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purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.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 ]
Girls Aloud star Sarah Harding will publish her memoir with Ebury Press in spring 2021. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-02 19:07:37 UTC ]
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JASON HARDY DOESN’T PRETEND to know the solution to America’s criminal justice problem. There are a little more than two pages of policy proposals buried in the epilogue of The Second Chance Club: Hardship and Hope After Prison, Hardy’s memoir about his time as a probation and parole officer in... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-12-02 16:00:48 UTC ]
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Weidenfeld & Nicolson will publish Forever Young, a memoir from Oscar-winning actress Hayley Mills about her early years. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-12-02 06:29:05 UTC ]
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“The Babur Nama” is the autobiography of the polymathic founder of the Mughal dynasty. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-11-30 19:59:24 UTC ]
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Hodder Studio will publish Ellie Taylor's memoir My Child and Other Mistakes: How to Ruin your Life in the Best Way Possible next summer. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-29 12:35:38 UTC ]
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Nikesh Shukla is launching his first podcast series “Brown Baby” in January 2021 in partnership with Acast, ahead of his forthcoming memoir of the same name. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-29 12:07:08 UTC ]
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Ten days ago, with the coronavirus and the election continuing to dominate the media-industry conversation in the US, Ben Smith, media columnist at the New York Times, briefly steered attention overseas, publishing an interview with the French leader Emmanuel Macron under the bait-and-switch... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-11-25 13:32:28 UTC ]
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Ebury Press will publish Ali Millar's debut memoir The Last Days, which will recount the author’s experience growing up as part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-25 07:36:54 UTC ]
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The parts of J.D. Vance’s controversial memoir that didn’t make it into the movie. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-24 17:07:44 UTC ]
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Queer activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s book is alive with the existential nausea of being displaced. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-24 13:00:00 UTC ]
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Barack Obama's A Promised Land (Viking) has soared straight into the UK Official Top 50 number one spot in its first week on sale. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-24 12:37:14 UTC ]
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Cash’s memoir is the story of a man whose penchant for letters suggests a desire to hold on to the present. Sealing up the envelope means ending the letter; it means allowing our fantasies and stories to be finished, read, and judged. The post The Stories We Become: On William Cash’s... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2020-11-23 17:00:48 UTC ]
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On foreign policy, Obama’s memoir reveals a president fully aware of many of his shortcomings, and ambivalent about many of his accomplishments. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-20 21:32:35 UTC ]
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Critical responses to Barack Obama’s memoir suggest less what’s in the book than what we’ve always wanted from him. Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2020-11-20 20:45:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Since 2003, Jessica Cohen has published over twenty books translated from Hebrew to English. Among other honors, she shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of Grossman’s A Horse Walks... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-11-20 16:36:29 UTC ]
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Roald Dahl holds a special place in my childhood. I still have vivid memories of reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda in school (we even read his rather unsavory memoir Boy; his accounts of boarding school bullying haunt me to this day!) and of watching the delightful early ’90s... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2020-11-20 12:00:50 UTC ]
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Quercus has pre-empted a “seminal” debut memoir from award-winning actor and “Succession” star Brian Cox. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-19 17:45:26 UTC ]
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Barack Obama's first presidential memoir, 'A Promised Land,' sold more than 887,000 units in all formats and editions in the U.S. and Canada on its first day on sale, its publisher said. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-11-19 05:00:00 UTC ]
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Pamela Sneed’s book powerfully recalls the contributions and leadership of lesbians during the height of the AIDS crisis. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-11-18 20:38:22 UTC ]
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This morning, Publishers Marketplace reported that two-time Booker Prize winner and historical fiction supremo Hilary Mantel has a new short story collection on the horizon. Learning to Talk, which will be released by Holt at some point next year, is billed as “a collection of loosely... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-11-18 18:07:12 UTC ]
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