Writing

Monday Miscellany

Nothing Is More Real Than Fiction Over on BookRiot Greg Zimmerman praises the power of ficiton: I get really angry when someone says they don’t read fiction because it’s all made up and “not real.” Bullshit! Nothing is more real than fiction. Nothing helps us make sense of the real world more than fiction. Nothing […]

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Monday Miscellany

Your Favorites: 100 Best-Ever Teen Novels A while back NPR asked readers/listeners to vote on their favorite YA novels. 75,220 people voted, helping to whittle the list of 235 finalists down to the top 100. In addition to the list of winners, this page includes links to explanations of what exactly constitutes YA literature. A

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Erik Larson’s Top 10 Essentials to a Writer’s Life

Top 10 Essentials to a Writer’s Life | WritersDigest.com. Bestselling nonfiction author Erik Larson (Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts) offers this list of 10 essentials for writers. Included after the list are links to articles about authors Gore Vidal and Nora Ephron, and to quotations about writing.

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Monday Miscellany

The Heroine in the Drawing Room Cynthia Crossen, books columnist for the Wall Street Journal, contemplates the meaning of the phrase domestic fiction, a genre often sneered at: Domestic fiction, like all literary genres, can be bad, and bad in an especially cloying, attenuated and dreary way. I call bad domestic novels Hallmark fiction, and

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Monday Miscellany: Lists Edition

Top 7 Literary Cities in Europe Tourism-Review.com explores “the top seven European cities for literary tourists”: Edinburgh, Scotland Dublin, Ireland London, England Paris, France St. Petersburg, Russia Stockholm, Sweden Norwich, England A List of the Greatest Lists in Literature Speaking of lists, The Atlantic offers this one: “our favorite lists in literature, from short to

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Monday Miscellany

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to be reworked by Val McDermid I haven’t been this literarily excited in a long, long time. One of my favorite authors, Val McDermid, has been chosen to update Jane Austen’s least well known novel, Northanger Abbey, for a modern audience: Northanger Abbey is the story of the gothic novel-obsessed 17-year-old

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Monday Miscellany

Here are a few things that caught my eye over the past week. What Makes Bad Writing From Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal Invitation to World Literature From Gilgamesh to Gogol, the world has been enriched by the writings of gifted people from a wide range of cultural traditions and regions of the

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Monday Miscellany

Here’s what caught my eye over the past week:  ‘I Am The Cheese’: A Nightmarish Nail-Biter: The most chilling book I’ve ever read is Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese. In this piece, which is almost as compelling as the novel itself, author Ben Marcus remembers how reading the book affected him as a 12-year-old

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