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Late Last
Night Books
because so much reading, writing, and living happens after-hours
Since 2013
Gary Garth McCann, founder and managing editor
an ad-free magazine about fiction by authors Terra Ziporyn * Sally Whitney * Eileen Haavik McIntire * Gary Garth McCann * Peter G. Pollak * Garry Craig Powell * Jenny Yacovissi * Lily Iona MacKenzie * Todd S. Garth * Daniel Oliver
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Author Archives: Garry Craig Powell

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The Serious Side of Humorous Novels – Our Parent Who Art in Heaven Included

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

25 JUNE 2022 The Serious Side of Humorous Novels – Our Parent Who Art in Heaven Included

Faun and female with wings – in the Municipal Palace, Rijeka/Fiume, owned by Gabriele d’Annunzio. Photo by Garry Craig Powell

So far nearly all the Goodreads reviews of my novel have emphasized how funny it is – which is gratifying, because it is a comedy, and humour is so hard to pull off. However, the best comedy usually takes as its theme issues of real importance, and it’s even more gratifying when readers understand the underlying argument as well. Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies was not merely ribbing the Beautiful Young Things of the 1920s, he was also showing how shallow and futile their lives were, and for me this tendency culminates in A Handful of Dust, which begins as a hilarious satire on the upper classes and the social climbers trying to enter that class, but ends up with real tragedy – the death of a small boy which is made all the more shocking because when his mother hears about his death, she is relieved, because her son shared the name of her lover, and her initial grief was for the latter.

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Why Huw, the Hero of Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, May Be a ‘Boyo’

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 APRIL 2022 Why Huw, the Hero of Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, May Be a ‘Boyo’
Myself, aged 24 – a proto-boyo

Do you know what a ‘boyo’ is? The Urban Dictionary defines it as ‘An endearing term used to refer to (young) men searching for the meaning of life through the works of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche and other such psychologists/philosophers.’ I have only become aware of this meaning in the past couple of days. And yet, by happenstance, Huw, the Welsh hero of Our Parent Who Art in Heaven (Flame Books, 2022, already available for pre-order), often addresses himself in his thoughts as ‘boyo’, the traditional Welsh or Irish form of ‘lad’ or ‘dude’. In our age, when young men so often feel emasculated, neutered, and lost – when so few of them have had real present fathers who confirmed them in their manhood, and when so many of them have been told in the course of their education that they should behave more like girls, be nicer, less aggressive – vast numbers of young men are trying to confirm themselves, give themselves the rite of passage they never had, and become more self-assertive, self-affirming.

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The Future of Fiction – the Superman/Superwoman or the Snivelling Slave

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MARCH 2022 The Future of Fiction – the Superman/Superwoman or the Snivelling Slave
The Battle of the Amazons by Peter Paul Rubens, 1600

This is the weekend of the Oscars – an event most of us now avoid, because of its tedious and hypocritical virtue-signalling and moralising. (Not to mention the clips from all-too-predictable, formulaic films.) This has me wondering and worrying whether literary fiction will also become irrelevant. In a sense it already has. Few men read ‘serious’ fiction any more, although when I was young, half the readers were men. And I suspect that most of the women still reading the latest lauded offerings do so only so that they are not left out in conversation at dinner parties. I know women who have admitted to me that that is why they read.

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Praise for Stoning the Devil from a Postcolonial Feminist Scholar

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JANUARY 2022 Praise for Stoning the Devil from a Postcolonial Feminist Scholar

I recently discovered a superb scholarly review of my first book, by a self-described ‘intersectional feminist’. In the abstract to ‘Orientalism and the Failed White Saviour: A Study of Garry Craig Powell’s Stoning the Devil’,  (2020)Dr Rathwell writes that my collection of linked stories ‘delivers a critique of Western white expatriate saviourism by presenting a nuanced relationship between his British protagonist Colin, and his Palestinian wife, Fayruz. Through the use of meta-literature, anti-hero tropes and references to violence and sexuality, Powell critiques stereotypical tropes of Orientalism. (…) complicat(ing) them in a literary manner to provide biting criticism of white saviorism in the Middle East. The relationship between Colin and Fayruz therefore serves as a metaphor for relations between the West and the Orient, and in doing so, questions if there can be a post-Orientalist world.

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Schopenhauer’s Advice: Don’t Read So Much!

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 OCTOBER 2021 Schopenhauer’s Advice: Don’t Read So Much!

