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purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.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 ]
Yellow Kite has signed Hope is Coming, Louise Blyth’s “extraordinarily powerful” memoir of grief, gratitude and enlightenment. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-16 07:57:45 UTC ]
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In “I Live a Life Like Yours,” Jan Grue, a Norwegian professor, writes of living with a rare form of spinal muscular atrophy. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-08-15 09:00:03 UTC ]
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I was called aggressive for criticising passages in Kate Clanchy’s memoir. But the real problem lies deep in the overwhelmingly white world of publishingIt started with a tweet. Kate Clanchy, author of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me posted on her Twitter account that a reviewer on... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-08-13 13:51:20 UTC ]
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Icon has landed journalist and debut author Marianne Eloise's memoir of life with obsessive compulsive disorder and autism. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-11 20:18:23 UTC ]
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Headline will publish the memoir of Tarana Burke, the founder and activist behind the "Me Too" movement. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-11 20:11:16 UTC ]
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The “Saturday Night Live” comedian’s “This Will All Be Over Soon” looks back at her beloved cousin’s cancer diagnosis and death. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2021-08-11 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Yesterday morning, Rita Glavin—an attorney for Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who has vigorously defended her client (including in a fifty-one-minute live interview on CNN) since a state report concluded that he sexually harassed eleven women—came out swinging again in a virtual... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-08-11 12:45:23 UTC ]
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Hollywood. It’s one of those locations—it’s hard, somehow, to call it a concrete place—that conjures up all sorts of archetypes: the ruined writer, egomaniacal director, sleazy executive, out-of-control star. In writing my memoir Always Crashing in The Same Car—a book with elements of criticism,... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-08-11 11:00:00 UTC ]
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The pandemic memoir “American Crisis” has become a financial and ethical headache for Penguin Random House, dragging the company into the scandals that prompted the governor’s resignation announcement. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-08-10 22:21:07 UTC ]
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Poet and teacher has apologised for ‘overreacting’ to scrutiny of book’s portrayals of autistic pupils and children of colourKate Clanchy is rewriting her critically acclaimed memoir after widespread criticism of her portrayal of her pupils, particularly children of colour and autistic... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-08-10 18:58:54 UTC ]
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In “Blind Man’s Bluff,” James Tate Hill opens up about the measures he took to avoid admitting that he had lost his eyesight. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-08-05 09:00:03 UTC ]
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She took the music seriously at a time when not many writers did. Among her books was a memoir of her life with one of its biggest stars, Jim Morrison. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-08-04 22:08:44 UTC ]
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Canongate has landed Time on Rock, an outdoor climbing guide and memoir of self-discovery by Anna Fleming. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-04 21:31:00 UTC ]
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Claire Wilcox has won the PEN Ackerley Prize 2021 for her "vivid" memoir Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (Bloomsbury). Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-08-04 21:28:36 UTC ]
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News and Events In this second episode of WLT Book Buzz, Laura Hernandez & Bunmi Ishola cover 42 books that connect with history. Find out what they read this summer and why these books should be on your shelf. Partition, World War II, the Tulsa Race... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-08-04 15:40:39 UTC ]
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In his memoir about being drafted into the Vietnam War, Jeff Danziger lays bare the futility and waste, as well as his own naiveté. Continue reading at The Christian Science Monitor
[ The Christian Science Monitor | 2021-08-03 20:35:22 UTC ]
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Gina Frangello had a suspicion there was a hunger to talk about women who break the rules. In advance of the release of Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism and Treason, she admits after some prodding, “I got more letters from women before this book came out than I ever received for... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2021-07-30 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia brings his memoir about his father, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, and mother, Mercedes Barcha, to the L.A. Times Book Club. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2021-07-29 20:18:15 UTC ]
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Buzzy new novels from Alexandra Kleeman, Leila Slimani and Stephen King, Billie Jean King’s memoir and plenty more. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2021-07-28 17:14:59 UTC ]
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With the help of a brilliant co-writer, a fully rounded picture may now emerge of the much-maligned royalNot since criminals were barred from profiting in this way can a publisher’s announcement of a memoir have united the British press in such disgust. Before that, even the gangster turned... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-07-25 07:00:45 UTC ]
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