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’m a sucker for books on writing, so I’ve read lots of them–the good, the bad and the stupid. As a mental exercise I decided to pick the few I’d have to buy again if they were all lost. Here are my picks for must-have books on the craft of writing:
The Elements of Style, by [...]
The Internet is old enough now that I expect to find a writer’s website when I google his or her name. Some writers have nothing (I’m talking to you, Ethan Canin, Leif Enger, Jeffrey Eugenides and Meg Wolitzer). Others have worse than nothing–a completely unusable site. And a few (like Neil Gaiman, pictured above) have [...]
For a writer rushing to the defense of entertainment (”…I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period.”), Michael Chabon doesn’t seem remotely interested in entertaining readers with his essay collection Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (McSweeney Books, 2008).
One of the great joys of Chabon’s fiction is narrative voice, a [...]
While the second half of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (by Stieg Larsson) moves considerably more quickly than the first, it still never engaged me the way a great book should.
The characters were almost uniformly two-dimensional; only the title character, Lisbeth, shows any personal growth. Many of the plot twists were either gratuitous or [...]
John Leonard, one of the finest critics ever to comment on American literature and culture, died Wednesday. Whether he was reviewing a book, a film or a television series, he deeply questioned both the quality of the craft and the significance of the work in our moment.
My introduction to his work came from his appearances [...]
Stieg Larsson’s debut novel wowed some high-placed critics since its translation into English earlier this year. It received high praise in places like the Sunday Times and the New York Times. Maureen Corrigan’s review on NPR’s Fresh Air convinced me to buy the book.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has all the elements of a [...]