As you may have noticed, Barack Obama has a book out today. It’s a memoir, titled A Promised Land, that runs to more than seven-hundred pages and is still only a first volume—covering the period from Obama’s childhood to the raid, in 2011, that killed Osama bin Laden. Originally, Obama planned to write a shorter, single volume, but he ended up grappling with a surfeit of good material and with a desire to offer both rich historical detail and a compelling narrative; as he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “there are parts of the book where I just had a really nice description I wanted to leave in and the editor was like, ‘Do we really need this, like, do we really?’ and I said, ‘Eh, I like it, sorry. That’s just a pretty description and I want to leave it.’” Online, every writer related and every editor winced. “Kill your darlings,” Seyward Darby, the editor in chief of the Atavist Magazine, advised. “It’s liberating, I promise.” Ahead of publication day, the former president embarked on a media tour, coverage of which has, implicitly and often explicitly, provided a marked contrast with the behavior of the soon-to-be-former president. Interviewers have asked Obama to weigh in on Trump’s refusal to concede defeat and the state of the country generally; in his answers, Obama has emphasized the centrality of America’s polarized information ecosystem in putting Trump in the White House and bolstering his unhinged claim that he gets to stay there. As Brian Stelter, CNN’s... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-11-17 13:29:32 UTC ]
How language shapes emotion across cultures. | Lit Hub Science Baynard Woods reflects on how writing a book forced him to confront the many lies of whiteness. | Lit Hub Memoir How do you begin to write a novel about 6th-century Londinium, the “darkest corner of the Dark Ages”? | Lit Hub History... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-07-20 10:30:12 UTC ]
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Journalist and super fan Danyel Smith champions the role of Black women in pop music in “Shine Bright,” which combines memoir with music history. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2022-07-18 19:10:00 UTC ]
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Erika L. Sánchez's insightful memoir might not resonate with the easily offended. But those looking for an unfiltered, feel-good story will find it here. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-07-17 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Isaac Fitzgerald’s “Dirtbag, Massachusetts” is a memoir about male misbehavior and the struggle to make sense of oneself. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-07-16 09:00:11 UTC ]
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“I was still an English Learner, for crying out loud; how could I ever imagine working in the movie industry?” How rummaging through Oliver Stone’s home office allowed a young Rafael Agustín to dream big. | Lit Hub Memoir If “empathy towards other species and toward nature is the only way out of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-07-15 10:30:12 UTC ]
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Insiders say outgoing prime minister unlikely to write about personal life but book deal possible this autumnBoris Johnson could be paid more than £1m for his memoir, according to publishing insiders. But anyone expecting a kiss-and-tell may be disappointed, as industry professionals have said... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-07-15 10:12:09 UTC ]
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"Writing my memoir essentially gave me the confidence that I could write fiction." The post Surrounded by Choice: The Millions Interviews Sopan Deb appeared first on The Millions. Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2022-07-15 10:00:16 UTC ]
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HarperCollins wins a British crime thriller debut, Gallery takes on a memoir by a former Scientologist, and more. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-07-15 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Lindy Elkins-Tanton, lead scientist for NASA’s Psyche mission, describes challenges and successes in “A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman.” Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2022-07-14 20:06:29 UTC ]
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The 'Dirty Dancing' star discusses the upcoming sequel, her memoir and the Supreme Court's 'fundamentally wrong' abortion ruling. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2022-07-14 14:00:17 UTC ]
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When CJ Hauser published “The Crane Wife” in The Paris Review, an essay about repressing her needs in a relationship, calling off a wedding, and going to study whooping cranes on the Gulf Coast, it quickly became a viral hit. Three years later, her 17-piece memoir in essays of the same name... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-07-14 11:00:00 UTC ]
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How Josephine Baker transformed from dancer to spy. | Lit Hub History “Although they’d been dead for 30 years, I was writing their story in a taut, blow-by-blow replay as the noose of Jones’s madness pulled tighter and tighter.” Julia Scheeres on the harrowing experience of writing about the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-07-13 10:30:04 UTC ]
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Random House buys a memoir about alcoholism and family, and Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor sells a historical trilogy to Europa. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-07-08 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Rafael Agustin dishes about "Illegally Yours," his candid new memoir about a childhood without documents, and the TV pilot that never made it. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2022-07-07 13:00:42 UTC ]
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“I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did,” says the poet and novelist, whose new book is the memoir “Crying in the Bathroom.” “That’s why I always write about the financial realities of my characters.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-07-07 09:00:11 UTC ]
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"The Pallbearers Club" is presented as a found memoir manuscript, complicated by the contradictory annotation of an enigmatic woman. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2022-07-04 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Dive into a tender coming-of-age memoir by Isaac Fitzgerald, a biography of Vladimir V. Putin and novels from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Bolu Babalola and Daniel Nieh. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2022-06-30 09:00:24 UTC ]
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Solitary confinement is a form of torture that the prison system makes commonplace. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2022-06-26 10:00:00 UTC ]
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Arceneaux, an astronaut on SpaceX’s Inspiration4 last September, describes how having cancer as a child changed her faith and the rest of her life in ‘Wild Ride: A Memoir of IV Drips and Rocket Ships’ (Convergent, Sept. 6). Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-06-22 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Kate Clanchy’s memoir about teaching won the Orwell prize. Then, a year later, it became the centre of a storm that would engulf the lives of the author, her critics and dozens of people in the book trade. So what happened?At the end of March, a book that had been condemned to die came back to... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-06-18 08:00:13 UTC ]
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