Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes.
“Prescience or eerie coincidence? On the eve of the anniversary of 7/7 Peter Millar examines thriller writers' knack for anticipating world-shaking events.”
Well, if writers can conceive of these events, surely the bad guys can as well. But then again, does art imitate life, or vice versa?
Some books are supposed to be classics, but all they ignite in us is anger. Rod Liddle presents his red-mist list…
“Books that are so terribly of our age, they cannot hope to see beyond it. The obvious contender here is White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a politely written tome of consummate vapidity, from an articulate, photogenic half-black writer, that tells you, in the end, nothing.”
Some fascinating facts about what, how and why we readers…er…‘informavores’ read online:
"[U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone. And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer.
The Guardian has a very interesting feature on writers’ rooms, where they offer a peek inside the personal writing spaces of a whole slew of authors, along with a paragraph or two concerning each. The latter is written by the author him/herself wherever possible, giving added insight into the both the writer and the writing process.
Imagine taking a tour of Hemingway’s home in Cuba and having a member of the secret police offer you any volume from the writer’s library for two hundred dollars. It’s unreal, but Irish thriller writer Adrian McKinty recounts just such an experience. How do you say no to a secret policeman in a foreign country who’s encouraging you, rather insistently, to join him in breaking the law?
…book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that. Many top-selling writers…have turned out at least one book annually for years. Now some writers are beginning to grumble about the pressure, and some are refusing to comply.
Be careful what you use as a bookmark. Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katharine Tynan Hickson are just some of the stranger objects discovered inside books by AbeBooks.com booksellers.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review asked a handful of writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates. Here’s what they came up with. There are certainly a few interesting—and highly appropriate—choices here…Macbeth is suggested for Clinton, for example.
A book’s ending can certainly make or break the entire read. After all, the final impression is most likely to be the strongest and most enduring. A few SF/F authors give their opinions on the question of good and bad endings here. Got any nominees yourself?
Obvious spoiler alert here if you haven’t read the books listed.
My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life…a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time.
First Look offers readers the opportunity to read and review HarperCollins books prior to publication. Reviewers for each book are selected in random drawings. A minimum of 10 advanced reading copies of each book offered will be distributed to chosen readers along with instructions for filing the review.
It's rare for a book-to-film adaptation to actually be as good as the original work, let alone better. By the time cinematic conventions, run-time limitations, special-effects budgets, etc. have all had their way with a story, the things that made it unique have often been leeched out. Possibly the best way to go: Start with a book that isn't all that great to begin with, like The Godfather.
Postcards From Yo Momma, a website that runs user-submitted e-mails and chat transcripts from real moms, is being turned into a hardcover work of literature by the people at Hyperion, publishing next April.
No details on the $$$, but rumor has it it’s a “comfortable sum.”
I suppose we could have used the title 'not safe for anyone' many times already, but I thought it would be especially pertinent here because in this show Richard and Hans illustrate the many situations in which the C-word is perfectly appropriate.
