Spufford provides both fresh observations and thought provoking insights No less does he inspire an irresistible urge to turn the page and read on True Stories And Other EssaysErudite idiosyncratic essays from a cultural observer of rare empathy and sincerity I liked the ones on science fiction the best Francis Spufford An excellent collection of essays Book review here Francis Spufford This collection of essays range from the Arctic and Antarctic to the former Soviet Union to Combating Atheism to Technical Writing to Book Reviews Spufford has some interesting insights and writes well None of these essay are too long or too self centered I really like the parts about Antarctica and the Soviet Union I read a few at time because there is a lot information in each one these Francis Spufford A collection of journalism and essays.

True Stories And Other Essays is an exceptionally difficult book to review It is a collection of essays that range wildly in topics from exploring the Antarctic the Soviet Union Christianity Technical Writing and Book Reviewing This strange combinations of topics made it a bit slow going for me but what was here was fascinating for the most part anyway If I am understanding things correctly these topics do have some common thread as they are all stemming from books or writing work that he had done in the past The first three topics stemming out of books that Spufford had wrote previously and the last couple of topics from other work he had done If you are a fan of Spufford s or are interested in this strange assortment of topics than this may be a book you enjoy It s a book that took me awhile because even though the essays aren t necessarily large they do contain a good amount of content to chew on and I think the lack of a consistent theme also kept me from getting into a solid flow with the book. 5 but I m rounding up this time because it was a very interesting read even though it took me awhile to get through It s kind of a random book in a lot of ways but I did find a certain fascination despite or maybe even because of the randomness Francis Spufford I think this is a terrific collection of many of Francis Spufford s essays articles and talks over the last 25 years or so Spufford is extraordinarily erudite remarkably thoughtful very insightful and writes prose which is dense but a real pleasure to read He has grouped the pieces into topics and they make a fine compendium of thought provoking and enjoyable ideas. He had me at hello really The introduction opens with The imagination said Coleridge is the power to disimprison the soul of fact Except he didn t Say it that is I loved that and the way he then traces the misattribution illustrating precisely the point he is making This includes just a page or so later fact that wants to be let out from its literal prison of dates and documents to roam free and have non literal adventures As Tolkien said who doesn t approve of escape Jailers that s who It s a wonderful essay to start the collection perhaps controversially in 2017 Spufford maintains the distinction between fact and falsehood while also against current trends of instant judgement and opinion maintaining that a fact or idea needs to be thought about and left in our heads until it begins to speak to us and reveal what it really has to say possibly in the form of a story. And so on This is a book to be savoured in smallish episodes I think Spufford s writing and thinking is packed with ideas and images and I like to let a bit sink in and settle before trying I come back to the book with renewed pleasure each time. In short this is a brilliant hugely enjoyable collection by a brilliant thinker and writer Very warmly recommended I received an ARC via NetGalley Francis Spufford Thought provoking insightful and a masterclass in writing. I decided to settle on a five star rating due to the remarkable use of vocabulary throughout Francis Spufford writes in a uniquely surprising and at times very descriptive manner It s delightful to read a collection of essays and stories that are unpredictable not only in the range of topics but also in word associations used Using phrases such as story economies or when explaining snow waxy and audibly squeaking beneath the first shoe to compress it Many of the topics are not usually ones I would choose to read however I enjoyed reading them due to the brilliant and unique style these stories and essays are written in Francis Spufford This is a great collection of essays If you read it you need to be aware that the author denies Penal Substitutionary atonement but he is helpful as a good example of Christian prose in the vein of CS Lewis Contains excellent examples of apologetic art and worthwhile thought Francis Spufford His meditations on narrative counterfactuals are brilliantly comprehensive Cultural Babbage True Stories The section Cold is full of intriguing detail An uneven collection but even the duds contain a blazing phrase or two Francis Spufford

