What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t, in the Town That Inspired “To Kill a Mockingbird” In a long piece for Smithsonian Magazine, Paul Theroux describes a visit to Monroeville, AL, home of author Harper Lee and inspiration for the fictional Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird: Monroeville is like many towns of its size in Alabama—indeed […]
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How the Modern Detective Novel Was Born Here Martin Edwards, author of the new book The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story, gives a concise history of the development of the modern detective novel. Authors he discusses include the following: Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle,
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Here’s Why Famous Authors Chose Their Fake Names For as long as there have been books, there have been authors disguising themselves behind pseudonyms. Some do it for political reasons, others for personal concerns, and some simply for the joy of mischief. In any case, pseudonyms are a tpower tool for writers, allowing their pens
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10 authors who excel on the internet If you love literature, here’s your chance to connect with some of the most technologically savvy writers: a few [writers] are using the etherland as a canvas for experimentation and play. They have moved their storytelling, wit and insight from page to pixel, winning fans and readers in
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Harlan Coben: ’Every successful author still has to treat it as a job’ An informative article on one of my favorite writers of thrillers, Harlan Coben. And a very successful writer he is: He’s written 27 novels, seven of them New York Times No 1 bestsellers. He has 60m books in print in 41 languages,
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Face it, book snobs, crime fiction is real literature – and Ian Rankin proves it On the occasion of Ian Rankin’s becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Allan Massie discusses the author of the John Rebus novels and crime fiction in general. Massie bets that having been “received into Scotland’s intellectual elite
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Julianne Moore on Forging a Bond With Alzheimer’s Patients Cara Buckley reports on how Julianne Moore prepared for her role in the film of Still Alice, a performance that won her an Oscar for best actress. Moore played Alice Howland, a Harvard cognifive psychologist with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. (Early-onset Alzheimer’s is defined as onset before
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Man in Hole: Turning novels’ plots into data points Dan Piepenbring reports for The Paris Review on an example of digital humanities, or the application of big-data crunching to literary analysis: Motherboard has a new article about Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English professor who’s been studying what he calls “the relationship between sentiment
The 10 Best Books Shorter Than 150 Pages Sarah Gerard, author of Binary Star, recommends 10 short novels. I’ve got this one bookmarked for next December, when I may be scrambling to complete by personal reading challenge on Goodreads. Dean Koontz on Life, Literature & His New Book ‘Saint Odd’ (INTERVIEW) “I’ve always loved the
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Guns, gay marriage and a real-life murder: The private life of thriller writer Patricia Cornwell Patricia Cornwell’s insecurities are rooted in a life story that reads like an over-ripe work of fiction. Married to neuroscientist Staci Gruber Cornwell is more grounded these days The Henry Ford of Books The planet’s best-selling author since 2001, James
