Is the literary trend toward passive women progress? Maybe we’ve been misreading Lynn Steger Strong writes that Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy “broke open a new and surprisingly vital form: the novel of passivity.” Strong is happy to see that, for the last decade or so, women’s fiction has been recognized for probing what the novel—“forms […]
Alan Dershowitz claims a fictional lawyer defamed him. The implications for novelists are very real. on Charles of the Washington Post reports that Alan Dershowitz, a real-life attorney, claims that he was defamed by a fictional attorney on the CBS All Access show The Good Fight. This may sound comic, “But his complaint, if successful,
More Book-Related Pandemic News Luckily, books still exist, and can be their own vehicle for connection. And what better reading material for right now than books where the characters are, in some way, alone? None of these are dystopian (at least not in the traditional sense), but are instead characterized by protagonists with complex interior
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“What Do I Know To Be True?”: Emma Copley Eisenberg on Truth in Nonfiction, Writing Trauma, and The Dead Girl Newsroom Jacqueline Alnes talks with Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of true-crime book The Third Rainbow Girl, “about what it means to seek truth in nonfiction, and how writing the personal can allow for more complicated
American Dirt Starts An Important Conversation But Not The One Author Intended I avoided the recent brouhaha over Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt while it was developing, but most of the dust seems to have settled now. If you looking for a summary of the situation, this article provides a good overview. It also contains
Learning to Write Mysteries the Mystic River Way Angie Kim’s recently published debut novel Miracle Creek is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Dennis Lehane’s 2001 book Mystic River is a novel I still remember well even after all these years. Coming across this article, in which Angie Kim explains
Richard Russo: On the Moral Power of Regret One of the most memorable novels I’ve ever read is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001). When I came across this essay by Russo, I knew I had to stop and take the time to settle in with it. I hope you learn from it as much as
Lots of interesting literary-related articles this week. Crime writers react with fury to claim their books hinder rape trials The Staunch prize was founded in 2018 to honor a thriller ““in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” This article reports on the many writers, including Val McDermid and Sophie Hannah,
I take no pleasure in reporting this. Back in 2017 I read Jay Asher’s book Thirteen Reasons Why in preparation for the Netflix series. I wrote about the mixed messages I found in the book, which disturbed me so much that I refused to watch the Netflix production, in Thoughts on “Thirteen Reasons Why.” Now
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The HBO adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects begins tonight (July 8, 2018). “To me,” she says, “Sharp Objects is a Western. The gunslinger goes back to his town to discover it’s been taken over by the bad guys. And she’s gotta get rid of all the bad stuff. The gunslinger who’s arrived to
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