The Prose Factory by DJ Taylor review – beware the suggestion that literary life isn’t what it used to be

The truth about book prizes, why Amazon is like an old-fashioned library and how much famous writers really earned from their journalism …Periodically, signs go up saying that Grub Street is closed to through traffic. Observers speculate that the street is being redeveloped as gentrification forces the former inhabitants to move out, or else that the closure may be due to the expansion of the neighbouring university’s English department. Older heads are shaken in what had been the local pub but is now a coffee’n’crafts shop: there used to be more life in the place, they mourn, when bohemian writers could dash off a review against the clock to pay for their round. Even if Grub Street is eventually reopened, it will never be the same again, and anyway it will probably have been renamed “Creatives Crescent”.Such cliches and exaggerations are characteristic of this genre of lament. Like most keening for the good old days, these threnodies are not pieces of dispassionate historical analysis: they are attempts to compensate for so much that is disagreeable about one’s own time by inventing a more or less idealised version of the past. Still, it is worth wondering why “Grub Street” should be the form taken by paradise lost in this case. After all, the street originally so named in London (it was real before it was metaphorical) came to be the home of that kind of “grub” defined by the OED as “a person of mean abilities; a dull industrious drudge; a literary hack”. Even allowing... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2016-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]

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Interview: Steve Gleason, the author of the A.L.S. memoir ‘A Life Impossible’

The former N.F.L. player has been living with A.L.S. for more than a decade. Sharing “the most lacerating and vulnerable times” in “A Life Impossible” was worth the physical and emotional toll, he says. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2024-04-25 09:00:47 UTC ]
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Book Review: Joseph Epstein’s New Memoir and Book of Essays

The editor and essayist Joseph Epstein looks back on his life and career in two new books. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2024-04-22 09:03:39 UTC ]
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Want to Start an Indie Press? These Publishers Have Some Suggestions

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-04-19 04:00:00 UTC ]
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PEN President Jennifer Finney Boylan Announces Plans to Review PEN’s Work Going Back a Decade

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[ Literrary Hub | 2024-04-18 14:26:32 UTC ]
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Amid Mounting Criticism, PEN America Literary Awards In Limbo

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Lev Rubinstein: Ordinary Life through the Lens of Russian Conceptualism, by Daria Shchukina

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Book Review: ‘The Band,’ by Christine Ma-Kellams

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[ The New York Times | 2024-04-13 09:02:30 UTC ]
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First US Anthology Celebrates Literary Translators’ Work from Nineteen Languages, by The Editors of WLT

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March’s Best Reviewed Nonfiction

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[ Literrary Hub | 2024-03-29 08:55:59 UTC ]
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The 2024 Lambda Literary Awards Shortlists Are Here

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AAP Announces 2024 Hawkins, PROSE Award Winners

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Pope Francis Launches New Book, 'Life,' with HarperCollins

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Shelf Life Books in Richmond Unionizes

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2024-03-19 04:00:00 UTC ]
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