How Stephen King Made Pop Culture Weird If you’ve ever been to Austin, TX, you’ve seen the bumper stickers: “Keep Austin Weird.” Even my new hometown of Tacoma, WA, likes to call itself weird, as does Portland, OR, in the photo above. Lincoln Michel explains that these are not isolated occurrences: If you haven’t heard, […]
These are the most interesting of the articles I spent time with last week. Q&A: CHRISTINE SNEED DISCUSSES HER COMPELLING STORY COLLECTION ABOUT THE LURE OF FAME In this interview fiction writer Christine Sneed, whose latest work is the story collection The Virginity of Famous Men, discusses why fame and our human flaws are good
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ALAN MOORE GOES (VERY VERY) BIG WITH JERUSALEM Alan Moore’s novel Jerusalem weighs in at more than 1,200 pages. Joshua Zajdman has been carrying it around for a while, and people’s questions and comments about its size have triggered him to reflect: why are “big books” perceived so differently? How long have “big books” been
Under Pamela Paul, a New Books Desk Takes Shape at the ’Times’ One of the book resources I look at most often is coverage by The New York Times. In this article Publishers Weekly looks at recent changes in the way the paper covers book-related news: In mid August, New York Times executive editor Dean
As Far As Your Brain Is Concerned, Audiobooks Are Not ‘Cheating’ I love audiobooks; they enable me to read while plodding along on the treadmill or doing chores around the house. I’ve always thought that listening to a book instead of reading it is not cheating as long as I listen to the unabridged version.
These are articles from around the web that caught my eye over the last week. IS FICTION AN ADDICTION? Who among us who love reading fiction have not asked ourselves these questions: At some point we must ask ourselves if fiction is junk food for our souls. Too much of my lifetime has been consumed in
10 Best Whodunits I love a good mystery! Here mystery novelist John Verdon (his latest book is Wolf Lake, featuring NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney) offers a list of “ten remarkable works, each of which has a special appeal to my whodunit mentality”: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Hound of the
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Liane Moriarty’s Favorite Books with Sudden Life-Changing Moments In Liane Moriarty’s seventh novel, Truly Madly Guilty, something terrible occurs at “an ordinary neighborhood barbecue in an ordinary neighborhood backyard.” It’s something so profound and unsettling, it seems to rewire the six adults and three children present; will any of them be able to recover the
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LITERARY OR GENRE, IT’S THE PLOT THAT COUNTS When you read a novel, which aspect of the fiction is more important to you, characterization or plot? This is a common question, yet for a long time now I’ve thought it’s not exactly the right question, or at least not the best way to look at
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On Novels and Novelists My 10 Favorite Books: Michael Cunningham Author MIchael Cunningham lists the 10 (really 11) books he’d want with him if he were stranded on a deserted island. The Author of ‘The Nest’ on How She Got Up the Courage to Write Here’s an interview with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of the
