As the culture vulture culture is entering its silly season, it's good to see a meaty literary exhibition that will entertain natives as well as visitors. On Thursday, the Minister for Arts, Sile de Valera, officially cut the ribbon on Jonathan Swift & His Contemporaries at the National Library on Dublin's Kildare Street.
The focus on the day was a 17th-century portrait of the teenage Jonathan Swift which has rarely been seen in public, having recently been discovered in the Scottish home of a Virginia Cardwell-Moore, who came along on Thursday. While the emphasis of the exhibition is on Swift's human side - his relationships, parentage and so on - it also attempts to put the satirist in context. The event was also an occasion to celebrate a new biography by critic and exhibition curator Bruce Arnold. Called Swift: An Illustrated Life, it is published, rather fittingly, by Lilliput Press.
The Hannibal vs Harry showdown continues to capture the public imagination. In case you've been ensconced in a Tribunal or Alaska, that's the battle for top of the best-seller lists between Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, and J.K. Rowling's tale of derring do, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban. Having beaten Hannibal's record as the fastest selling novel in recent history (69,159 in its first two and a half days), Harry Potter has now taken over the number one slot at the top of the British fiction best-seller list.
As if this kind of skulduggery and intrigue weren't enough, a new scandal has rocked the Harry camp. The new book, which was earnestly awaited by children and adult fans alike, had a first-print run of only 5,000. Highly indignant collectors of first editions are clamouring for Bloomsbury to account for the tiny print run and to respond to rumours that it was trying to create a hot collector's item out of the latest book. But whether Bloomsbury intended that or not, it looks as though it will be the inevitable end result with some booksellers predicting that the first editions will be fetching £200 within months.
ThE latest rumour on the book circuit is that a children's book - gasp - might be a contender for the Booker prize. David Almond has already been in the news recently when it was announced that his first novel, Skellig, had won the Carnegie Medal. It is rare for a children's first novel to get this award - Mary Norton's The Borrowers and Richard Adams's Watership Down are among the few exceptions.
Now a number of the reviewers of his second book, Kit's Wilderness have called for it to be entered for the Booker prize. Almond's publishers, Hodder Signature, have not ruled it out.
The London book world is not happy about the news that Frances Coady (right), publisher at Granta Books has been made redundant along with three employees. Although the reason given for her dismissal was a contraction of the imprint's activities, one of the press's main authors, Blake Morrison, has another theory.
"I'm very upset about Frances going," he says. "I fear it's because they just published my selected poems, as Granta never used to publish poetry. I think it sent the proprietor over the edge."
The Forward Prize is now accepted as one of the most prestigious - never mind the richest - poetry prizes around, so the shortlist is always examined with great interest. This year's list for the £10,000 prize for best collection has a strong Irish contender in Paul Muldoon whose recent collection, Hay, made the final five.
Others shortlisted in this section by judges including poets Simon Armitage, Helen Dunmore and Penelope Shuttle were Kate Clanchy for Samarkand; Jane Drapcott for Prince Rupert's Drop; Jo Shapcott for My Life Asleep and Carol Ann Duffy, whose collection, The World's Wife, is surely Muldoon's main rival. The other categories are the £5,000 Waterstone's Prize for Best First Collection and the £1,000 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. The results will be announced on October 6th.
The summer edition of the thrice yearly cultural review, Graph, has hit the book shelves this week. The contents list includes a rather scathing review by Des Traynor of the short story anthology, Shenanigans; academic P.J. Mathews on Ireland's critical culture; poet Chris Agee on essayist Hubert Butler, and Kathy Cremin on popular Irish women's novels - a distinctly under-analysed section of contemporary literature.
However, one of the most entertaining articles must surely be John Murray's translations of the diaries of the popular Russian writer, Sergei Dovlatov. As these are, for the most part, small extracts they have a pithy quality that at times read like Wildean epigrams ("In literature the complex is more accessible than the simple") and at others times like a parody of the Chinese proverb: "Blok was known to be the most unsociable of people. Suffice to say that his closest friend was called Ivanov."