A portrait of Rafa Benitez's Liverpool
Guillem Balague
Biographical Portrait of Liverpool's Spanish football manager Rafael Benitez and an extraordinary season for the club.

When Rafael Benitez was appointed manager of under-achieving Liverpool at the start of the 2004-2005 season, the reaction of many fans was 'Who the **** is Rafael Benitez?'. The Liverpool fans had grown used to French manager Gerard Houllier but he had been a fan of the club himself since his days as a teacher on Merseyside. A Spaniard with admittedly a wonderful record at Valencia was going to take over management of Liverpool's famous Boot Room and try and win over a disillusioned Kop.

But in one season, Benitez's importation of Spanish players, coaching methods and diet has led to a revolution, even usurping Jose Mourinho's Chelsea, whereby the team has ended the season winning the ultimate trophy for any European club - the European Champions League. No fan will ever forget the comeback from a 3-0 deficit to a 3-3 scoreline, then dramatic success in the penalty shoot-out.

This is the story of Rafa's remarkable success.

By JOHN WATERS
Published: November 19, 2006

Tennessee Williams saved my life. As a 12-year-old boy in suburban Baltimore, I would look up his name in the card catalog at the library and it would read “see Librarian.” I wanted these “see Librarian” books — and I wanted them now — but in the late 1950s (and sadly even today), there was no way a warped adolescent like myself could get his hands on one. But I soon figured out that the “see Librarian” books were on a special shelf behind the counter. So when the kindly librarian was helping the “normal” kids with their book reports, I sneaked behind the checkout desk and stole the first book I ever wanted to possess on my own. “One Arm” read the forbidden cover on a short-story collection by Tennessee Williams that I later found out had once been available only in an expensive limited edition, sold under the counter in “special” bookshops before New Directions released the hardback version. And now it was mine.


"I've had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn't cry for myself," Tennessee Williams wrote, "would you?"


Of course, I knew who Tennessee Williams was. He was a bad man because the nuns in Catholic Sunday School had told us we’d go to hell if we saw that movie he wrote, “Baby Doll” — the one with the great ad campaign, with Carroll Baker in the crib sucking her thumb, that made Cardinal Spellman have a nation-wide hissy fit. The same ad I clipped out of The Baltimore Sun countless times and pasted in my secret scrapbook. The movie I planned to show over and over in the fantasy dirty-movie theater in my mind that I was going to open later in life, causing a scandal in my parents’ neighborhood.

Yes, Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend. I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny. I didn’t quite “get” “Desire and the Black Masseur” when I read it in “One Arm,” but I hoped I would one day. The thing I did know after finishing this book was that I didn’t have to listen to the lies the teachers told us about society’s rules. I didn’t have to worry about fitting in with a crowd I didn’t want to hang out with in the first place. No, there was another world that Tennessee Williams knew about, a universe filled with special people who didn’t want to be a part of this dreary conformist life that I was told I had to join.

Years later, Tennessee Williams saved my life again. The first time I went to a gay bar I was 17 years old. It was called the Hut and it was in Washington, D.C. Some referred to it as the Chicken Hut, and it was filled with early 1960s gay men in fluffy sweaters who cruised each other by calling table-to-table on phones provided by the bar. “I may be queer but I ain’t this,” I remember thinking. Still reading everything Tennessee Williams wrote, I knew he would understand my dilemma. Tennessee never seemed “gayly-correct” even then, and sexual ambiguity and confusion were always made appealing and exciting in his work. “My type doesn’t know who I am,” he stated, according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren’t always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams didn’t fit into his own minority, so I had the confidence not to either. Gay was not enough.

It was a good start, however. “I was late coming out, and when I did it was with one hell of a bang,” Tennessee writes in “Memoirs” in 1972, the same year my film “Pink Flamingos” had its world premiere in Baltimore. While I was just getting my first national notoriety, Tennessee was struggling to finish the final version of “The Two-Character Play” and horrifying theater purists by appearing on stage in his new play “Small Craft Warnings,” and then answering questions from the Off Broadway audience afterward to keep the show running. I never once thought this was unbecoming behavior on my hero’s part and tried to follow his example by introducing my star Divine at midnight screenings of our filth epic. “I never had any choice but to be a writer,” Tennessee remembered at the time, and he remained my patron saint. I followed his career like a hawk.