Recently I’ve been following a YouTube channel called Weltgeist, which deals (exclusively, I believe) with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche. This has prompted me to re-read The World as Will and Representation, the great pessimist’s magnum opus. But Schopenhauer had opinions on nearly everything, as his entertaining (and occasionally outrageous) essays show, including reading and writing. And since he was one of the few philosophers who had a clear and elegant prose style himself, and since he was clearly one of the greatest intellects of recorded history, it may be worth considering what he had to say on the subjects.

First of all, he cautions us not to read much. This is pertinent, when so many people aim to read a book a week, or more – one of my friends felt guilty if he could not manage to read two or three books in a week.

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The Birth of a Book by a Big, Bad, British Author

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 SEPTEMBER 2021 The Birth of a Book by a Big, Bad, British Author

Cover Illustration by Nick Ward

Here’s the news: nearly 10 years after the publication of my first book, Stoning the Devil, Flame Books of Scotland (a new press – their website will be up within a couple of weeks) are going to publish my second, the satire Our Parent Who Art in Heaven, in late March 2022. Writers customarily preface such announcements with apologies for their ‘shameless self-promotion’ but I won’t. There’s none of that here. I don’t expect this novel to make me rich or famous, and I don’t even want that. I do want the novel to reach an audience, because in its no doubt modest way, I think it’s important.

What’s it about then? Here’s the blurb on the back cover:

Welshman Huw Lloyd Jones’ life seems perfect: he teaches Creative Writing at a charming college in the American South, and is happy with Miranda, his beautiful wife.

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Can Fiction Writers Stem the Tide of Barbarism?

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 AUGUST 2021 Can Fiction Writers Stem the Tide of Barbarism?

The barbarians are no longer at the gates, but inside them – and I’m not talking about invaders from other cultures, but homegrown barbarians who are either ignorant of the glories of Western culture, or actually despise it and want to destroy it. Anyone who supports cancel culture, for a start, which may mean the majority of the people you know, if you’re an educated person in the liberal professions – is a barbarian, someone with a medieval mindset who not only believes in strict orthodoxy, but wants to enforce it through ostracization. And the publishing industry is peopled almost entirely by these latter-day Goths, Vandals, and Huns.

This is all obvious to anyone who’s paying attention. The problem is that most writers have not been paying attention.

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Roz Morris Talks to me about her new novel, Ever Rest

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JUNE 2021 Roz Morris Talks to me about her new novel, Ever Rest

Roz Morris

I’ve just had the pleasure of interviewing Roz Morris, who is English and the author of three novels, a travel memoir and a series for writers. She once had a secret career as a ghostwriter, where she sold 4 million books writing as other people, but is now obeying the commands of her own soul, which are to write literary fiction with a  strong sense of story. She is also an editor and writing coach, and has taught masterclasses in Europe and for The Guardian newspaper in London.

We mainly discuss Ever Rest, (Spark Furnace 2021), her just-published novel. The premise:

     Twenty years ago, Hugo and Ash were on top of the world. As the acclaimed rock band Ashbirds they were poised for superstardom.

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Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MAY 2021 Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat

Leo Tolstoy – the greatest novelist of all – and yet lots of readers, even serious ones, have never read him. Why? Partly it’s because his two most famous works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are on the long side. That’s true, but even so, if you read just an hour a day, and typically read a short novel in a week, it might take a month to read Anna Karenina, and six weeks or two months to read War and Peace. Not that long. And you’ll probably read them faster, because they’re so good you’ll find yourself reading more at weekends and on evenings when you have time. But let’s say you’re really busy, and intimidated by these monuments of Russian literature.

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Is This the End?

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 APRIL 2021 Is This the End?

For months, I’ve been contemplating giving up—not just this column, but writing. Altogether. I hope this won’t sound like a long whine, whinge, or worse—the dreaded ‘mansplaining.’ But for a long time, there has been no interest in my work from the industry, even though I’m fairly sure I write better than I did fifteen years ago, when there was a lot of interest. Some of that, I suspect, is because of the current ‘woke’ moment—what a ‘vile phrase’ that is, to quote the Bard. But I’ve moaned about that before so I won’t now.

            It could also be because my writing simply isn’t engaging a new, different audience: one that is not only ‘woker’ (presumably, if we can trust the media), but one is that is doubtless younger, and suffers from a shorter attention span.

