Billed as ‘a therapeutic novel’, the publisher’s first foray into fiction follows 29-year-old Anna’s mental health journey – with a view to helping the reader. But how useful can such clunky writing be?At 29 years old, Anna is full of self-loathing. She hates her job, her boyfriend is having an affair and her parents’ response to her troubles is indifferent at best. This is the starting point for A Voice of One’s Own, the first novel to be published by The School of Life. In its pages, fiction and self-help make for uneasy bedfellows.Co-founded by philosopher Alain de Botton in 2008, The School of Life broadly aims to teach its “students” how to lead calmer, more fulfilling lives. Its publishing arm, launched in 2016, disseminates self-help literature with pithy titles such as Reasons to be Hopeful and A Simpler Life, which purport to blend philosophical wisdom with practical advice. Like De Botton himself, the books are Marmite; while many critique the school for peddling watered-down pop philosophy, its teachings have clearly found a market. The organisation has branches in seven major cities, and its most popular title, Big Ideas for Curious Minds, has sold over 120,000 copies globally, while its workshops on playfulness, confidence and self-awareness regularly sell out. The new book represents a departure, however. Through A Voice of One’s Own, The School of Life is showing, rather than telling, its readers how to live better. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-07-07 15:45:50 UTC ]
Atticus Lish was acclaimed for his first novel 'Preparation for the Next Life.' His second, 'The War for Gloria,' is more raw, painful and personal. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-09-02 13:00:39 UTC ]
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Book Reviews The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo by Steven Taylor / Flickr The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s first novel, is textually connected to the works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston,... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-08-18 20:12:10 UTC ]
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The country music superstar has teamed up with the novelist James Patterson to write Run, Rose, Run, which will be published in MarchFirst globally successful entertainer, then heroic sponsor of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine, and now novelist … Dolly Parton seems determined to prove that there... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-08-11 16:27:28 UTC ]
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Independent publisher Influx Press is launching a new fiction prize for Black British women, in partnership with lifestyle platform Black Ballad. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-07-27 19:32:32 UTC ]
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"The notion of 'a book' is just a convenient fiction which we books go along with because it serves the needs of the bean counters in publishing, not to mention the ego of the writers. But the reality is far more complex.” So explains “the Book”, one of the narrators of Ruth Ozeki’s fourth novel... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-07-09 19:27:08 UTC ]
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The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka is coming out with his first novel in almost 50 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. The post Fifty Years Later, a New Novel Emerges appeared first on The Millions. Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2021-06-24 09:59:45 UTC ]
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The forthcoming head of Amazon's publishing arm, a 10-year veteran at the business, looks toward its future. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2021-06-18 04:00:00 UTC ]
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'Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch,' historical fiction about Kepler's mother, is Galchen's first novel since 2008's 'Atmospheric Disturbances.' Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-06-03 14:00:33 UTC ]
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Book Reviews Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer in the TV adaptation of A Discovery of Witches (2018) / IMDB Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy has taken a new life through the Sundance dramatic series, A Discovery of Witches. The novels... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-05-27 13:42:23 UTC ]
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"Second Place," Rachel Cusk's first novel after the radical, brilliant "Outline" trilogy, follows a forceful woman who's had enough of difficult men. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-04-28 14:00:33 UTC ]
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Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the US cover for Wole Soyinka’s new novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, which will be published on September 28 by Pantheon Books. This will be Soyinka’s first novel to be published in 48 years, and also the first since he won the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-04-23 13:30:34 UTC ]
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While we don’t know what the state of the our pandemic society will be come September, we can at least be sure that we’ll all be getting a little Joy Williams, as a treat. Specifically, a new novel—her fifth, and her first since 2000’s The Quick and the Dead, which was a runner-up for the […] Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-03-03 21:01:23 UTC ]
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Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2021-03-02 16:46:21 UTC ]
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The Books of Jacob, praised by the Nobel prize judges and winner of Poland’s prestigious Nike award, will be published in the UK in NovemberThe magnum opus of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk – a novel that has taken seven years to translate and has brought its author death threats in her native... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-26 15:00:18 UTC ]
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Faber is to publish Lucy Caldwell's first novel in nearly a decade, These Days. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-23 01:30:10 UTC ]
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READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
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The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown,... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-02-16 15:21:36 UTC ]
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On October 5, this timeline will be blessed/cursed by Jonathan Franzen’s first novel since 2015: Crossroads, or, if you’re not abbreviating, Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1. It’s the first novel of a trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, which, yes, nods to the doomed... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2021-02-10 17:59:29 UTC ]
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HarperNorth has snared its first fiction acquisition, a gritty gangland thriller by Karen Woods. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-08 01:06:27 UTC ]
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LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH was the original kinky bastard. A 19th-century Viennese nobleman, he wrote the controversial 1870 novella Venus in Furs, which explored his fetish for pain and abasement, and inadvertently helped coin the term “masochism.” The Masochist, Slovenian poet Katja Perat’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-19 18:00:58 UTC ]
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