Why was “Memoirs” reviewed so badly when it first came out? “The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it,” Robert Brustein wrote, two years later, in The New York Times. Today, few critics would be so blatantly homophobic, but Tennessee did love to bait his enemies. “They offered me a $50,000 advance,” he said, “and I thought I would be dead before the book came out.” But more sensibly he admitted, “Of course, I could devote this whole book to a discussion of the art of drama, but wouldn’t that be a bore?” “Memoirs” certainly isn’t a bore and caused a sensation when it was released. In fact, the day Tennessee showed up at Doubleday Bookshop in Manhattan and signed more than 800 copies became known as “The Great Fifth Avenue Bookstore Riot.”

Maybe I like “bad” Tennessee Williams just as much as “good.” This year a boxed set of DVDs was released containing all of Tennessee Williams’s best-reviewed movies: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Sweet Bird of Youth,” “The Night of the Iguana,” and “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.” But I want the “bad” Tennessee Williams boxed set: “Boom” (the greatest failed art film ever made) directed by Joseph Losey and starring Elizabeth Taylor as Sissy Goforth, the richest woman in the world, and Richard Burton as the angel of death; “Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots” (the film version of “The Seven Descents of Myrtle”); “This Property Is Condemned” with Natalie Wood; and even “Noir et Blanc,” the 1986 Claire Devers film version of “Desire and the Black Masseur.” The “bad” Tennessee Williams is better than most of the “good” of his contemporaries.

Was Tennessee nuts when he wrote “Memoirs,” or just high? Would his original agent, Audrey Woods (from whom he sadly broke in 1971), even have allowed him to publish this book if she had still been in charge of his career? “Since that summer of 1955 I have written usually under artificial stimulants,” he confesses before adding, “aside from the true stimulant of my deep-rooted need to continue to write.” Did Tennessee ever really get over the 1960s, which he calls “my stoned age?” “To know me is not to love me,” he allows, remembering the “seven-year depression” he went into after the death, from lung cancer, of his longtime boyfriend, Frank Merlo. “I’m about to fall down,” Tennessee would announce to whoever was present in those years, “and almost nobody, nobody ever caught me.”

When Tennessee suddenly is level-headed, it can come as a surprise. “I have never doubted the existence of God,” he writes soberly before later admitting to a “disbelief in an after-existence.” His guarded optimism always seems to save the day. “Mornings, I love them so much!” he enthuses, celebrating “their triumph over night.” Self-pity? Never. “I’ve had a wonderful and terrible life and I wouldn’t cry for myself: would you?” Hardly.

“Is it possible to be a dirty old man in your middle 30s?” Tennessee writes in “Memoirs,” remembering his very active sex life — a kind of sex life we are much more used to reading about in memoirs today than we were then. “Baby, this one’s for you,” he tells himself whenever Mr. Right Now appears, but he seems to be realistic about safe sex with strangers even before the onslaught of AIDS. Recommending “that penetration be avoided” with hustlers “as they are most probably all infected with clap,” he may be the only Pulitzer Prize winner to write about A-200, a product used for ridding your body hair of crab lice.

Tennessee falls in love a lot too. “I have a funny heart,” he admits. “Sometimes it seems to thrive on punishment.” What other memoir has “loneliness” listed in the index? Provincetown, Mass., that beautiful beach town on the very tip of Cape Cod, seemed to bring out the best in him romantically. Not only did he meet two of his best boyfriends there (and Tallulah Bankhead), he wrote the line “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” while holed up in a cabin before the summer season began. I felt the same way about Provincetown. I hitchhiked there in 1964 just because somebody told me, “It’s a weird place,” and boy, were they right. A very gay place too, but a different kind of gay. “I may be queer, but I AM this,” I remember thinking. I’ve gone to Provincetown for 43 summers and every time I pass by Capt’n Jack’s or the Little Bar at the A House, two places Tennessee got lucky in love, I mentally genuflect in respect.

