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 ]
Adam Kay’s junior doctor memoir racked up impressive sales over the course of the year and topped the chart, but a self-published title was hot on its heels in second spot. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-08 05:28:53 UTC ]
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Penguin Random House's parent company Bertelsmann has expressed confidence it will meet its targets for the full year 2019, reporting a boost in group revenues for the first nine months of 3.3%. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-08 00:49:57 UTC ]
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Penguin Ireland will publish New Zealand rugby union coach Joe Schmidt’s memoir later this month. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-06 02:38:57 UTC ]
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Tori Amos—synesthete musical prodigy, RAINN activist, and one of the most iconic singer-songwriters of the 1990s (easily the greatest musical decade)—is releasing a new, politically-themed memoir entitled Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage. The book, Amos’ first since... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-11-05 21:44:52 UTC ]
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In the middle of Carmen Maria Machado’s new memoir In the Dream House, CARMEN, stylized in all caps like a play script, sits across from the woman with whom she’s been in an abusive relationship (THE WOMAN IN THE DREAM HOUSE). The scene is set (“the curtain rises”) and we’re shown, “the house... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2019-11-05 12:00:26 UTC ]
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“WHAT IS DIFFICULT is not impossible.” Anne Boyer both writes and proves this maxim in The Undying, her crystalline memoir of illness and the hard knowledge that illness provides. The Undying engages with art from Aelius Aristides to John Donne to Audre Lorde, within an account of the author’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-11-04 20:00:59 UTC ]
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Val Kilmer’s memoir lands at a Big Five house, 'Dead Man Walking' goes graphic, the screenwriter of The Jerk sells a thriller, and more. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-11-01 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Katy Waldman reviews Carmen Maria Machado’s ”In the Dream House,“ a formally inventive memoir that recounts the author’s experience with an abusive relationship. Continue reading at New Yorker
[ New Yorker | 2019-10-31 17:04:01 UTC ]
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The book doesn’t offer a clear-eyed view of who the singer really was — he would have hated that. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2019-10-30 14:42:51 UTC ]
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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoSince studying Lara as a student, I have been a fan of Bernardine Evaristo’s work, and am delighted to see her win the Booker Prize this year. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve black characters with different backgrounds and experiences, most... Continue reading at British Council global
[ British Council global | 2019-10-30 09:49:28 UTC ]
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Carmen Maria Machado follows up her acclaimed collection of stories, “Her Body and Other Parties,” with a memoir about her frightening relationship with another woman while in graduate school. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-10-29 19:27:21 UTC ]
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JAQUIRA DÍAZ’S FIRST BOOK — the memoir Ordinary Girls, published by Algonquin Books on October 29 — lyrically chronicles a childhood and early adulthood marked by pain and chaos but also by joy and celebration. Díaz grew up, first, in one of Puerto Rico’s roughest neighborhoods and then amid... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-10-29 12:30:43 UTC ]
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Author Timothy J. Hillegonds shares three ideas on how to determine what to include and what to leave out of a memoir so that it supports the main themes of the book. The post But This Really Happened: What to Include and Leave Out of a Memoir by Timothy Hillegonds appeared first on Writer's... Continue reading at Writer's Digest
[ Writer's Digest | 2019-10-28 15:03:11 UTC ]
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ABC’s Black-ish spinoff joins a new memoir by Thomas Chatterton Williams in presenting a seemingly enlightened but ahistorical view of race. Continue reading at The Atlantic
[ The Atlantic | 2019-10-26 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Duras’s body of work is a reminder that it’s okay to press send, to publish your drafts.” On Marguerite Duras, proto-internet essayist. | Lit Hub Memoir “Space flight is not being powered by people doing reasonable things.” Peter Ward explores the fraught history (and inevitable future) of space... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-10-26 10:30:56 UTC ]
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Stop whatever it is you’re doing and pay attention to me because I have, just this morning, stumbled upon some joyous, and potentially game-changing, literary news: Val Kilmer is releasing a memoir. Yes, friends, according to Publishers Weekly, Simon & Schuster will publish I’m Your... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-10-25 16:13:04 UTC ]
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“Little Weirds,” a new collection by the actress and comedian, isn’t the funny memoir you might have expected. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-10-25 09:00:27 UTC ]
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Chatto & Windus has triumphed in a hotly-contested eight-way auction to publish an "extraordinarily brave" memoir about faith, loss and addiction. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-10-23 09:08:05 UTC ]
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Chelsea Green Publishing has announced plans to rush a climate manifesto by Roger Hallam, one of the world’s leading environmental activists, to press. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-10-22 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Head of Zeus has picked up a memoir of Belfast by poet and writer Ciaran Carson, who passed away earlier this month. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-10-22 01:49:57 UTC ]
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