News From Nowhere 4

News From Nowhere is pouting coquettishly from the casting couch this month, with our updates taking a cinematic turn. Firstly, we were excited and alarmed in equal measure by the prospect of a celluloid adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s debut novel Wetlands. The film premiered at Sundance on January 18; a preview in Variety promises ‘computer-animated renderings of toilet-seat bacteria’ and suggests that director David Wnendt hasn’t shied away from Roche’s depictions of haemorrhoid treatments.  

Also in the news, Manchester-based authors Chris Killen, Joe Stretch and Socrates Adams have been at Utah’s Slamdance festival promoting their award-winning film Wizard’s Way, set to be remade by Jack Black. Based on a fictional online role-play game, the film was co-written and directed by the three, who also make appearances in front of the camera. With Jenni Fagan also working on an adaptation of The Panopticon, maybe we’ll finally start seeing some movies which live up to the books that spawned them.

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Next, to the Telegraph, where a new literary genre has been tagged, labelled and laid out on the slab. According to that organ of the press, 2014 will be dominated by what nobody is calling ‘chick noir’; books charting the dissolution of marriages, from the female point of view. If Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is the Bridget Jones of the genre, then Season To Taste by Nathalie Young is it’s Cannibal Holocaust. The story of a woman who impulsively caves her spouse’s head in with a spade, before dismembering and cooking him, the book has been branded in some quarters as ‘the next 50 Shades’. Whether that means the British lit scene is going to end up like that village in Hungary where everyone poisoned their husbands is unclear; if so, maybe even the LRB will have to start employing some female writers. In the meantime, as Flossieraptor the wise points out, we await the day when domestic dramas aimed at a primarily male readership get referred to as 'dick noir'.

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The Bookseller has revealed that former Granta man Philip Gwyn Jones has joined Scribe UK as an editor at large, starting this month.Gwyn Jones was rumoured to have been responsible for bringing Eleanor Catton to Granta, amongst other big names, before leaving as part of owner Sigrid Rausing's restructuring of the business. Now, he is charged with building up a list of prestige titles for Scribe, a relative newcomer to British publishing. In some ways, Gwyn Jones's position mirrors that of Ravi Mirchandani and James Gurbutt, both of whom were let go from Random House imprints before moving to smaller publishers, where they discovered, respectively, White Tiger and A Visit From the Goon Squad. So maybe we should expect big things from Gwyn Jones - meanwhile, the question to ask is why can't big publishers give these editors the freedom they clearly merit?

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Now that the cosy literary prizes are out of the way (and the Bad Sex), it’s time to bang the nails down on 2013’s coffin with the Hatchet Job of the Year award. The award is sponsored by the Fish Society, appropriately, since several of this year’s entries fall in to the ‘fish in a barrel’ category – for example Rachael Cooke on Anne Widdicombe’s ‘lofty and wrong-headed’ memoir, Strictly Anne. Likewise, it doesn’t take a genius to identify Morrissey’s 'pooterish' self-importance, as AA Gill does. Elsewhere, though, some sacred cows at least are taken on, in the form of Peter Kemp’s piece on The Goldfinch and Lucy Ellman’s skewering of Coupland’s wretched Worst. Person. Ever. And at least David Sexton writes with some conviction about The Luminaries, even if he is totally wrong.

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Stung by my Gran’s criticisms of Wolf Hall (she got Thomas Cromwell all wrong, apparently), Hilary Mantel has wisely decided to move away from historical fiction (for the time being) with the announcement of a new short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, due in September. Following on from the controversy over her speech about Kate Middleton last year, we applaud her dedication to winding up the Daily Mail.