Tennessee knew how to have fun with fame, too, and it seems he met all my idols: Jane Bowles, Luchino Visconti, Jean Marais, Johnny Ray, Yukio Mishima. So what if Jean-Paul Sartre once stood Tennessee up — I bet Sartre was a bum date anyway. Tennessee helped William Inge, the great playwright who lived in Tennessee’s shadow, through alcoholism (the blind leading the blind?), and tried to understand the folie de grandeur of his best friend, Lady Maria St. Just, one of the most difficult women who ever lived. Even Truman Capote comes across sympathetically in “Memoirs.” But unlike Truman, Tennessee never took the upper class that seriously. He hung around with street queens in New Orleans and prostitutes in Key West, and later in life, the Warhol superstar Candy Darling became a best friend. He isolated himself, far away from New York and Los Angeles, to write and whenever he panicked, travel seemed to be the answer. “My place in society,” Tennessee remembers, “then and possibly always since then, has been in Bohemia.”

Suppose Tennessee Williams had lived? What if he hadn’t choked on that prescription drug vial cap that he supposedly used as a launching pad for his meds? Would his career have had a second wind like Edward Albee’s? Or would he have despaired and crumbled further when the AIDS epidemic hit and wiped out many of his new younger friends? Surely he would be appalled at the end of “trade” as he knew it, but would he be like some of the older gay men I see now in one-time hustler bars in Baltimore who wait for the trade, even though they know it will never ever come? Would Tennessee have teamed up with Paul Morrissey? “I would like him to make a film of one of my short stories,” Tennessee writes, and who knows — maybe these two mavericks could have reinvented each other the way Sirk and Fassbinder did. Most important, could Tennessee have ever really hit bottom and gotten sober once and for all? On the wagon, would he have been able to continue to think up the best titles in the history of theater, the way he had always done? Even with all the self-prescribed substance abuse, Tennessee seemed to age well and remained cheerfully handsome, but if he had reached his late 70s would he have ruined it all by getting a face lift? Could anyone have saved Tennessee? Critics? Fans? Tricks? We, the readers? One thing for sure, flattery would have gotten us nowhere. “When people have spoken to me of ‘genius,’ ” he writes with a wink, “I have felt an inside pocket to make sure my wallet’s still there.”

I never met Tennessee Williams, but I saw him once at the Boat House restaurant in Key West, surrounded by admirers, looking a little woozy, and decided maybe this wasn’t the time for us to be introduced. But reading “Memoirs” is the next-best thing — it’s like having a few stiff drinks with Tennessee on one of his good nights as he tells you juicy stories that were once off the record. Listening could save your life too.

by Barnard, Timothy P. (Editor)

Price: US$19.75 (S$32.00*)
Region: Southeast Asia/Asean
Format: Paperback, 318 pages
Published: 2004, Singapore, 1st Edition
ISBN: 9971692791
SB#: 034967

About This Book
These 12 papers are related to those originally given at a 1998 scholars' conference at Leiden University and to research done there and elsewhere over many years. Many areas are explored around the difficulties in defining "Malay" or Melayu, or Malayness. Among the matters addressed are: diversity of the modern indentities "melayu"; origins; Makassar Malays of the 17th and 18th centuries; some 18th century texts; survival strategies of a 19th century Haji Ibrahim of Bugis ancestry; issues of identity and Islam in contemporary Malaysia; Borneo and Malayness; Indonesian literatures in Malay; a translated epic poem by a contemporary poet from Sumatra; and a stimulating afterword history of Malay ethnicity by Professor Anthony Milner. With annotations and index.

Kiran Desai was tonight (Tuesday 10th October) named the winner of the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Inheritance of Loss, published by Hamish Hamilton.