True Stories: And Other Essays By Francis Spufford

0300230052

9780300230055

English

360

Hardcover

An irresistible collection of favorite writings from an author celebrated for his bravura style and sheer unpredictability Francis Spufford s welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places writers or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story telling and truth telling How must a nonfiction writer imagine facts vivifying them to bring them to life How must a novelist create a dependable world of story within which facts are in fact imaginary And how does a religious faith felt strongly to be true but not provably so draw on both kinds of writerly imagination Ranging freely across topics as diverse as the medieval legends of Cockaigne the Christian apologetics of C S Lewis and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini most of it thematically arranged around the topics of Spufford s non fiction ish books though not interestingly Golden Hill his one definite fiction and I would have thought his biggest hit plus the few book reviews which he felt worth reprinting on the grounds that they addressed something bigger than a current release So it begins with cold I May Be Some Time is one of his books I ve not read so I don t know how much overlap is here but in this ghastly year without a winter I found a certain salve in all this ice Sometimes as with the Scott expedition Spufford is teasing out the implications of a story we all sort of know elsewhere he s excavating fascinating obscurities such as the Tikigaqmiut people in the far North West of America whose other term for themselves Inupiaq shares the same root as Inuit but is doubly haughty about defining only the in group as real people The account of their culture is fascinating for the interplay between its similarities to and differences from other folklores and customs I was especially intrigued by their idea that as well as the individual soul human bones have their own spirits Of course not all the pieces have aged as well as others A 1992 piece on African American polar explorer Matthew Henson is in many ways ahead of its time but then ends on a list of other pioneers where the last name is Bill Cosby Spufford can t be blamed for not knowing or even for not wanting to rewrite old work but it still can t help marring the effect. What could have been the book s toughest stretch for many readers defences of christianity pegged to Unapologetic instead gets off to a surprisingly good start In general Spufford does well at avoiding the genre s besetting sins of Richard Dawkins is a bit annoying and consumerism is fairly depressing thus I have proven that we need a theocracy an angle which apart from anything else tends to ignore the degree to which we already have one what with bishops in the Lords and the tendency of prime ministers to bang on hypocritically about their own faith Certainly he has a number of fair points he s quite right that the metaphorical view of life is part of being human that belief is first and foremost an emotional rather than a rational decision that to many religious people the community and the ethical aspects of faith signify far than the metaphysics And he forcefully distances himself from creationism Hell and to a large extent even the idea of sin as conventionally understood. Spufford talks about The God Delusion as having been responsible for a less nuanced and polarised discussion about faith in recent years which for all my own issues with Dawkins is really not fair It wasn t the New Atheists who kicked off the century by murdering thousands And fundamentalists are not half the rare fringe which Spufford and others would claim even before they were propping up the UK government you still have eg 40 odd per cent of Americans disbelieving evolution And given they aren t going to include many atheists that s surely the majority of US christians Yes Spufford tries to distance British christians from such crazies suggesting that before Dawkins mucked up the detente the UK had hitherto avoided such culture wars but wasn t the church s dead hand part of the reason we didn t get gay marriage sooner and still don t have legal euthanasia or abortion in Northern Ireland There was always a certain amount of pussyfooting involved in whatever ceasefire existed And that emotional content which precedes religious codification does often seem to hinge less on a sense of cosmic love and purpose and on Urgh gay. Still even that section while occasionally wrongheaded is worth reading And the reviews section is amazing not least because it contains a number of fine pieces on the most significant SFF writers of recent years and then just as you re worrying whether the choice of Banks Pratchett Robinson might seem a little canonical there s a celebration of one Felix Gilman a fantasist of whom I d never previously heard The real gems though are the title essay and one of the ones in the Red Plenty section which between them offer as fine an explanation as I ve ever read of the shimmering structures I see behind books when I think very hard about them There are plenty of books and courses out there which talk about writing as craft and the how is obviously important But there s precious little and less of it recent which gets into this high level visionary stuff about the why Netgalley ARC Francis Spufford Spufford began as a writer of non fiction though always with a strong element of story telling Among his early books are I May Be Some Time The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys He has also edited two volumes of polar literature But beginning in 2010 with Red Plenty which explored the Soviet Union around the time of Sputnik using a mixture of fiction and history he has been drawing steadily closer and closer to writing novels and after a slight detour into religious controversy with Unapologetic arrived definitely at fiction in 2016 with Golden Hill It won the Costa First Novel Award for 2017 and three other prizes and was shortlisted for three Light Perpetual 2021 was long listed for the Booker Prize His next bo Spufford began as a writer of non fiction though always with a strong element of story telling Among his early books are I May Be Some Time The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys He has also edited two volumes of polar literature But beginning in 2010 with Red Plenty which explored the Soviet Union around the time of Sputnik using a mixture of fiction and history he has been drawing steadily closer and closer to writing novels and after a slight detour into religious controversy with Unapologetic arrived definitely at fiction in 2016 with Golden Hill It won the Costa First Novel Award for 2017 and three other prizes and was shortlisted for three Light Perpetual 2021 was long listed for the Booker Prize His next book Cahokia Jazz due October 2023 in the UK and February 2024 in the US is a noir detective novel set in the 1922 of a different timeline from our own Spufford studied English at Cambridge University He was a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Anglia Ruskin University from 2005 to 2007 and since 2008 has taught at Goldsmiths College in London where he is Professor of Creative Writing site_link .

.If I could I d probably rate this book a 3.And yet