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 ]
Stevens’s “The Making of a Justice” is both a personal memoir and a meditation on the law. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-07-17 13:32:04 UTC ]
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Last night, Variety reported that Lakeith Stanfield (also known as the actual best part of Atlanta, there I said it, don’t @ me) to star in a feature film adaptation of Kwame Onwuachi’s Notes From a Young Black Chef—which is an essential cooking memoir that you should go read immediately if you... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-07-16 14:28:13 UTC ]
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Imagine that you are a character from a classic tale pitching your memoir to a literary agent. You know that it will become the next bestseller. Write your query letter, story synopsis, or elevator pitch to the agent. The post It’s My Story and I’ll Pitch if I Want To by Cassandra Lipp appeared... Continue reading at Writer's Digest
[ Writer's Digest | 2019-07-16 09:00:28 UTC ]
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Virago has scooped an "eye-opening” memoir from broadcaster Sandi Toksvig, based around what she sees from the upper deck of a London bus. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-07-15 11:56:36 UTC ]
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As we descend into the hazy thick of summer, this week’s book events remind us that one day in a life has the power to change everything. Indeed, it’s all that ever changes anything. In the memoir corner, we have a traumatic encounter at the train station, a knock on the door of a rundown... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2019-07-12 14:20:00 UTC ]
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A pitcher who had modest success with the Yankees in the 1960s, Bouton revealed the seamier side of baseball in a book that was a best seller. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-07-11 02:47:37 UTC ]
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“How was the church food of your youth?” and other questions for Amber Scorah on her new memoir about leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses. Continue reading at The Paris Review
[ The Paris Review | 2019-07-05 13:00:54 UTC ]
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Former prime minister David Cameron will “talk candidly” to mark the publication of his long-awaited autobiography, For The Record (William Collins), in a series of events. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-07-04 16:12:23 UTC ]
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JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON’S memoir Crabcakes begins with the death of his tenant, Mrs. Channie Washington. A traditional memoir might have sketched McPherson’s upbringing: the strapped childhood in segregated Savannah, Georgia, as the son of an electrician and a maid, and his ascent to Harvard Law... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2019-07-04 12:30:37 UTC ]
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The former baseball commissioner, whose new memoir is “For the Good of the Game,” was a voracious childhood reader, “mostly about sports,” and especially “novels about the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-07-04 09:00:07 UTC ]
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Good news, memoir fans: Variety reports that Dani Shapiro’s bestselling memoir Inheritance will be adapted into a feature by Killer Films, with Cami Delavigne (the co-writer of Blue Valentine) on board to write the script. The memoir centers on Shapiro’s discovery, after a DNA test, that the man... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2019-07-03 13:43:07 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Alan Levenson Ever since early Islam, Jews have been dubbed the people of the book. The title stuck in European lands too, a deferential nod to the role of the Hebrew Bible in the Western canon, the breadth of Jewish literacy (never... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-07-02 20:46:30 UTC ]
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SPCK has signed ex-Lib Dem leader Tim Farron’s “gripping” autobiography, detailing how he balanced being a Christian and a Liberal during his political career. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-07-01 12:23:42 UTC ]
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A short list of books includes a personal memoir about a family’s struggle with schizophrenia, a history of psychiatry and an exploration of how tyrants think. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-06-28 22:41:56 UTC ]
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“A Good American Family,” by David Maraniss, examines the paranoia and brutality of the McCarthy era through the lens of his father’s experience. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2019-06-28 15:12:51 UTC ]
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Ebury will publish the memoir of Holocaust survivor and concentration camp librarian Dita Kraus, who inspired the novel The Librarian of Auschwitz (Ebury). Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-06-26 06:34:21 UTC ]
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Interviews Shelly Bhoil Tenzin Dickie is a Tibetan writer and translator and editor of The Treasury of Lives, a biographical encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region. Her edited anthology, Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-06-25 14:25:59 UTC ]
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Philip H. Geier, Jr., the long-time chairman and CEO of the advertising giant known as The Interpublic Group of Companies, died on Wednesday, June 19, at the age of 84. Over the course of his nearly six-decade-long career, Geier made a name for himself in the worlds of both advertising and... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-06-24 19:42:28 UTC ]
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The title of Bobby Hundreds’ book — “This Is Not a T-Shirt” — is straight-up transparent: It’s not a T-shirt. It’s less obvious at the outset — but not for long — that it’s also not a traditional memoir, brand history or “how-we-turned-a couple-hundred bucks-into-global-streetwear-label”... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2019-06-20 15:40:00 UTC ]
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The title of Bobby Hundreds' book — "This Is Not a T-Shirt" — is straight-up transparent: It's not a T-shirt. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2019-06-20 15:30:01 UTC ]
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