Because I was sick for much of last week, this week’s entry is short. Stories don’t need morals or messages Salon’s Laura Miller caused a flurry of comments recently with this article about a post on the New York Times education blog. In that post the parents of twins talked about taking their kids’ third-grade […]
Book Reviewing in the News There’s been a lot of discussion surrounding the announcement that Adam Mars-Jones won the Hatchet Job prize for the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant” book review published in the last year. Judge Sam Leith said: “The best hatchets, in criticism, are wielded with precision as much as they are with force.
Hemingway & Gellhorn Trailer: Will HBO Get Hemingway Right? Their upcoming movie Hemingway & Gellhorn is, as the title suggests, not only about the author of The Old Man and the Sea (adapted in 1958) and so on, but also Martha Gellhorn, a writer equally worthy (perhaps more so) of the biopic treatment. And if
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‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ turns 50: The Reading Life – latimes.com Ken Kesey’s novel ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ which became an Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson, turns 50. Does it stand up to time? That’s the question Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times asked herself, then read the novel for
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Finally, Out with the Old Year. . . In what I promise will be the last list of “best books of 2011” reported here, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles summarizes his favorite novels of 2011 in the following categories: most devastating best Western weirdest sex best seafaring tale most metaphysical best novel about novels
It’s New Year’s Eve, a good time to look back on what’s happened in the literary world this year. Here are two more “best books” lists I think I’ve missed, NPR’s choices of The Best Music Books of 2011 and 2011’s Best American Poetry. Britain’s The Telegraph provides comprehensive coverage in The Literary Year 2011.
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How the literary female detective has changed In The Christian Science Monitor Randy Dotinga says of Scottish mystery writer Denise Mina: [she] has become one of the finest mystery writers of the 21st century. Her deeply perceptive grasp on the inner lives of crooks, cops, journalists, and their families has allowed her books to transcend
Visitors make special literary find at bookstore in downtown Houston – houstonherald.com | Houston Herald – Houston, MO: News. When they came to Houston for the first time a few weeks ago, a Columbia couple didn’t expect to go home with a prized addition to their collection of books by a famous 20th century Canadian
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When novels change history As with so many concepts in literature, the French have an elegant word for it: uchronie. For Anglophone readers and writers, we have to make do with such unwieldy terms as “counterfactual novels”, “alternate timelines” and “allohistories” to describe these books. Uchronie is a neologism modelled on Utopia – a “no-time”
Book lovers rake in the reading as publishers release fall titles It’s time to trade in the beach reads for the usually longer and more serious fall reads. The Sacramento Bee‘s Allen Pierleoni lists upcoming new titles, some by big-name authors (think Joan Didion, Lee Child, Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, and Sue Grafton ) in
