I don’t write fiction, but I do enjoy reading it. I also enjoy reading about the writing of fiction, because understanding the issues that writers consider about their writing process makes me a more competent reader and critic. I grabbed this book when I saw it on the “Featured” shelf at the library. I was […]
“What About the Baby?” by Alice McDermott Read More »
Opinion Have we forgotten what a public library is for? The executive directors of the Michigan Library Association and Michigan ACLU reflected on the recent vote to defund a public library outside of Grand Rapids over its display of LGBTQ books. Categories: Censorship, Libraries The Ultimate Guide to Wondrous Independent Bookstores Shortly after opting out
Over the Past 25 Years, the Big Publishers Got Bigger—and Fewer A report from Publishers Weekly: As 2022 began, the U.S. trade publishing business was dominated by what has been called the Big Five—Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Before the Penguin–Random House merger in 2013, that group was
An In-Depth Guide to Book Sizes Every once in a while I come across a book that isn’t a standard size. That difference may not seem important, but it can make shelving the book difficult if you want to put it in with, say, other books by the same author. Category: Publishing People Are Sharing
Introduction I still remember the experience of first seeing the movie Planet of the Apes (the original 1968 version starring Charlton Heston). As the movie ended, Taylor (the astronaut played by Heston) and Nova rode off on a horse in search of a new place to live. As they rode along the beach, the camera
What Makes a Good Twist Ending? Read More »
“There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single ‘reliable’ narrator, I often wonder; is this the whole story? What could be missing here? Truth is often a multiplicity of perspectives, and sometimes the more viewpoints and versions of events there
5 Effective Multiple-Perspective Novels Read More »
Making Story Structure Your Own I’ve recently been working on reviews of two Big Books: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (530 pages) To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (704 pages) Big Books contain so much that finding a way into discussing them is often a challenge. For both of these novels I’ve
Writers’ Inner Voices Many writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ the voices of the characters they create and having characters who talk back to them, rebel, and ‘do their own thing’. It’s an experience described by a wide range of authors from Enid Blyton, Alice Walker, Quentin Tarantino and Charles Dickens through to Samuel Beckett,
How Crime Writers Use Unreliable Narrators to Add Suspense Emily Martin uses the categories that William Riggan explores in his book Pícaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator to look at ways crime writers employ them to build suspense. The 2021 Tournament of Books Long List Next March’s Tournament of Books, something that
See What the World’s Reading Habits Look Like in 2020 The editing and proofreading service Global English Editing gathered statistics from various sources, including Pew Research and Amazon’s bestsellers page, that demonstrate how the world’s reading habits changed over the course of 2020: “35 percent of web users worldwide reported reading more during the pandemic,
