I’m an inveterate Dickens fan, so I’m reading Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens right now. The novel’s mystery centers on Dickens’ final unfinished manuscript, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which, like all of his novels, was published in serialization before appearing as a book. Serialization was once deader than Mr. Dickens himself, but the Internet [...]
Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Fall is a great time of year for books. It’s the run-up to the holiday season, a time when lots of new titles appear and lots of publishing news is made. So here’s a roundup:
The Huffington Post recently [...]
The Wisconsin Book Festival kicked off yesterday, but tonight’s events begin the big weekend of readings, roundtables and other book-related offerings, starting with readings by Wisconsin authors Lorrie Moore and Michael Perry. Moore will read from her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, her first novel in ten years; Perry reads from his latest [...]
DoubleX, the online magazine by and for women that spun off of Slate, today has a delightful interview with Judy Blume, an author who meant the world to me during a truly awful stretch of adolescence, roughly from age 11 to 14.
Cue the Rod Serling voice: Picture, if you will, a Midwestern girl with gappy [...]
It’s Banned Book Week! The American Library Association annually uses the last week of September to celebrate “the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment,” according to the ALA website.
Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted [...]
As I mentioned in my last post, I recently read The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. But I’ve been reading lots of other things, too. So here’s the list, with a brief comment on each:
Romeo & Juliet
I’ve been wanting to read some Shakespeare, and purchased some individual plays so my Riverside Shakespeare wouldn’t sit on my [...]
The Daily Beast’s Book Beast has an interesting article on authors who are reaching out to book clubs as a way to connect with readers and promote their books. In an era of dwindling publicity budgets, it’s a way to boost sales, and a fascinating opportunity to see their books from an audience perspective.
Salon.com has [...]
I’ll say it up front: I despise the term “chick lit.”
Let me also admit that I steadfastly avoid the kinds of books I think of as belonging to this category: the designer-name-dropping, upscale-housing-trendy, single-female-on-a-shopping-and/or-sex-spree-but-longing-for-mister-right books.
But I’ve seen plenty of well-written, nuanced books tagged with the term, and it seemed to me that these books were [...]
Orson Scott Card’s craft book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy begins, interestingly enough, with a discussion of genre. He specifically discusses the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy, but what he says could as easily apply to a discussion of “literary” versus “women’s” fiction or (horrors!) “chick lit”:
…common wisdom has it that more males [...]
I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and it raises questions about genre that have been on my mind for months. So I’m going to focus for a few posts on genre, and the slippery business of labeling fiction. What categories/distinctions make sense? Which seem more of a product of bias against subject matter [...]