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 […]
“Everything I write is about the stories people tell themselves about themselves to make life more bearable, which basically is what all people do all the time.” — mystery novelist Laura Lippman Source: ‘Most Dangerous Thing’ a tale of summertime & secrets kept
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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
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
Kurt Vonnegut narrates his eight tips on how to write a good story: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. Every character should want something, even if
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‘America’s Final Beginning’ a clumsy, preachy novel written by a beginner. I offer this review as a good definition of what is commonly known as a “program novel” or a “propaganda novel”: a novel that is written to portray a message but that forgets the first requirement of a novel is to tell a good
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Why fiction is good for you Jonathan Gottschall is getting a lot of mileage from the recent publication of his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. In this piece he addresses the issue of whether fiction in all its forms—TV shows and commercials, religious beliefs, and social commentary as well as novels,
“writing and reading can allow people to live other lives and to try things out symbolically so that we can make better decisions about what we value and do. There is no guarantee, of course, that reading and writing make people act more wisely. But, writing and reading, by expanding our experience and repertoire of
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“I’m conscious of writing as a living, breathing practice, not as something in a textbook or something you do for a grade in a 10-week course. It’s living a life. And particularly for women, it’s living a struggle to claim artistic practice as a viable and socially relevant activity. So as a writer I teach
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The private lives of great writers What would we do without literary criticism wars? Just how relevant is an author’s private life to our appreciation or understanding of his or her work? Many would argue that we should disregard it entirely. Others (myself included) might point out that while you can thoroughly enjoy a novel
