Tony White reading his novel Shackleton's Man Goes South, which is being published by the Science Museum.Tony White's last "traditional" novel was published by Faber in 2003 – that is, traditional in its form and distribution. Michael Moorcock, writing in the Guardian, said that Foxy-T, a story about call shops and kids in the East End of London, proved that the contemporary novel "has never been more alive". Its riot of street slang and Bengali-cockney idiom expressed the hybrid modernity of the contemporary city. But White's work since has been anything but traditional, and even more contemporary.
In 2012, White was invited by art producers Situations and Bristol city council to create "Missorts", an audiobook app for the centre of the city. It's triggered by GPS as the listener moves through the Temple Meads and Redcliffe areas. White collaborated not only with the council, but app developers, a composer, other writers, local libraries and a local church. It's a permanent public artwork, telling a story about the area, and was accompanied by a novella, Missorts Volume II, available as a paperback or free ebook.
Now the Science Museum has published a new book, and its first novel: Shackleton's Man Goes South. At heart a book about climate change, it's also, says White, "a kind of alternative history of publishing in extremis, examples of the apparent human necessity of finding new ways to tell and share stories, and how the future of writing, publishing and reading might need to be as much in the low-tech past as the hi-tech present".
Visitors to the museum's Atmosphere gallery can download the novel for free – as can anyone from its website. (Physical copies can be bought from the museum's shop too.) For White, these collaborations allow him to explore the possibilities of writing further, and see their effects more directly: "As the physical square footage of the traditional book trade diminishes, these commissions have given me the chance to engage directly with readers and to learn from them."
A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A tweet has been posted to your Twitter account. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Lauren Graham, star of NBC's 'Parenthood,' says that she wrote a book of fiction, 'Someday, Someday, Maybe,' because it would be more fun than real stories.
Actress Lauren Graham has written a novel about an aspiring actress. (Photo: Stan Godlewski for USA TODAY)
Dan Loh for USA TODAY
By Thibault Camus, AP
Her own family was "poor," she says, "but we were never degraded." Her dad, who assumed "all whites were unredeemable," worked as a welder, among other jobs. Her mother, "the most non-racist person I knew," worked as a restroom attendant "so she could send me $5 a week when I was at Howard. Back then, that made a difference."Morrison, who worked as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983, says she has followed her own advice to write about what you don't know: "I write to find out something. I write with questions in mind. 'What would it feel like if …' Or, 'What would happen if…' "The plots are simple to construct, she says. "The characters are complex." She says they talk to her, like ghosts: "On a good day, they shut up and let me work."In Home, told from multiple viewpoints, she does something she's never done before.Her main character, Frank "Smart" Money, who harbors a terrible secret from Korea, talks back to the author, challenging what she knows and doesn't.Money is summoned home to Georgia, to a "no-count, not-even-a-town place," to save his naive sister, Cee, who's been abused by a white doctor. That part of her plot was inspired by Harriet Washington's 2007 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present.Morrison's novels, which often blend reality and myth, arise from her imagination and research. They are not autobiographical. One book she won't write is a memoir. She's canceled plans to do so after deciding, "A) I don't remember everything anymore, and B) as a subject to write about, I'm not that interesting to myself. I'm more interested in my imagination. Fiction is my place."On Lorain, Obama, OprahThat doesn't surprise Carolyn Denard, a dean at Emory University in Atlanta and president of the Toni Morrison Society, a group of 600 scholars and fans. "She has been so generous with her life story in appearances and in countless interviews," Denard says. "And she has now written 10 novels. She has always told me that everything we need to know about her is there — in the works."Morrison doesn't discuss her 1964 divorce from Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect she met at Howard. (As a single mother, she raised two sons. Ford, 50, is an architect in Princeton, N.J., where his mother used to teach. Slade was an artist and illustrator, who collaborated with his mother on several children's books and died in 2010 at 45 from pancreatic cancer.)But in an interview, on a variety of topics, she's funny and biting:•Growing up in Lorain: "All those immigrants. I thought it was typical. It helped me feel comfortable in the world at large. There wasn't a ghetto sensibility."