This week, the author Curtis Sittenfeld tweeted that it feels like we are now living in her 2005 novel Prep—and she did not mean it in a good way. The book is set at a fictional elite New England boarding school, a place not altogether unlike Georgetown Prep, the Maryland high school that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attended. One of the book’s major themes is its main character and narrator’s difficulty adjusting to the school’s rarified culture, and in a subsequent tweet, Sittenfeld highlighted a passage in which Prep’s narrator talked about turning to old yearbooks as a way to decipher the school’s exotic-seeming ways: “[T]hey were like an atlas for the school. … You could figure out, if you had the inclination and the time, who in a given year was friends with whom and who had dated whom, and who had been popular, or athletic, or weird and fringy.” Sittenfeld articulated something that almost anyone who’s ever paged through a yearbook can attest to, which is that there’s something transfixing about these keepsakes. I know I spent hours poring over the yearbook of a friend’s older sibling in my early teens, before I started high school and became a yearbook editor myself. For people on the outside, a yearbook can feel like a decoder ring. Continue reading at 'Slate'
[ Slate | 2018-09-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
The main character here learns that her ancestral home was once a part of a kingdom—where her ancestor was queen. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2025-06-04 12:30:00 UTC ]
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Feature image © Sarra Fleur Abou-El-Haj. There are echoes of Virginia Woolf throughout Honor Jones’ masterful, exquisitely crafted first novel Sleep, which explores the ways in which a childhood trauma haunts her main character, Margaret, and those around her. The novel opens with scenes of... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2025-05-27 07:15:09 UTC ]
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In 1859, Harriet Wilson published Our Nig. This forgotten novel was the first book published by a Black woman in the United States. Wilson’s main character, Frado, is parentified too young and then becomes a mother too soon. This traumatic experience is widely caricatured in global literature,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2025-05-09 08:58:35 UTC ]
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Shelby Van Pelt’s novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, is available now in paperback from Ecco, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, routines, and more. * Who do you most wish would read your book? In Remarkably Bright Creatures, my main character, Tova, has a group of friends... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2025-04-29 08:58:17 UTC ]
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Psychological thriller Eileen is an adaptation of the 2015 debut novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, who often writes about female loners, giving special attention to the parts of her characters that many would consider unbefitting of a leading lady. Continue reading at CBC
[ CBC | 2023-12-08 09:00:00 UTC ]
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In this post-Fleabag world, publishing has become obsessed with the inner turmoils of messy millennials – but isn’t it time they pulled themselves together? Meet the novelists subverting the clichesYou’ve probably come across this woman: she is unfulfilled in her career, has been abandoned by at... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-08 15:19:43 UTC ]
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‘Young Goodman Brown’ is an 1835 short story by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story deals with a number of key themes. But what are the most prominent themes of Hawthorne’s story, and how should we approach and interpret […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-03-14 15:00:15 UTC ]
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The main character in “The Lyrics” is his best friend and fiercest rival, John Lennon Continue reading at The Economist
[ The Economist | 2021-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Writer says they had not realised they should speak up about the title when the book was first published, but it will henceforth take the heroine’s female nameAlex Gino’s award-winning children’s novel about a trans girl, George, is being renamed Melissa, after Gino and publisher Scholastic said... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-11-02 14:38:09 UTC ]
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One of the greatest science fiction writers, Asimov’s work has had a lasting effect thanks to his prescient takes on technology, climate collapse and humanity’s future. Continue reading at The Conversation
[ The Conversation | 2021-09-24 15:01:23 UTC ]
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Yu Miri won a National Book Award for “Tokyo Ueno Station,” a novel whose main character is the ghost of a homeless construction worker. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-11-27 10:00:27 UTC ]
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What could be better than a book about a library, or featuring a librarian as its main character? Find a book for every library lover. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2020-08-24 10:30:00 UTC ]
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The author of “Mexican Gothic” offers a downloadable book club kit including a paper doll inspired by her main character. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2020-07-16 09:00:04 UTC ]
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I May Destroy You skewers the weirdness of fandom and captures just how terrifying the publishing industry can beMichaela Coel’s critically acclaimed new TV series I May Destroy You (BBC One), the journey of a young woman uncovering and trying to deal with sexual trauma, is a show that I fall... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-07-11 07:00:06 UTC ]
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"Shadow of the Batgirl" author Sarah Kuhn wants young Asian American girls to see they can be the main character in superhero stories too. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-02-08 01:35:48 UTC ]
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Penguin Random House teams with TBWA and Barnes & Noble to launch #DiversityEditions for Black History Month. During the Pequod‘s last voyage in Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, Captain Ahab is 58 years old. Physically, he has a prosthetic leg made of whale bone, and a pale white mark or... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2020-02-05 09:00:42 UTC ]
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This week, the author Curtis Sittenfeld tweeted that it feels like we are now living in her 2005 novel Prep—and she did not mean it in a good way. The book is set at a fictional elite New England boarding school, a place not altogether unlike Georgetown Prep, the Maryland high school that... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2018-09-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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New York City looms large for debut novelist Hermione Hoby's main character, and on the Strick&Williams–designed book jacket. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2017-11-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Turtles All the Way Down is best-selling author John Green's first novel since 2012's runaway success, The Fault in Our Stars. While that book tackled the issue of teens with cancer, this book centres on a protagonist suffering from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive thoughts and behaviour. Green,... Continue reading at Stuff
[ Stuff | 2017-11-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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