Related Post: 10 Big Books I Have Read & Loved While scanning my bookshelves for Big Books I have read, I also found six that I have already read but want to read again. You’d think that once through a Big Book would be enough, but in fact Big Books contain so much that they […]
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Not too long ago, in the book section at Target, I overheard a woman say to her companion, “I stay away from big books.” They walked away, so I didn’t get to hear any more of the conversation, but it made me think about big books. I can imagine many reasons someone might offer for
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Writing Tips: James Lee Burke Usually I would put writing tips from a big-time author under the heading “on writing” rather than “on novels and novelists.” But I’m including these tips from one of my favorite mystery writers, James Lee Burke, here because he has written them out as an essay rather than a list
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If you enjoyed a good book and you’re a woman, the critics think you’re wrong Jennifer Weiner never passes up an opportunity to lament how the world of literary criticism mistreats authors (like her) and readers of popular literature. “Every once in a while,” she explains, “a literary novel becomes tremendously popular, transcending the typical
Vanishing Point This piece is a translation of a speech given by Swedish novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard on receiving a German literary award. Here the writer explains how reading fiction helps us to understand humanity in general by focusing our awareness on individual people. What characterizes our age is “the sheer volume of images of
Out with vampires, in with haunted houses: the ghost story is back Just in time for Halloween (or shortly thereafter), here are several new ghost stories: It has been supplanted in recent years by vampires, witches and other monsters, but now the good old-fashioned ghost story is back with a bang, with everyone from debut
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She swoons to conquer Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has a Ph.D. in the eighteenth century novel, asks, “Readers of romance fiction enjoy tales of alpha males and forced seduction. Could they still be considered feminists?” In 2013, Americans spent $1.08 billion dollars on romance novels, which represented a whopping 13 per cent of the adult-fiction revenue
The Jamaican novelist Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” a raw, violent epic that uses the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 to explore Jamaican politics, gang wars and drug trafficking. Mr. James is the first Jamaican-born author to win the Man
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Sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson says it’s getting harder and harder to predict the future Neal Stephenson is one of the biggest names in science fiction writing. Here, Drake Baer admits that he was “stoked” to talk to Stephenson and ask him, “What do you think is going to happen to human society in the near
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