The American author was not only brilliant but also generous and kind to younger writers, writes Emma BrockesThere is that famous photo of Joan Didion, taken in Malibu in 1976, in which she leans on a deck overlooking the beach, cigarette in hand, scotch glass at her elbow, and regards her family – John Dunne, her husband, and their then 10-year-old daughter, Quintana – through lowered, side-long eyes. Like other iconic photos of Didion from the period, she is at one remove from the group, off to the side and in this case, looking not at the camera but at her family as they look at the camera. It’s the pose Didion perfected, in life as in art, and when news of her death at the age of 87 broke on Thursday, it was a shock to see another frame from that sequence surface online. In it, Didion, eyes fixed forward, smiles broadly at the camera in the conventional style – a rare glimpse behind the persona.The paradox of Didion was not unusual among writers, whose confidence is often born of a million anxieties. But her ability to operate outside herself – to measure the gap between inside and out and slyly mock any effort to conceal it – was unparalleled. She was, famously and by her own account, diffident, brittle, runtish, prone to migraines, afraid of the telephone, and as she wrote in the preface to her 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, “bad at interviewing people”, apparent deficits that, in Didion’s hands, were of course precisely what permitted her entry to... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2021-12-24 18:44:54 UTC ]
American author Laurie Halse Anderson is the winner of the 2023 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest children’s book prize. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2023-03-07 05:00:00 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘In the Desert’ is a poem by the American author Stephen Crane (1871-1900), published in his 1895 collection, The Black Riders and Other Lines. Crane is perhaps best-known for his American Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, and this is his... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-02-14 15:00:27 UTC ]
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‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-01-20 15:00:27 UTC ]
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‘Young Goodman Brown’ is an 1835 short story by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story contains a number of powerful symbols. But how should we analyse the symbolism of the story? Let’s take a closer look at the most […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-12-30 15:00:29 UTC ]
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‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man’ is a short story by the American author Richard Wright (1908-60), originally published as ‘Almos’ a Man’ in Harper’s Bazaar in 1940 before being revised by Wright later in his life. The final version was published in 1960. In the story, a black […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-11-11 15:00:28 UTC ]
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‘The Veldt’ is a short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1952 collection of linked tales, The Illustrated Man. The story concerns a nursery in an automated home in which a simulation of the African veldt is conjured by some children, but the lions which […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-06-06 14:00:03 UTC ]
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‘The Snake’ is a short story by the American author John Steinbeck (1902-68), published in The Monterey Beacon in 1935 before being included in Steinbeck’s collection The Long Valley in 1938. The story tells of a young scientist who is at work experimenting with animals in his laboratory when he […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-05-26 14:00:50 UTC ]
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In this panel—scheduled for May 24, 1–2 p.m. ET; moderated by Ed Nawotka, PW’s bookselling and international editor; and presented by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award—Tahera Qutbuddin, a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Chicago; Michael Cooperson, an American author, translator,... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2022-05-16 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Iranian American author Azar Nafisi explores fiction as a means of engaging with the world, rather than retreating from it in “Read Dangerously.” Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2022-04-27 19:45:22 UTC ]
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‘The Mocking-Bird’ is an 1891 short story by the American author Ambrose Bierce, who is also remembered for his witty The Devil’s Dictionary and for his mysterious disappearance in around 1914. ‘The Mocking-Bird’ is a Civil War tale about a soldier who shoots a man while on sentry duty at […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-04-26 14:00:13 UTC ]
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‘Chickamauga’ is an 1891 short story by the American author Ambrose Bierce, who is also remembered for his witty The Devil’s Dictionary and for his mysterious disappearance in around 1914. ‘Chickamauga’ is a war story, but is unusual in focusing on a young child who is a bystander to the […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-04-07 14:00:45 UTC ]
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‘Two Kinds’ is a short story by the American author Amy Tan (born 1952), published as part of her book The Joy Luck Club in 1989. The story is about a young American girl born to Chinese parents; her mother pushes her to become a child prodigy, but the daughter […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2022-03-08 15:00:22 UTC ]
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In They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents, Iranian American author and Vice journalist Neda Toloui-Semnani reconstructed the story of her parents as young, leftist Iranian activists radicalized at Berkeley in the late ’60s and who came to see communism as the political answer... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2022-02-08 12:00:00 UTC ]
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Books owned by The Snow Goose author up for sale this week include Ian Fleming first editions inscribed for his former colleagueA first edition of Diamonds Are Forever, in which Ian Fleming thanks his friend and fellow author Paul Gallico for “spread[ing] his wings over my first-born [Casino... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-01-26 10:27:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Weina Dai Randel burst onto the literary scene a number of years ago with her duology about Empress Wu Zetian, China’s first woman leader. After winning the prestigious Rita Award in 2017 and seeing her novels translated into seven... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2022-01-20 14:33:49 UTC ]
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The American author was not only brilliant but also generous and kind to younger writers, writes Emma BrockesThere is that famous photo of Joan Didion, taken in Malibu in 1976, in which she leans on a deck overlooking the beach, cigarette in hand, scotch glass at her elbow, and regards her... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-12-24 18:44:54 UTC ]
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The American author Anne Rice, best known for Interview with the Vampire, has died aged 80 with Chatto & Windus paying tribute to the "true one-off". Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-12-12 22:02:56 UTC ]
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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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