•Her mother: "Whenever a new place or store would open in Lorain, she would go just to check it out and see how we were treated. When the Dreamland movie theater opened, all the black kids sat on the left side. My mother deliberately made us sit on the right side. I was furious because my friends were on the other side. But my mother wanted to make a point."•President Obama: "As good as it gets … I think what drives some of his critics is not that he's black, but that he's such a smart, articulate black … and that causes all this vulgarity about his birth certificate or the Muslim thing." She's "thrilled" that she's one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, and is eager to meet Obama for the first time at a White House ceremony to be scheduled soon.•E-books: She likes reading books on her iPad — to a degree. She recently found that Hilary Mantel's 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, set in Henry VIII's England, "was so good, I had to go buy the book book, or whatever it's called now. When I like a book, I want to add my notes. Exclamation points! And questions marks! I want to corrupt it with my responses."•Her friendship with Winfrey: "I adore her. She sends me flowers every year on my birthday. She did what they said was impossible: She used TV to get people to read books." (Morrison says Winfrey's embrace of three of her novels, Song of Solomon, Paradise and Sula, did more for her sales than the Nobel Prize ever did.)But no, Morrison hasn't urged Winfrey to revive her televised book club. "We stay friends because I don't ask her for anything. Everyone else does." (Winfrey likes to say that when she told Morrison she often has to reread parts of her novels to understand them, Morrison replied, "That, my dear, is reading.")•Home as a place: These days, it's mostly Morrison's riverfront house in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y., which lives up to its name, 20 miles north of Manhattan on the west bank of the Hudson. "I love the river. As a girl, I loved Lake Erie. There's something about water."•Home, her new novel, set in the '50s: "I wanted to rip the scab off that period. There's all this Leave It to Beaver nostalgia. That it was all comfortable and happy and everyone had a job. Oh, please. There was violent racism. There was (Joe) McCarthy. There was this horrible war we didn't call a war, where 58,000 people died."•The length of her new novel (just 147 pages): "Some reviewers say it's too short. They used to say my novels were too long. Someone called it a novella. What's the ella? It's a novel. The better I can do with less is more."The reviews have been generally good: Entertainment Weekly (A-) and People (four stars) loved it, but The Los Angeles Times called it a "thin book with some beautiful writing."The dedication page on Home reads simply "Slade," her son who died."Sometimes you just don't have any words," she says. "Sometimes, it's just clichés and tired old words, and there's nothing really to say."After a long pause, Morrison adds two words about her son: "He knows."For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com. 
Gupta by H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAYGupta by H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAYThe operating room is quiet except for the sucking, gurgling sounds associated with surgery, along with some background music requested by one of the residents. Let the Good Times Roll by The Cars blends into the Talking Heads' Take Me to the River, all while blood silently flows through tubes attached to the patient, a 24-year-old man who broke his neck in a car accident the night before.Standing on two orange risers with an overhead spotlight beaming down onto his hands, Gupta and his team are decompressing the man's spinal cord as quickly as possible, pulling his neck into alignment and then fusing it back together.An assistant repeatedly wipes blood from the surgical instruments Gupta hands back, a process that quickly turns the white cloth pink.Two and a half hours later, Gupta's team declares the surgery a success.Born: Oct. 23, 1969; age 42Raised: In Novi, Mich., suburban Detroit. His parents moved from India to work as engineers for Ford Motor Company in the 1960s.Education: B.S. in biomedical sciences at University