The Indian-born writer has a strong family tie with the prize as her mother Anita Desai has been shortlisted three times since 1980 but has never won. This year, however, her daughter, Kiran, has won the acclaimed literary prize.

Author of the 1998 universally praised Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Desai is the first woman to win the Man Booker since 2000 when Margaret Atwood scooped the prize with The Blind Assassin. Her winning book, The Inheritance of Loss, is a radiant, funny and moving family saga and has been described by reviewers as ‘the best, sweetest, most delightful novel’.

This is the first time that Hamish Hamilton has published a Man Booker Prize winner although they had two shortlisted authors in 2005.

Chair of the judges, Hermione Lee, made the announcement at the awards dinner at the Guildhall, London, which was broadcast live on the BBC 10 O’ Clock News. Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Man Group plc, presented Kiran Desai with a cheque for £50,000.

Hermione Lee comments,

“We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006 is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness. The winner was chosen, after a long, passionate and generous debate, from a shortlist of five other strong and original voices.”

Over and above her prize of £50,000, Kiran Desai is guaranteed a huge increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.

The judging panel for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Hermione Lee (Chair), biographer, academic and reviewer; Simon Armitage, poet and novelist; Candia McWilliam, award-winning novelist; critic Anthony Quinn; and actor Fiona Shaw.

‘Kiran Desai is a terrific writer. This book richly fulfils the promise of her first.’ - Salman Rushdie

In the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in an isolated and crumbling house, there lives an embittered old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy.

When a Nepalese insurgency threatens the blossoming romance between Sai and her handsome tutor, they, too, are forced to consider their colliding interests. The judge must revisit his past, his own journey and his role in this grasping world of conflicting desires - every moment holding out the possibility for hope or betrayal.

Kiran Desai was born in India in 1971, and was educated in India, in England, and the United States. Kiran studied creative writing at Columbia University. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss.

For further information or interview requests, please contact: Amelia Fairney, Hamish Hamilton on 020 7010 3247; Amelia.fairney@ukpenguingroup.com.

by Elodie Mazein Thu Oct 5, 9:36 AM ET
LONDON (AFP) - The first official sequel to Peter Pan, entitled "Peter Pan in Scarlet," hit bookstores in Britain and 30 other countries Thursday, 100 years after Scottish author JM Barrie created the character.

More than 500,000 copies of the work written by Geraldine McCaughrean have been published for the launch in English but also in languages including Basque, Chinese, French, Hebrew and Polish.

Some 200,000 copies are available in the United States and 50,000 in Britain.

"I'm more nervous now that I was when I signed on because I just didn't realize in my ignorance that it was going to be quite that big," said McCaughrean, a British children's author.

"I thought it was a very English kind of a book, possibly American, but not Korean and Russian. It's just very exciting," she told BBC radio.

In the new book, Wendy is now a wife and mother.

"They've grown up.... the first thing they have to do is to become children again so that they can go back to Neverland," McCaughrean said.

"And when they get there, they find Neverland seriously changed. It's colder, and more dangerous and more frightening than it was before," she told BBC radio.

"Peter Pan is the same, anarchic little demon as he always was. Tinkerbell is not there at the beginning of the book but there's a new fairy, called Fireflyer, who is all bent on meeting her," she said.

Captain Hook's spirit is stalking Neverland and newcomers include mysterious circus master "The Great Ravello," and a male fairy Fireflyer.

"This is the biggest dilemma that faced me because he disappeared into a crocodile and I don't do ghosts. But his ship is still floating on the lagoon and his spirit of evil is still lurking," she said.

The plot and new characters were secret, with a pre-publication embargo placed on the book. However, in August, an investigation was launched into how a copy of the book came to be leaked to a US newspaper.

A party is scheduled to take place Thursday evening at Kensington Palace to celebrate the launch of the sequel in 34 languages. Author James Matthew Barrie lived near Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, where a Peter Pan statue stands.

McCaughrean was handpicked to write the sequel from nearly 200 authors around the world after London's Great Ormond Street children's hospital launched a search for a writer in August 2004.

Entrants were asked to submit a sample chapter and synopsis.

