Categorising fiction may help to sell books, but it says little about how writers write or readers readIn her Reith lecture of 2017, recently published for the first time in a posthumous collection of nonfiction, A Memoir of My Former Self, Hilary Mantel recalled the beginnings of her career as a novelist. It was the 1970s. “In those days historical fiction wasn’t respectable or respected,” she recalled. “It meant historical romance. If you read a brilliant novel like I, Claudius, you didn’t taint it with the genre label, you just thought of it as literature. So, I was shy about naming what I was doing. All the same, I began. I wanted to find a novel I liked, about the French Revolution. I couldn’t, so I started making one.”She made A Place of Greater Safety, an exceptional ensemble portrayal of the revolutionaries Danton, Robespierre and Desmoulins, but although the novel was completed in 1979, it wasn’t published until 1992 – widely rejected, as she later explained, because although she thought the French Revolution was the most interesting thing in the world, the reading public didn’t agree, or publishers had concluded they didn’t. She decided to write a contemporary novel – Every Day Is Mother’s Day – purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-11-27 12:30:00 UTC ]
The jury for the memoir category had raised concerns that the citizenship requirement was excluding a large part of American culture. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2023-09-12 21:31:43 UTC ]
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Holt buys a posthumous memoir from Hilary Mantel, Liselle Sambury sells a YA dark academia fantasy to McElderry, and more. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2023-09-08 04:00:00 UTC ]
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Rory Stewart’s new memoir about his life in politics details his dawning realization that the game was not worth the effort. Continue reading at The Atlantic
[ The Atlantic | 2023-09-07 12:26:58 UTC ]
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You *can* handle the truth with these eight incredible nonfiction reads to kick your fall reading season off right, including Thicker than Water: A Memoir by Kerry Washington. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-09-07 10:32:00 UTC ]
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The wide-ranging collection A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing features subjects from her health struggles to Robocop and has been announced a year after the author’s deathA collection of journalistic writing by Hilary Mantel is to be published next month, just over a year after the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-09-07 05:00:18 UTC ]
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25 new novels we think you should read this fall. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Yiyun Li muses on class, money, joy, and luxury—for writers and their characters. | Lit Hub Memoir Where creatives went to play: Jonathan Miles captures the “potent cultural cocktail” of the French Riviera. | Lit Hub... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-09-06 10:30:23 UTC ]
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The US Copyright Office (USCO) wants your thoughts on generative AI and who can theoretically be declared to own its outputs. The technology has increasingly commanded the legal system’s attention, and as such office began seeking public comments on Wednesday about some of AI’s thorniest issues... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-08-31 17:02:25 UTC ]
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Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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“I have music and rhythm to help me get my point across,” says the singer and songwriter, whose new memoir is “Talking to My Angels.” “But real poets do it all just with the language and the lines. That’s a gift.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2023-08-31 09:02:59 UTC ]
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Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Greg Wrenn’s memoir, Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis forthcoming from Regalo Press. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher: Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-08-30 14:30:33 UTC ]
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Clara Luper’s Diamonds and Acts of Radical Love: A Conversation with Cornel West, by Karlos K. Hill Interviews [email protected] Wed, 08/30/2023 - 08:14 Dr. Cornel West / Courtesy of AAE SpeakersCornel West, who recently retired from Princeton... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2023-08-30 13:14:20 UTC ]
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Our book picks this month touch on themes of change and renewal. They include a memoir about embracing a truer identity, a report on one Ohio town’s struggle toward racial equity, and a novel about pursuing the American dream. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2023-08-28 15:22:29 UTC ]
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Safiya Sinclair was raised to be Rastafari; instead, she became a poet. Why it took her more than a decade to write the lyrical memoir 'How to Say Babylon' Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2023-08-28 15:00:14 UTC ]
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Every fall season, bookseller enthusiasm builds for certain subjects, and novels—notably high-stakes historical fiction and immersive work in translation—are extra hot for 2023. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2023-08-25 04:00:00 UTC ]
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A former "Friends" writer's new memoir details her experience on the show at a time when the stars seemed unhappy, and the writers room wasn't so friendly. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2023-08-25 01:20:03 UTC ]
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From the Pulitzer and Booker to the Walter Scott Prize and more, these award-winning historical fiction books are the best in the genre! Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-08-24 10:36:00 UTC ]
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Patty Lin says that Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry and co forced rewrites of gags they didn’t like by performing them badlyFriends may have been a worldwide smash hit that made megastars of its cast, but – according to one of its writers – the actors weren’t always trying their... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-24 10:34:01 UTC ]
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Drew Gilpin Faust, former Harvard University president, discusses her memoir “Necessary Trouble,” about her rebellion against sexist and racist strictures of 1950s Virginia. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2023-08-22 16:11:00 UTC ]
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The novelist discusses his career and his recent essay about cadavers in crime fiction, and the actor Richard E. Grant talks about his memoir and his love of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2023-08-18 17:55:09 UTC ]
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John West’s Lessons and Carols is a lyric memoir of recovery, parenting, loss, and hope, which is also periodically quite funny (ex. the first line of the first Lesson, “Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent.”) Hopscotching through time, the memoir shows us West’s first, early... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2023-08-18 11:00:00 UTC ]
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