of Michigan; M.D. from University of Michigan Medical School, 1993. Completed his residency in neurosugery at the University of Michigan Health System in 2000.Family: Married wife, Rebecca, an attorney, in a lavish day-long Hindu ceremony in 2004. They have three daughters, ages 6, 5 and 2, and live in Atlanta.Television: Joined CNN in 2001 as chief medical correspondent. Special correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes.Other experience: Served as one of 15 White House Fellows, primarily as an advisor to Hillary Clinton in 1997-1998. In 2009 offered the position of Surgeon General by President Obama, but withdrew his name from consideration, citing family and career.Books: Two non-fiction titles, Chasing Life (anti-aging advice, 2008) and Cheating Death (miraculous recoveries, 2010), both best sellers; and Monday Mornings, first novel, pubbing on Tuesday."Looks good," Gupta says while looking over one final X-ray. "We have to do a little bit of gardening, but it looks good.""Trophies for everyone!" someone yells.Most Americans know Gupta as CNN's Emmy Award-winning chief medical correspondent, the one with the shiny black hair and dazzling smile, a smile that is hidden this morning behind his blue surgical mask. And yes, he's a real neurosurgeon, not just playing one on TV. He practices at Emory University Hospital and is associate chief of neurosurgery services here at Grady.He is also the author of his first novel, Monday Mornings (Grand Central, 304 pp., $24.99, on sale Tuesday), a book Gupta describes as a "peek behind the curtain" at what really happens in a hospital. There are chapters that are downright chilling, with surgeons operating on the wrong side of the brain, for instance. More on that later.Keeping up with Gupta is not for the weak of heart, or the weak of anything.Always on the goGupta, 42, operates four or fives times on any given Monday, or 200 to 250 surgeries a year on that day. He also operates every other Friday and sees patients on Thursdays. He starts making his rounds at 5:30 a.m. and rarely finishes before 8 p.m.Then there's his gig at CNN, with frequent reporting junkets to medical emergency hot spots like Haiti (earthquake), Japan (tsunami), New Orleans (Hurricane Katrina) and Iraq (war).And don't forget his attorney wife, Rebecca, and their three daughters, all under 7.So, why not write a novel in your spare time? (The man is also training for a triathlon in Malibu, Calif., in September; he does pull-ups daily on a bar attached to his office doorway.)Can a breakdown be just a commercial break away? Not likely, says Gupta's CNN producer, Ben Tinker."You won't see any meltdowns," he says. "In fact, you're not going to find anything. What you see is what you get."A driven man.Immediately after surgery, Gupta is in the physicians' locker room, changing out of his scrubs and into a long white lab coat bearing his name. He also pulls up his bold green and black striped socks, just one pair from a large collection for which he is famous around the hospital and at CNN."I have a split career," he says, "and living here makes it a lot easier than, say, in New York." In less than five minutes, he's pulling his wife's sporty Jaguar into the CNN parking lot, where, like Superman, he strips off his white coat and throws it into the car's back seat.A fresh startHe is now Sanjay Gupta, reporter. He says he keeps his two lives — surgeon and TV star — separate, not wearing scrubs on TV, for instance. He joined CNN in the summer of 2001, recruited by then-CNN chairman Tom Johnson. He had never worked in TV before. His first big story: reporting on the 9/11 attacks from Ground Zero."I'm a reporter here," he says, once he's in CNN's massive newsroom. "I'm informed by my background, yes, but I'm pretty tough on myself. I make sure I've got it right. I feel good about what I do. We're diligent."Between constantly checking his iPhone — he has four e-mail accounts — and wolfing down a burrito from Moe's Southwest Grill ("they're the best"), he chats in his CNN office about his life on the run and his new book, a project he has been working on "for a long, long time."The book's title, Monday Mornings, refers to when physicians at "Chelsea General" in suburban Detroit gather for their weekly "Morbidity and Mortality" (M&M) meeting — a time to discuss and analyze what went wrong in recent surgeries, a private meeting Gupta says is held at most hospitals. That operation on the wrong side of the brain? It's discussed there. It's like going before a jury of your peers, not a fun outing for the erring physician."It's unsettling to surgeons to realize they're not infallible. Operating on the wrong side of the head? It happens," he