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A Very Different Diverse Voice: The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MARCH 2021 A Very Different Diverse Voice: The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa

We’re all being urged to read ‘more diverse voices’ these days, although you may have noticed that almost all of the writers you’re being told to read write in English, live in the United States or England and have been to top-tier universities. Curiously, they’re also nearly of the same currently fashionable ethnicity, and the majority of them are of the same sex, or gender if you prefer. Odder still, the stories resemble each other: nearly all are victim narratives, ‘heartbreaking’ stories of loss, oppression, repression, cruelty, violence and slavery. And there’s a bogeyman (I choose the gender deliberately here) common to all these novels too. You know who that is.

            Let me state categorically, for anyone who doesn’t know my views, that I am not defending the hegemony of the white male, and welcome diverse voices, provided they are talented, and provided they are—well, diverse.

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Zooming with a World Famous Editor and a Debut Author with a Seven-Figure Advance

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 FEBRUARY 2021 Zooming with a World Famous Editor and a Debut Author with a Seven-Figure Advance

Let me say first that this was a large Zoom group, and the editor and author are both alumni of Selwyn, one of the colleges of the University of Cambridge, as I am. I did manage to ask one question. Since it was a private group I shall not name the figures, though you may be able to guess who they are, particularly the editor.

The editor founded one of the largest independent publishers in the world in the eighties, and has published Booker Prize winners and Nobel Prize winners. He also discovered JK Rowling–to whom he offered the princely advance of £1,500 for her first novel. (Her agent persuaded him to raise the offer to £2,500!) Many people in the meeting asked questions about how to find a publisher, whether an agent was necessary, and so on.

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Why Fiction Writers Should Read Shakespeare

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JANUARY 2021 Why Fiction Writers Should Read Shakespeare
The Droeshout portrait, 1623. Martin Droeshout never saw the subject, but this is supposed to be the best image of the man.

It struck me recently that I still hadn’t read all of Shakespeare, and there was no real excuse. After all, I claim to be a writer, in English, and Shakespeare has been regarded as the prince of poets for four hundred years. It’s possible that in our benighted days, when even university curricula frequently try to teach identity politics—which means bombarding their students with woke authors of cool ethnicities and sexual persuasions, among other things—Shakespeare, as a Dead White Male from an evil colonial country, is considered irrelevant, or worse, pernicious. But quite apart from the fact that the man was surely gay or bisexual (it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s read the sonnets coming to any other conclusion) and that his plays are full of gender-fluid people, there are compelling literary reasons to read him too.

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Why Fiction Writers Should Read (and maybe Write) Poetry

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 NOVEMBER 2020 Why Fiction Writers Should Read (and maybe Write) Poetry

Most fiction writers don’t read much poetry, let’s be honest. I confess I don’t read much contemporary American poetry myself. So much of it is either incomprehensible–even to someone who has a higher degree in Creative Writing–or pretentious, or simply tedious in its insistence on the usual woke themes. However, this past few weeks I’ve been reading the Oxford Library of English Poetry, a three-volume anthology edited by John Wain, and have found it not only immensely pleasurable, but also, I believe, useful.

Let’s take the pleasure part first. This anthology contains no American verse, and as Wain himself admits, there have been many great American poets. If you were to make an anthology of the best verse in English, a number of them would have to be included: Whitman and Emily Dickinson are two obvious giants.

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Martin Amis vs. Bernardine Evaristo

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 OCTOBER 2020 Martin Amis vs. Bernardine Evaristo
Photo by Javier Arce (cropped). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Feud! This week one of my favourite authors, Martin Amis, said in an interview (in the Evening Standard, 21 October 2020) that he had not read the latest Booker Prize winners because ‘You don’t feel a literary push behind it. It’s politics, it’s sociopolitical considerations rather than literary like the Nobel.’ He also said that ‘To read your contemporaries, let alone your juniors, is an uneconomical way of dividing your reading time.’ So how did Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker winner, react to this?

Just two days later, in the same British newspaper, Evaristo lashed out: ‘Amis seems to belong to the school of privileged male writers of a certain generation who have benefited from a white, patriarchal society for decades.’

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Quiz: Are You Destined for Literary Success?

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 SEPTEMBER 2020 Quiz: Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Are You Destined for Literary Success?

Just fill in our quiz, all you talented wordsmiths, and find out!

  1. How talented are you? Be brutally honest, babes! a. Off the charts – right up there with Dan Brown and Lee Childs b. No genius, but I know my craft, and work my ass off c. Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie would like my work if they knew it d. I don’t know crap about grammar or spelling, but hey, that’s what editors are for, right?
  2. How much training do you have in Creative Writing? a. Bachelor’s degree b. MFA c. PhD d. I went to a summer workshop and slept with one of the tutors
  3. Your social media presence a. rivals Kim Kardashian’s b.
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Tom Jones – DWM Garbage or Masterpiece?

