The 10 Best Books Shorter Than 150 Pages
Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star, recommends 10 short novels. I’ve got this one bookmarked for next December, when I may be scrambling to complete by personal reading challenge on Goodreads.
Dean Koontz on Life, Literature & His New Book ‘Saint Odd’ (INTERVIEW)
“I’ve always loved the English language,” declares Dean Koontz in this interview. Todd Aaron Jensen interviews the best-selling author on the eve of the publication of Saint Odd, the final installment of the Odd Thomas series.
Koontz discusses his troubled childhood with a physically abusive, alcoholic father who was a gambler and a womanizer. He admits that his outlook on life is not what we might expect from someone with such a background. Now 69, Koontz explains how his wife offered to support his writing for five years to see if he could make a living at it. The couple has now been married for nearly 50 years.
Read what this prolific author has to say on topics such as his worldview, his concept of heroism, the concept of fate or destiny that runs throughout his work:
the more we learn, the more layers we find. Every time we learn more, we find there’s still more we don’t know. I try to convey that in my books, that sense that the world is a place of deep mystery, and part of that deep mystery is this incredible beauty that surrounds us. That matters to me because if the world were just an efficient machine, it wouldn’t need to be so beautiful.
How Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith Use Technology: An Excerpt From ‘Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors’
Elisabeth Donnelly discusses “ Sarah Stodola‘s fascinating new book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, which she describes as “an intimate and well-researched look inside the habits and traditions of 18 of your favorite writers (including David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and George Orwell).”
Read an exclusive preview, which looks at Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith’s very different approaches to technology and the Internet’s role [in] their writing.
7 of Margaret Atwood’s Apocalpyses, Ranked From Pretty Survivable to Totally Terrifying
Laura I. Miller writes:
Margaret Atwood is the queen of post-apocalyptic fiction. From zombies to worldwide contagions, few things are as captivating as the apocalypses she conjures … Atwood’s post-apocalyptic stories are as much about physical survival as psychological endurance, and her dystopias are among the most wretched and most (horrifyingly) believable ones I’ve encountered as a reader.
In honor of the upcoming release of the film version of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Miller considers which of Atwood’s apocalypses she thinks she could survive. She what she has to say about these works:
- The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home
- MaddAddam
- Year of the Flood
- Oryx and Crake
- Positron
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- The Tent
10 Great Novels That Aren’t About What You Heard They Were About
Science fiction and fantasy novels become famous for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they catch the zeitgeist, or maybe they have one idea that everybody falls in love with. But sometimes, we all fixate on something that’s not the actual point of the book. Here are 10 great novels that aren’t about what everybody thinks.
How many of these books have you read?
- Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
- Dune and Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert.
- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes.
- Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement.
- How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.
And be sure to check out the comments to see what other people would add to this list.
