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 ]
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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On the opening day of the U.S. Book Show, Ingram Content Group chairman John Ingram and author Keel Hunt sat down with PW executive editor Jim Milliot, giving publishing professionals a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the distributor, printer, and publisher. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2021-05-25 04:00:00 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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‘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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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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In “Model City Pyongyang,” two architects give a visual tour of the capital city. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2019-12-04 23:24:33 UTC ]
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The US experience of watching sport online should ring alarm bells for those who prize the Premier League’s ability to bring people togetherIn the late 1960s, the American author and tech seer Richard Brautigan wrote lyrically of “a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-12-02 18:49:42 UTC ]
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Lit Lists Olivia McCourry Asja BakićMarsTranslated by Jennifer Zoble Feminist Press, 2019 With imaginative and striking prose, Bosnian author Asja Bakić’s debut story collection, Mars, tells a tale of a series of different universes. Each realist tale... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-10-16 13:12:17 UTC ]
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News and Events WLT Margarita Engle will deliver the keynote address for the Neustadt Lit Fest at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, in the Reynolds Performing Arts Center, 560 Parrington Oval, on the University of Oklahoma Norman campus. The event is free and... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-10-01 19:25:31 UTC ]
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