Thanks to Aleksandra Kos for an interesting piece which argues that the book explores ‘the experience of embodiment and how this shapes social relations’.

I have a new story on the Short Fiction website about being scared to go outside on a hot day. So not topical at all.

I wrote about the delights of literary ‘success’ for the Royal Literary Fund.

My story, as titled above, is the story of the month at the Willesden Herald. It’s from my first story collection The False River.

I had a very enjoyable conversation with John Siddique about China and writing for the Royal Literary Fund. You can listen here or download as a podcast.

I went on Swedish radio to talk about Xinjiang and other small questions like the future of China. Listen here

Thanks to Creative Scotland for awarding me a grant to work on my next novel, which if you squint at, or close one eye, you could call a love story.

There’s a review of The False River in The Herald newspaper today.

‘The False River

Nick Holdstock

Unthank, £9.99

The Willesden Herald Short Story Prize might not sound glitzy, but it allows Nick Holdstock’s story “Ward” (in which a teenage girl’s cancer diagnosis changes the course of her life) to be described as award-winning, which feels deserved. And judging by the quality of these stories, it won’t be his last accolade. Short story collections are often front-loaded with the best work, but The False River actually becomes more compelling as it goes along. His ease with dark and transgressive themes (animal-lovers should skip past “The Ballad of Poor Lucy Miller”) brings to mind a young Ian McEwan, but Holdstock is a multi-faceted writer who often seems to be urging his stories to break free of the frames surrounding them and even alters one character mid-story because he doesn’t like the direction it’s going. But mostly this accomplished collection is driven by a burning curiosity about the psychological states of its characters, and it should put him firmly on the literary map.

The start of ‘And Then’, a story from The False River, appears in today’s Scotsman newspaper.

The False River is out now.

With thanks to the publications in which some of this work first appeared – especially the Manchester Review, the Southern Review, and the Willesden Herald. I’m also grateful to editors like Emily Nemens (formerly of the Southern Review, now Paris Review Fiction Editor), Tom Vowler, and especially the late Jeanne Leiby, who was my first editor at the Southern Review, and offered me encouragement at a crucial time.

Thanks to Tom Vowler for a fun interview now posted on the Unthank Blog. Glad to say peacocks get a mention.

Out September 26th. Pre-order here.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

I wrote about editing for the Royal Literary Fund website.

Thanks to Amy Hawkins for a thorough, perceptive review of my book (alongside two others) in the TLS.

“It is always refreshing to read anything on China that takes the focus away from Beijing and Shanghai … Holdstock is at his best when detailing China’s rural to urban transformation.”

I wrote about the disappearance of Rahile Dawut (pictured holding the camera), and hundreds of thousands of other people in Xinjiang, for the LRB Blog.

I wrote a short piece about the re-issue of Julien Gracq’s novel for the TLS.

I wrote about Ben Bland’s book on activism and identity in Hong Kong for the Financial Times.

I wrote about extinction for the LRB Blog. Spare a thought for the thylacine.

The LARB has a new China blog which has lots of good content by people who really know their stuff. I wrote something for a roundtable discussion on Han Song’s story ‘Finished’, a Kafka-esque story about migrant workers.

I wrote a piece for 3 a.m. magazine about Magda Szabó.

I wrote about Cambridge University Press’s decision to censor some of its content in China for the London Review of Books Blog.

Looking forward to reading from The Casualties in Stockholm next week. Event details here.

Thanks to Timothy A. Grosse for his generous review of China’s Forgotten People in The China Journal.

I wrote a piece on Ian Johnson’s remarkable book about the rebirth of religion in China for Literary Review.

My piece for Open Letters Monthly on the (almost) lost novel of Zdanevich who worked with Picasso, Miro Ernst and Giacometti et al, and in the mid 1970s could still be seen wandering round Paris’s Latin Quarter wearing a sheepskin coat, herding a flock of cats before him.

I’ve been working as a Royal Literary Fellow at Newcastle University for the last year, a job that involves me helping students improve their academic writing. Mainly this happens through one to one sessions in which the student and I talk about their work, usually with reference to a specific piece they’re working on. The following is a short piece on what that experience has been like for me.

This is a strange job. I work amongst academics, but am not an academic. There are superficial similarities between what we do — we sit in our offices and talk to students — but I’m not sure we have the same goals. Whereas they try to convey information to the students, my role feels more diagnostic. The students who visit me know that they, or rather their work, is unwell in some fashion, but can’t see (or at least articulate) what the problem is.

The true cause of this sickness is impossible to discern. Laziness, the education system, their parents, the decline of community libraries, the Internet, the thrill of text messaging, the fact that television has never, ever been as good as it is now: take your pick. But perhaps the aetiology is immaterial. Treatment is all that matters.

I suspect that many of the students want some easy to swallow pill that will make them all better after 7 days. Telling them to search their essays for phrases like ‘This emphasies’ and words like ‘clearly’ or ‘obviously’ will provide minor relief – and maybe reduce irritation – but it will not cure their writing of its maladies. What I recommend is more akin to physiotherapy. They need to assume new habits that may seem dull, uncomfortable and pointless and don’t appear to be doing anything useful even after six bloody weeks. They need to print out their work and slowly read through it in a quiet room. They need to read more. They need to read better.

Even if they suffer this regime of treatment there are no guarantees. Having excellent skin is no indicator of one’s internal health. Simplistic, naïve ideas can be well-expressed. And one can be many wonderful things in life without being able to write well. It’s entirely understandable if people have other priorities. There are other kinds of health.

I’m sure many doctors doubt their choice of vocation. People smoke and eat rubbish food and try to meld with their couch and then complain they are unwell. But I don’t blame the students for their problems. In some ways it’s surprising that they’re not much worse: it seems to me that often they are required to do things they haven’t been shown how to do.

I sometimes find it difficult to accept that a student’s prognosis depends almost entirely on them, how much they want to improve, how much their circumstances allow them to. I can reassure them, I can listen, but I cannot transport them to some sanatorium cum library on a Swiss mountain.

But it strikes me that perhaps this illness metaphor misses the point. To speak of recovery assumes they have fallen from some state of perfect health in which no comma was ever misplaced. They aren’t trying to get well. They, like the rest of us, are only trying to learn.