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 AUGUST 2020 Tom Jones – DWM Garbage or Masterpiece?

I recently finished reading Fielding’s chef d’oeuvre, Tom Jones, first published in 1749, and running to over 750 pages in the Norton Critical Edition—without the critical essays at the end. So by contemporary standards it’s a whopper, and that in itself may be why sufficient reason why so few people, apart from English Lit. students, have read it. (And have they? I suspect half of them merely skim it.) And yet, with some reservations, I very much enjoyed reading it, and benefited from the experience quite a bit. In this thumbnail review, I shall consider some of the reasons why people may shy away from it, and try to show what they’re missing.

First, it was written nearly three hundred years ago, so some will be wary of the ‘old English.’

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A Catalogue of Worthless Writers

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JULY 2020 A Catalogue of Worthless Writers

Let’s face it: plenty of writers are rubbish. I’m afraid I despise, deplore, or simply detest quite a lot of them. They include:

Writers with no sense of humour;

Writers who think they mustn’t offend anyone;

Writers who believe the purpose of fiction is to edify their readers;

Smug, self-righteous, or sententious writers;

‘Woke’ writers;

Writers with an overt or covert political agenda (especially the latter);

Pretentious writers;

Writers who are toadies, lickspittles and arse-kissers;

Writers who admire (or pretend to admire) other writers because they are successful;

Writers who believe that an MFA or PhD in Creative Writing qualifies them to write;

Writers who believe that a writer’s colour, religion, sexual orientation, sex (or gender!) qualifies anyone to write;

Writers who whine about their white privilege;

Writers who don’t bother to learn the rules of English usage or spelling;

Writers who don’t think it’s important to read the canon;

Writers who think the canon needs to be decolonised;

Writers who think it’s necessarily important to read the latest literary prize winners;

Writers who are ignorant of history and philosophy;

Writers who think their drug experiences are interesting;

Writers who believe that their experiences as victims is fascinating and important;

Writers who despise other writers because they are not, or were not, morally pure;

Writers who follow the latest trends and write for the market;

Writers who think that their ‘platform’ is important;

Writers who believe that writers are essentially social engineers;

Writers who are certain that their values and views are correct;

Writers who can’t think for themselves (at the current time, the majority, sad to say);

Writers who watch more TV or movies than read books;

Writers who want the writer’s ‘lifestyle’;

Writers who think their job is always to be kind;

Writers with no imagination (a surprisingly large proportion);

Writers with no ear for language (incredibly, the majority, whether ‘literary’ or otherwise);

Writers who think literary agents know more about literature than they do;

Writers who believe that the world needs their novel;

To sum up: Writers who are not artists, but hacks or halfwits.

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Why Can’t Writers Write Right Now?

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 JUNE 2020 Why Can’t Writers Write Right Now?

(Yes, the rhyme is deliberate.) Well: is it Covid-19? Maybe it was, a bit. At first. People’s routines were upset, they felt anxious, under-stimulated, and possibly other things seemed more important. But what kind of excuses are those? Crap ones. More serious, possibly, is the furore over George Floyd’s death and racism in recent weeks. Not only has there been unrest in the US and the UK, which at times has seemed to threaten the very fabric of society, but also, black writers have been demanding a more prominent role. (I say black writers rather than ‘diverse writers’ because by far the most vocal writers have been black, and most of them seem to have been pointing specifically to under-representation by African-Americans (in the US) or Afro-British (in the UK).

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How Jane Austen Learned to Write

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GARRY CRAIG POWELL

Author of  Stoning the Devil

26 MAY 2020 How Jane Austen Learned to Write

She didn’t do an MFA in Creative Writing, let alone a PhD. She didn’t even have a BA in it. Or in English. And yet Jane wrote the initial draft of Sense and Sensibility when she was 18, and had finished Pride and Prejudice by the time she was 20. Astonishing? Yes. So how did she do it? Did she follow the advice of the self-appointed writing gurus—who tell you that if you can’t do a degree in the subject, you need to attend expensive conferences, join writing groups, get professional editors? No, none of that. So how on earth did she learn her craft?

By reading and writing. I’m not an Austen scholar, but I know that in the late eighteenth century England’s public libraries had not yet been founded, so it’s fair to assume that most of her reading was done in her father’s library.

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