The American author talks about growing up queer in a family of ‘wolves’, poverty and class in the US, and the 19th-century writers who inspired his latest novelBrandon Taylor writes quickly. “I can type almost as fast as I can think,” he says. The first draft of his debut novel, the Booker-shortlisted Real Life, took him five weeks; last June he challenged a writer friend to a race. The friend had been 30,000 words ahead on his book, with Taylor going from a standing start, but by August, Taylor had finished, while his friend was still ploughing on.Since Taylor says that “everybody in my family dies young”, one might assume that this is a rush to seize the day. But writing, he says, is also “the most fun I’m capable of having”. When he discovered the internet aged 12, via his parents’ dial-up modem in rural Alabama (the web being “this beautiful land that I could only visit temporarily because somebody wouldn’t pay the phone bill”), Taylor used to produce 8,000 words a day, writing five collaborative stories at once on roleplay forums. “That was good training for having stamina as a writer,” he explains, a genial 34-year-old in a blue denim shirt sitting at a table in the Guardian’s London offices. “As long as I have a good sense of scene or character, when I get a good first line there is nothing standing between me and the end.” Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-06-03 10:00:28 UTC ]
Simon & Schuster UK has acquired the 28th instalment in American author Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum bounty hunter series, alongside the first novel in a brand new series. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-09-22 17:14:06 UTC ]
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American author Mitzi Szereto says she has been plagued by fake pornographic e-books listed under her name on Amazon in a similar scam to one which previously targeted commercial women’s writers in the UK. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-11 21:51:56 UTC ]
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Quercus has acquired One Italian Summer and a second book from American author Rebecca Serle. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-07-01 19:33:59 UTC ]
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Hodder has removed a passage from American author Elin Hilderbrand’s latest novel after criticism over its reference to Anne Frank. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-06-10 01:28:19 UTC ]
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Pan Macmillan’s Tor imprint has signed Under the Whispering Door, The House in the Cerulean Sea and one further standalone novel by American author T J Klune. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-05-28 18:12:05 UTC ]
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In the introductory essay of White Magic, Elissa Washuta—a Native American author and member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe—examines the colonization of spirituality, as well as her own reticence to describe herself as a witch: “I just want a version of the occult that isn’t built on plunder, but I... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-05-07 11:01:00 UTC ]
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Lit Lists As spring emerges and lockdown restrictions continue, here is a list of new and upcoming translated works from around the world to fill your sunny days at home. Isabel Allende The Soul of a Woman Trans. Isabel Allende Ballantine Books,... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-05-03 19:19:35 UTC ]
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‘The Lost Decade’ is one of the shortest works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the American author best-known for The Great Gatsby. Published in Esquire magazine in December 1939, just one year before Fitzgerald died, ‘The Lost Decade’ is one of his most powerful short stories to deal with... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2021-04-17 14:00:20 UTC ]
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The American author John Naisbitt, whose 1982 bestselling book Megatrends was published in dozens of countries, has died at 92 Continue reading at ABC News
[ ABC News | 2021-04-10 13:18:30 UTC ]
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“DER LETZTE TANZ” (“The Last Dance”) — a story by Hungarian American author Susan Taubes written in German and published posthumously — tells the story of Mary Ann, a young girl who has an on-and-off love affair with a man she calls Death. He visits her in dreams, for the first time at the age... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-26 16:00:55 UTC ]
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Head of Zeus' Aries imprint has signed a two-book deal with American author Alex Finlay, including a book following a family made infamous after the airing of a true crime documentary. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-12 14:50:51 UTC ]
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Angry Robot has acquired its first novella collection from Hugo Award-winning American author Tim Pratt after seeing the author's Kickstarter campaign for the project. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-01-05 22:12:51 UTC ]
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"The first time we have sex, we are both fully clothed, at our desks during working hours, bathed in blue computer light.” So begins Luster, the extraordinary début novel from American author Raven Leilani, which has caused a sensation in the US and deserves to do the same here. The... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-01 23:03:04 UTC ]
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With no room for Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall trilogy, the six finalists also include four debutsHilary Mantel will not win a third Booker prize with the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, after American writers made a near clean sweep of this year’s shortlist.With four... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-09-15 12:21:07 UTC ]
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‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) is one of the most famous stories by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story is a powerful exploration of the dark side of human nature. How Hawthorne loads his story with such power is worthy […] The post... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-06-24 14:00:49 UTC ]
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Welbeck Publishing Group has acquired Dark Horses, a debut novel from American author Susan Mihalic. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-04-29 18:22:14 UTC ]
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IN A CAREER of almost four decades, American author Stephen Wright has produced exactly five novels. He doesn’t do short stories, he says; when he sits down to write, “I just jump in the pool and start swimming to the deep water.” And his novels are most definitely deep, his key themes being... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-04-14 12:30:54 UTC ]
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A reading pathway of the works of American author Charles Portis, most famous for True Grit, who died on February 17 at the age of 86. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-02-19 11:36:40 UTC ]
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The romanticized Belle Epoque in Paris was an age of political crisis: Julian Barnes on a (different) age of fake news and “gangster imperialism.” | Lit Hub History “Your friends say The novelist, Brandon Taylor, and you want to die of shame.” When the short story writer (reluctantly) goes long.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-18 11:30:46 UTC ]
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Each of the American author’s 56 novels was a bestseller and her fiction was extolled by writers from Scott Turow to David Foster WallaceMary Higgins Clark, the “Queen of Suspense” who topped charts with each of her 56 novels, has died at the age of 92.Simon & Schuster president Carolyn... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-02-03 11:54:59 UTC ]
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