Top 10 Essentials to a Writer’s Life | WritersDigest.com. Bestselling nonfiction author Erik Larson (Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts) offers this list of 10 essentials for writers. Included after the list are links to articles about authors Gore Vidal and Nora Ephron, and to quotations about writing.
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The Heroine in the Drawing Room Cynthia Crossen, books columnist for the Wall Street Journal, contemplates the meaning of the phrase domestic fiction, a genre often sneered at: Domestic fiction, like all literary genres, can be bad, and bad in an especially cloying, attenuated and dreary way. I call bad domestic novels Hallmark fiction, and
Top 7 Literary Cities in Europe Tourism-Review.com explores “the top seven European cities for literary tourists”: Edinburgh, Scotland Dublin, Ireland London, England Paris, France St. Petersburg, Russia Stockholm, Sweden Norwich, England A List of the Greatest Lists in Literature Speaking of lists, The Atlantic offers this one: “our favorite lists in literature, from short to
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Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey to be reworked by Val McDermid I haven’t been this literarily excited in a long, long time. One of my favorite authors, Val McDermid, has been chosen to update Jane Austen’s least well known novel, Northanger Abbey, for a modern audience: Northanger Abbey is the story of the gothic novel-obsessed 17-year-old
“Everything I write is about the stories people tell themselves about themselves to make life more bearable, which basically is what all people do all the time.” — mystery novelist Laura Lippman Source: ‘Most Dangerous Thing’ a tale of summertime & secrets kept
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Here are a few things that caught my eye over the past week. What Makes Bad Writing From Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal Invitation to World Literature From Gilgamesh to Gogol, the world has been enriched by the writings of gifted people from a wide range of cultural traditions and regions of the
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
Kurt Vonnegut narrates his eight tips on how to write a good story: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. Every character should want something, even if
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‘America’s Final Beginning’ a clumsy, preachy novel written by a beginner. I offer this review as a good definition of what is commonly known as a “program novel” or a “propaganda novel”: a novel that is written to portray a message but that forgets the first requirement of a novel is to tell a good
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Why fiction is good for you Jonathan Gottschall is getting a lot of mileage from the recent publication of his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. In this piece he addresses the issue of whether fiction in all its forms—TV shows and commercials, religious beliefs, and social commentary as well as novels,