says, adding that no one is harder on themselves than doctors.Gupta compares the "what-went-wrong?" meeting to Monday-morning quarterbacking. "I like the idea that it's a new beginning. A fresh start. A mistake is how we learn. That's why I placed (the novel) on Mondays." (Gupta attends "Thursday" meetings at Emory.)The idea for the book came from his years as a neurosurgeon. "I write things down a lot. I take a lot of notes. And then I realized there were some unbelievable stories there," says Gupta, who also realized many of them were about the relationship between physicians and their patients. "I wanted people to understand what happens in a hospital when there's a mistake. Bad things can happen to good people."If you think this sounds like a good TV show, you're not alone. Shooting for Chelsea General, a TNT pilot based on Gupta's novel and starring Alfred Molina and Ving Rhames, begins this week. Executive producer is David E. Kelley (Boston Legal, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal).Gupta wrote much of his debut novel on planes: "It's kind of hard to do with three kids in the house." One time the story came so fast he wrote for almost 30 hours straight. "It was all there, and I wanted to get it out."Having difficulty bringing his theme together early on, he decided to use the Monday morning meetings to bring the novel's five diverse surgeons together. He says he didn't show the novel to anyone for fear they would respond with the cliché "Keep your day job!"Early reviews show he needn't have worried. Fellow author/physician Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone, sings the book's praises on Amazon.com. "Hospitals are, after all, Gupta's turf. His insights into the craft of surgery combined with vivid storytelling make Monday Mornings a gripping and wonderful read right down to the wire."So how much is real?Deb Futter, Gutpa's editor at Grand Central Publishing, echoes Verghese, praising Gupta for the way he blends medical facts and storytelling. "Everyone is fascinated, and terrified, by what goes on behind the scenes at a hospital. Dr. Gupta's novel takes you right to the heart of the medical world," Futter says. "He manages to make the doctors real people with real problems and also marries medical information with a riveting plot."Will his fellow physicians see themselves as those "real" people in these pages?"The characters are from earlier stages of my life," he says, then concedes he employed "various personality aspects" of surgeons he has known. "But I didn't want to implicate anyone." (And there is no autobiographical character, he says.)Another novel is not in the works. At the moment, Gupta is "toying around" with the idea of writing a book on memory. His two non-fiction books, Chasing Life (anti-aging advice) and Cheating Death (miraculous recoveries), were best sellers.Unlike the solitary writer's life, being on TV has brought Gupta high-profile visibility both around the world and at home here in Atlanta. He and his wife are often interrupted on the rare evening they go out to dinner. Someone usually has a medical question for the good doctor.TV has also made him a bit of a pinup boy. People magazine named him one of the "sexiest men alive" in 2003, something that still makes him laugh. "I was very amused by that. No one ever said I was the sexiest anything back in my hometown!" (He grew up in Novi, Mich., outside Detroit.)And with that the handsome novelist/physician/father/triathlete flashes his famous smile and is off once again — back to the hospital, where at least three more surgeries await this afternoon. "There are some mornings I wake up and feel besieged," he admits. "But I'm incredibly lucky. Sometimes I have to pinch myself that I get to do all of this stuff."For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com. 
You might as well be reading today's paper. Terrorism. Pakistan. Navy SEALS. They're all here in Tom Clancy and Peter Telep's Against All Enemies, which enters USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list at No. 2. Clancy returns with a tale of a terrorist bombing in Pakistan which sends a former Navy SEAL into the mountains to uncover the culprits. But what he finds sends him halfway around the world to America's border. "Tom's novels have always been prescient, whether they were about technology or military tactics or geo-political maneuvering," says his editor, Tom Colgan. "(Here) he examines the unacknowledged war on America's doorstep, the bloody slaughter perpetrated by the Mexican drug cartels. Tom brings his unique Clancy twist to the story and warns us about the potential disaster a destabilized neighbor poses to the U.S."
By Erik S. Lesser, for USA TODAY