Highsmith - author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, not to mention The Price of Salt (renamed Carol to go along with the movie) - had a dark, dark well of self-hate that affected most of her fiction. And yet: "It feels good to be hunted. If you read the genres of suspense – crime...
"Sedition — Merriam-Webster defines it as 'incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority' — is a word that echoes across American history, archaic yet familiar. Historically, charges of sedition have just as often been used to quash dissent … as they have to punish actual threats to government stability or functioning. But to many scholars and historians,...
From the company's announcement: "We did not come to this decision lightly. As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy...
Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said...
"In a highly polarized culture … the most recent and arguably final example of a great American work of art loved broadly and without reservations by the masses, the elite, and everyone in the so-called middle. Is Peanuts the last American artwork with universal appeal? And what is the spiritual message it conveys that engenders that appeal?" -...
The Sumerians had cuneiform and the Egyptians hieroglyphics, both complex and difficult to master, but who developed the system where each character represents a particular sound and the characters (letters) can be combined to form words the way sounds are? The Phoenicians invented the alphabet from which all the European and Near Eastern scripts (and possibly those of India...
Despite the disastrous rollout of a book that had been advance-hyped by some as a Grapes of Wrath-level work of literature, Jeanine Cummins's thriller about an Acapulco bookseller and her young son on the run from a drug cartel was the top-selling novel for adults of 2020. Here's a report on how the rise and fall and rise of...
There were other fine sci-fi writers, but Ray was the one who first engaged the mainstream audience. He had a huge impact on both American literature and popular culture. He was also one of the most significant California writers of the last century. - Los Angeles Review of Books
" described '21st-century sensibilities' as having prevented the inclusion of the play in Tales from Shakespeare, his retelling of 10 Shakespeare plays for children aged six and older." Morpurgo says that this way of describing his decision is bogus: he had to choose only ten plays, and he felt they should be stories appropriate for eight-year-olds, which The...
The legendary Powell's still sits empty of customers, no matter how many people may be buying online or via curbside pickup. The hope for 2021 is just to survive, says its CEO. But for some smaller bookstores, nimble moves were easier. Take Maggie Mae's, a children's bookstore. "The takeway for Maggie Mae’s ... is to 'embrace the pivot' by...
After all, why should we have access to the characters' sex lives? Raven Leilani, author of Luster, says "I try to portray it in the way that moves me when I see it, when it is awkward and silly, which it often is. To depict it that way is to make it tender; what it looks like when two...
Maria Dahvana Headley, whose Mere Wife and new translation of Beowulf have electrified readers (and listeners) on a teenage inspiration: "I happened upon The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, who was a surrealist painter and writer. ... I didn’t really know anything about surrealists then. The novel is full of wild characters that are very elderly women. It’s also...
Pam Jenoff - you may know her from The Diplomat's Wife, The Lost Girls of Paris, and many other novels - started taking writing classes just as soon as she began practicing law. "She has learned to be a tireless reviser — a skill acquired in the legal world, where 'people are always marking up your work.' She says,...
