The Best Stephen King Book: Readers’ Picks Readers have spoken. The Stand won in a landslide as Stephen King’s most popular novel. If your King favorite is something else, check the pie chart here to see how it stacked up. New & Forthcoming: The Algonquin Reader Download Algonquin Books’ big list of books due out […]
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
This week’s link round-up: The 42 Best Lines from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series: I’m sorry that I missed Towel Day on May 25, the annual celebration of the life and work of Douglas Adams, but I’ve put it on the literary calendar so I won’t forget next year. In honor
A Coalition of Dunces The Pulitzer Prize committee refused to award a 2011 prize for literature despite the nominations of three novels by the judges. The Morning News has a good summary of the issue. And in Time magazine’s entertainment section, writer Lev Grossman explains Why I’m Okay With There Being No Pulitzer for Fiction
The 10 Most Disturbing Books Of All Time In my younger days if I heard a book or movie was disturbing or hard to handle I generally took that as a challenge. Most books generally turned out to not be too bad, but occasionally I’d come across something that would leave me with a sick
Why teens should read ‘adult’ fiction – and vice-versa Sheila Heti doesn’t understand why so many adults are reading YA (young adult) literature such as The Hunger Games: What surprises me most about YA books is not that adults are reading them in mass numbers (as with Hunger Games appearing on bestseller lists everywhere); it’s
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
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.
America’s Most Literate Cities, 2011 Drawing from a variety of available data resources, the America’s Most Literate Cities study ranks the largest cities (population 250,000 and above) in the United States. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources.
And the Nominees Are . . . Last week saw the announcements of nominations for two big sets of literary prizes. Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction in the following categories: best novel, best first novel by an
