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purely to get published; A Place of Greater Safety emerged only when she contributed to a Guardian piece about writers’ unpublished first novels.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 director and accused child sexual abuser's memoir had been dropped by its previous publisher after widespread backlash. Continue reading at HuffPost
[ HuffPost | 2020-03-23 14:17:52 UTC ]
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Woody Allen's memoir has been released by US indie Skyhorse Publishing after the title was dropped by Hachette Book Group. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-23 13:49:11 UTC ]
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The value of “writing a life” that Wallis Wilde-Menozzi undertook a quarter century ago is now the model to express our times. Continue reading at The Paris Review
[ The Paris Review | 2020-03-20 16:10:53 UTC ]
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A MAJOR FEATURE of the African-American writer James McBride’s books — beginning with the memoir The Color of Water (1995), a tribute to his white mother — is the large dose of humor injected into subjects that are, on the face of things, deadly serious if not sacred. Here in The Color of Water... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-03-18 19:00:39 UTC ]
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Hodder has acquired a celebrity memoir, Eat, Gay, Love, by the YouTube star and radio presenter Calum McSwiggan. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-17 11:41:15 UTC ]
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“Nobody Will Tell You This but Me,” a memoir by Bess Kalb, traces her family history from the Russian pogroms to the American dream. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-03-17 09:00:08 UTC ]
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“Our House Is on Fire” shares a very personal story of the suffering that preceded Thunberg’s activism on climate change. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-03-16 16:00:00 UTC ]
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Little, Brown has acquired a new memoir by award-winning actor Rupert Everett, Tainted Glory, to be published on 8th October. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-15 15:05:18 UTC ]
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Paul Lisicky, author of “Later: My Life at the Edge of the World,” talks about Provincetown, the challenges of memoir and learning not to suppress anger. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-03-15 09:00:05 UTC ]
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Leslie Gray Streeter's memoir about grief is funny, sad and real. When a critic said it wasn’t “top shelf,” she said, "I was like, 'I’m the mid-price vodka of memoirs.'" Continue reading at HuffPost
[ HuffPost | 2020-03-14 10:00:03 UTC ]
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Among the big books that sold this week are the three new titles My Lovely Wife author Samantha Downing will pen for seven figures; Alexandra Andrews’s hotly contested debut, Who Is Maud Dixon?; and a new memoir from Michael J. Fox. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-03-13 04:00:00 UTC ]
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In this episode, writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit reflects on her new memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence. Solnit talks to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about the deep impact of gendered violence on daily life and what it means to... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-12 08:49:53 UTC ]
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Headline is publishing the first memoir by ex-Liverpool and England player Jamie Redknapp. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-11 22:25:10 UTC ]
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“Young Heroes of the Soviet Union,” by Alex Halberstadt, is a moving and often funny memoir about the author’s family and their history. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-03-11 16:29:22 UTC ]
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Katy Waldman reviews the writer Rebecca Solnit’s new book, “Recollections of My Nonexistence,” which is Solnit’s first to be billed as a memoir. Continue reading at New Yorker
[ New Yorker | 2020-03-11 10:00:00 UTC ]
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It’s been a day since the publication of The Mirror and the Light—the final installment of Hilary Mantel’s celebrated trilogy about Tudor England, starring the enigmatic Thomas Cromwell—so you’ve already blazed through it, right? Well, whether you have already or you’re about to, once you’ve... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-03-11 08:55:24 UTC ]
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Sphere has done a string of "major" international rights deals for a memoir by human rights lawer Benjamin Ferencz, Parting Words, including a pre-empt in Germany. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-10 23:17:05 UTC ]
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HarperNonFiction has bought a “unique and poignant” memoir by Holocaust survivor Thomas Geve, told through the drawings of concentration camps he did as a boy. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-10 19:10:45 UTC ]
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A trans author reflects on the fraught history of trans women’s memoir covers, and why she didn’t want her likeness on her own. Continue reading at Guernica
[ Guernica | 2020-03-10 12:00:35 UTC ]
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The film director’s book Apropos of Nothing was dropped by its US publisher after staff walkouts, but the French publisher says ‘Allen is not Roman Polanski’Woody Allen’s controversial memoir will still be published in France despite its US publisher dropping it, with his French publisher saying... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-03-09 14:57:23 UTC ]
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