A Gallimaufry of Links

Christopher Brookmyre has been shortlisted for The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The prize is given to the best comic novel published in the last year and the winner will be announced at the Hay Festival at the end of the month.

The six shortlisted novels are:

A SNOWBALL IN HELL - Christopher Brookmyre
JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI - Geoff Dyer
THEIR FINEST HOUR AND A HALF - Lissa Evans
RANCID PANSIES - James Hamilton-Paterson
HOW THE SOLDIER REPAIRS THE GRAMOPHONE - Sasa Stanisic
A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE - Steve Toltz

Stuart MacBride talks about childhood memories, seeing a ghost and the house he lived in that was inspiration for his first novel COLD GRANITE.

Maxine Clark reviews Karen Campbell's new novel AFTER THE FIRE.

Louise Welsh will be presenting a BBC Radio Scotland programme on Conan Doyle and the paranormal. It will be broadcast at 11:30am on 29 May as part of a series marking the 150th anniversary of Conan Doyle's birth and it's going to be available online after the show goes out on BBC iPlayer.

This one looks like fun. Irvine Welsh is to direct a remake of The Magnificent 7. Called The Magnificent 11, it's apparently centered on a local amateur soccer team, a Tandoori restaurant and a group of menacing thugs.

In other Irvine Welsh news, Random House have announced that they are launching an "enhanced" e-book list called Book and Beyond, which will include additional content embedded. As an official Technical Numpty, I have no idea how this works and any attempt to explain it to me will be met with a glazing of the eyes, but I'm looking forward to seeing it in action. Irvine Welsh is one of the ten authors chosen for the initial launch and his e-book, which will be available shortly, will "offer a gritty video commentary on the characterisation of his book Crime and a taster of his prequel to Trainspotting."

And finally - from the Glasgow Herald's archives 100 years ago today, one of the news articles was "Unprecedented Sobriety at Clydebank - There were again no apprehensions for drunkenness in Clydebank last weekend. It is now 10 days since an inebriate was taken into custody, which is quite unprecedented for the town." Ah...how times have changed...and not. Clydebank is now considered part of Glasgow. Since it was decision day in the football league yesterday, I think the time between inebriates being taken into custody was probably nearer 10 minutes. And I'm not sure what it says about Glasgow, but I can still see "No drunks arrested" being headline news.

There, did I do that right? Or did all those links take you to somewhere unsavoury or a complete dead end?