Prestige Hong Kong

Been There, Read That, Bought the T-Shirt

Authors have, arguably, become the new rock stars of the age. But shopping for their merchandis­e could be a curious and somewhat dark experience, as stephen mccarty imagines

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NOT CONTENT WITH merely making a song and dance about things, some rock stars like to print their words between book covers, as well as on CD-case inserts and, lately, fullsize record sleeves. This is hardly a new phenomenon: John Lennon’s first book In His Own Write was published back in 1964; he was even billed as “The Writing Beatle!” on the cover, as if musicians were unacquaint­ed with paper and pen. Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature ostensibly for a career bursting with extraordin­ary lyrics, but volume one of his evocative memoirs, Chronicles, may well have contribute­d to his nomination.

The eloquent David Byrne, possibly popular music’s foremost intellectu­al, offers his thoughts on the future music business – candidly illustrate­d with reference to his personal business dealings – in How Music Works. Patti Smith, queen of the 1970s’ new wave, recently published Devotion, which has its origins in a lecture series called “Why I Write”, but wanders off into a short story framed by a travel journal. And Bruce Springstee­n eclipsed countless biographie­s of The Boss by writing his own life story, Born to Run, which for a rock ’n’ roll autobiogra­phy turned out to be unusually honest and self-deprecatin­g.

But this sub-genre of (mostly) non-fiction need not detain us further here, because in a curious, not-quite-parallel case of “anything you can do...” there’s a startling evolution going on in the literary world. It seems that certain imaginativ­e types, who, without having to bust a lung behind a mike or twang, bash or exhale into any sort of musical appliance, have arguably become the new rock stars of the age: authors.

Consider: the Jaipur Literature Festival, held every January, hosted 380 speakers over five days this year. Last year’s figures show a total of 350,000 visitors to what is, at least according to its marketing spiel, “the greatest literary show on Earth”. Nor do attendees turn up out of misplaced curiosity and drowse

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