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 […]
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.
2011: The Literary Year in Review Read More »
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
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”
Books | Talking Book and Braille Library in Seattle is a volunteer wonder | Seattle Times Newspaper The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library serves more than 10,000 state residents and runs on the best efforts of 400 volunteers, providing recorded and Braille books for anyone with a disability that prevents them from reading books
Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early
It’s easy to talk about books that are either amazingly good or blatantly bad; we usually have no trouble articulating the points that we either love or loathe. But it’s often hard to find much of anything to say about a book that we think is just so-so, mediocre, ordinary—perhaps the nicest term is unremarkable.
Why is it so hard to review mediocre books? Read More »
Why is dystopia so appealing to young adults? A dystopia is an imaginary world in which people live dehumanized lives of fear and subjugation; it’s the opposite of utopia. In this piece YA writer Moira Young examines why distopian novels such as Suzanne Collins’s recent Hunger Games trilogy are so popular with young people: Books
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
