress as Sheila when they’re reading the book. I said no for the book’s sake.
Has success changed your life? A lot of things came together in improbable ways that felt fortuitous beyond my designs, and seemed to push the book forward. My life is settled back to where I was before I got divorced. It’s not that I’m with the same man – but I’m with a man. I’ve known him most of my life. There’s a line from a dream I once had: "If you want to know what your life is, throw everything over and see what stays the same." Maybe there are certain magnetic things in your character that keep you in a certain place. The preoccupation that made me write the book has gone for me, it’s been solved.
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The Kentishtowner is North London’s NESTA award-winning daily online magazine(est.2010): Editors describe the magazine as ‘dedicated to cultural affairs – art, food, pubs, culture, community, history, architecture, music. Kentish Town and Camden as a borough may be at the heart of what we do, but we love the capital as a whole. We’re not bound too rigidly by geography: to prove it, we have a thriving travel section. We believe a mix of features makes for a balanced read.’
They have great reviews as well…and a yearly award scheme based on readers’ votes–Thank you to the Salonistas who made the Salon a winner!
Drawing by far the most votes for a single ‘random thing’ was this rather special book club. To quote one reader in their entirety: ‘Sounds posh (and it is academic) but actually it’s a fabulous friendly forum for real discussion about serious literature. You pay about a fiver per evening and spend an hour or two, over drinks, discussing a good book, play or poem. It’s like a structured book club with interested strangers. I haven’t come across anything like this before – like going back to a university tutorial in a very enjoyable way.’ Said another; ‘A wonderful way to study books one would normally not read by oneself; or if one did, one would most likely not understand!’ and also ‘a most agreeable and useful evening’.
My daughter is surprised the Salon beat the fishdogs at Camden Market.
This article titled “Sheila Heti: ‘I love dirty books'” was written by Liz Hoggard, for The Observer on Saturday 19th January 2013 17.30 UTC