Great Ormond Street's copyright on the original "Peter Pan", bequeathed to it by Barrie in 1929, runs out next year.

The royalties for the new book will be split between McCaughrean and the hospital.

David Barrie, Barrie's great-great-nephew, said: "JM Barrie could never have guessed that Peter Pan would still be making a vital difference to Great Ormond Street Hospital almost 70 years after his death.

"I'm sure he would be delighted to know that, thanks to Geraldine McCaughrean's sequel, the boy who wouldn't grow up will go on helping children back to health for many years to come."

The judging panel for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction today (Monday 14th August) announces the longlist of books for this year.

The longlist of 19 books was chosen from 112 entries; 95 were submitted for the prize and 17 were called in by the panel of judges.

Chair of judges, Hermione Lee, comments:

"Judging the Man Booker Prize puts you through almost as many emotions as there are in the novels. We’ve tried to be careful and critical judges as well as being passionately involved. We have many regrets about some of the novels we’ve left off, and we could easily have had a longlist of about 30 books, but we’re delighted with the variety, the originality, the drama and craft, the human interest and the strong voices in this longlist. It’s a list in which famous established novelists rub shoulders with little known newcomers. We hope that people will leap at it for their late summer reading and make up their own shortlist.”

The judging panel for the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: Hermione Lee (Chair); Simon Armitage, poet and novelist; Candia McWilliam, award winning novelist; critic Anthony Quinn and actor Fiona Shaw.
The 2006 shortlist will be announced on Thursday 14th September at a press conference at Man Group’s London office. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 10th October at an awards ceremony at Guildhall, London.

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006 is as follows;

Carey, Peter Theft: A Love Story (Faber & Faber)
Desai, Kiran The Inheritance of Loss (Hamish Hamilton)
Edric, Robert Gathering the Water (Doubleday)
Gordimer, Nadine Get a Life (Bloomsbury)
Grenville, Kate The Secret River (Canongate)
Hyland, M.J. Carry Me Down (Canongate)
Jacobson, Howard Kalooki Nights (Jonathan Cape)
Lasdun, James Seven Lies (Jonathan Cape)
Lawson, Mary The Other Side of the Bridge (Chatto & Windus)
McGregor, Jon So Many Ways to Begin (Bloomsbury)
Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men (Viking)
Messud, Claire The Emperor’s Children (Picador)
Mitchell, David Black Swan Green (Sceptre)
Murr, Naeem The Perfect Man (William Heinemann)
O’Hagan, Andrew Be Near Me (Faber & Faber)
Robertson, James The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hamish Hamilton)
St Aubyn, Edward Mother’s Milk (Picador)
Unsworth, Barry The Ruby in her Navel (Hamish Hamilton)
Waters, Sarah The Night Watch (Virago)

-ends-

For those of you who would like to know a little bit about Singapore without the Tourism board overtones or biasness, I present to you Notes from an Even Smaller Island and Scribbles from the Same Island by Neil Humphrey.

Notes from an Even Smaller Island

Price: US$7.72 (S$12.90*)
Region: Singapore
Format: Paperback, 232 pages
Published: 2001, Singapore, 1st Edition

About This Book

This light-hearted observation of Singapore by a young Dagenham (Essex)-born English school teacher/journalist enters areas of Singaporean life not normally highlighted in tourist guidebooks. The resulting picture is comic, shrewd, relaxed and highly coloured, and at times infuriatingly provocative!

Scribbles from the Same Island

Price: US$7.72 (S$12.90*)
Region: Singapore
Format: Paperback, 224 pages
Published: 2003, Singapore, 1st Edition

About This Book

Singapore's most famous Toa Payoh HDB flat-dwelling ang moh, Neil Humphreys is back with more with 'Scribbles from the Same Island', after a successful first book, Notes From An Even Smaller Island. Expect to find more of his take on innocuous subjects made hilarious through his witty observations. 'Scribbles' is a collection of Neil Humphreys' column published in WEEKEND TODAY and includes several short stories specially written for this book.