The bestselling young adult author wrote her first published novel on a BlackBerry while commuting. Now she has a fan base ardent enough to complain about the way she ended one bookLauren Oliver, a bestselling young adult writer whose latest book, Vanishing Girls, was published in the US last week, did not set out to write for teenagers – not originally. In fact, when she started out she wrote more than one novel for adults that she simply couldn’t sell to publishers. Talking about that early work, she is her own toughest critic: she calls the manuscripts “long” and “plotless”. “I kept getting the same feedback,” she said, “which was the writing was very good and the characters were great, but there was no story whatsoever.”Oliver is the daughter of English professors, and she’d attended the MFA program in creative writing at New York University. But, she says, for a long time, publishers’ feedback on her early work puzzled her: “It was honestly a criticism I didn’t totally understand.” Nothing in her background, she said, had prepared her to wield the mechanics of story. It took a job in a young adult division of Penguin to teach her that, where training under editors she learned the basics of structure. And it taught her “to tell a story, not just write character description and pretty sentences and stuff”. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2015-03-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
Want your house to have extra atmosphere on Halloween? Or maybe you just love Harry Potter and have enough adult money to decorate your home however you wish? Either way, these floating candles are absolutely gorgeous and a perfect addition to any magic-filled room. Right now, you can... Continue reading at PC World
[ PC World | 2024-10-25 12:30:34 UTC ]
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Tom Fleming, senior vice president of acquisition, Adstra Digital media has forever altered the ad industry by creating new ways of reaching and engaging consumers. For a long time, digital advertising has stood separate from older offline tactics in terms of execution, organization, funding... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2024-06-26 13:42:23 UTC ]
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We get it, new dads (like new moms) just need a break. Aside from volunteering for babysitting duties, there’s an easy way to help: Get them some new gear. Perhaps some wireless earbuds to listen to podcasts as they put the baby to sleep, or something that could help to distract the youngins so... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-06-02 13:15:04 UTC ]
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George Saunders’ new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, is out next month and promises to be a literary master class on the short story. Drawing from his teaching career at Syracuse’s MFA program, Saunders walks readers... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-12-17 17:00:15 UTC ]
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“You think you’ve known someone for a long time,” a character in one of Jenny Bhatt’s short stories says of her Indian colleague shortly after he’s shot dead by a white man in a bar. “Maybe he never really took to us. Never really became one of us.” Turn by turn, each of his white […] The post... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2020-10-13 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Fans of “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” have waited a long time for Clarke’s second novel. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-09-08 16:23:45 UTC ]
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The year after I graduated from college, my parents got divorced. I took it rather badly. (Picture me crumpled on the floor of a Barnes & Noble, sobbing.) I’d been holding things together for a very long time, and then, with little warning, I couldn’t anymore. So I sought the assistance of a... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-08-19 08:48:35 UTC ]
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For a long time, I felt like I had been failed by publishing. After a diagnosis of Aspergers Syndrome - now Autism Spectrum Disorder (or ASD) in 2015 - I set out to learn more about my new ‘label’, and what it meant to me. Recommendations included looking to TV, because characters such as... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-08-04 22:34:00 UTC ]
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On Tuesday, Bloomberg Media launched Bloomberg Green, a new quarterly print magazine focused on climate change solutions. The latest offshoot of the "Bloomberg Green" brand, which first debuted in January, the print edition complements an existing web vertical and daily newsletter of the same... Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2020-06-09 21:09:53 UTC ]
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From Quiz to Chernobyl, the one-off television series is the perfect antidote to the relentlessness of multi-season shows. But do they ultimately leave us wanting more?Broadcast across three nights as lockdown kept us glued to our sofas, ITV’s Quiz was the first new drama in a long time that... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-06-02 14:27:30 UTC ]
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Looking back and charting changes in a business as multi-faceted and all-encompassing as children’s books is a tricky business. Given that the peak titles from the past last a very long time while most titles fade away fairly fast and the least successful disappear surprisingly completely it is... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-04-29 19:37:34 UTC ]
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This time last week, when I asked someone at one of the bigger publishers whether they had called off their London Book Fair party yet, I could feel the baffled response down the telephone line—“as if”. A week is a long time during pandemics (we are learning), but for Reed Exhibitions, the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-06 04:53:02 UTC ]
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Nearly 13 years ago, Netflix launched the first subscription-based streaming service for “Hollywood content,” laying the foundation for a massive paradigm shift in the way we access and watch movies and TV. Hulu followed suit soon after, but Netflix again changed the game in 2013, releasing the... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-10-24 19:52:28 UTC ]
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Business is good at Nickel City Graphics, the Buffalo-based digital content studio founded by Neil Carroll in 2008. Carroll ran a solo enterprise focusing on video content for a long time. But he recently started to consciously grow his business, with four employees now and plans to add more.... Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal
[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2019-07-13 11:55:00 UTC ]
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Although Facebook Inc. doesn’t sell robots, its researchers use plenty of them — and the company said its machines are getting a lot smarter a lot faster. The social media giant announced Friday that its engineers, working with computer scientists from New York University, have reduced the... Continue reading at Baltimore Sun
[ Baltimore Sun | 2019-05-20 17:10:00 UTC ]
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Although Facebook Inc. doesn’t sell robots, its researchers use plenty of them — and the company said its machines are getting a lot smarter a lot faster. The social media giant announced Friday that its engineers, working with computer scientists from New York University, have reduced the... Continue reading at Baltimore Sun
[ Baltimore Sun | 2019-05-20 17:10:00 UTC ]
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If you're wondering about that leading "Afraid Of?" headlineright off the bat New York Mag seems to be suggesting something unflattering about the Post, right?well, here's a sample summary of Carmon's piece via Twitter:(Adam Penenberg is director of New York University's American Journalism... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2019-04-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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This year's ceremony, held at New York University's Skirball Center and conferred for the first time to a sold-out house, saw debut and women writers have a particularly strong year. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2019-02-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Last night on "The Daily Show," Trevor Noah served up a plug for "The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library," a hardcover book from Noah and the show's writers that goes on sale today. It's been a long time in the making, given that just over a year ago The Donald J. Trump Presidential... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2018-07-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A debut novel about the 1957 publication of 'Dr. Zhivago,' called 'We Were Never Here,' has been acquired by Knopf's Jordan Pavlin after a 14-bidder auction. Pavlin called the buzzed-about title, by a recent grad of the MFA program at the University of Texas at Austin, a "literary page-turner." Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2018-06-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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