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 ]
Nothing pains me quite as much as having to admit I might have been wrong about something. But news breaking last week may force me to reconsider my opinion of Dave Eggers' 2013 novel "The Circle."I don't think the book has gotten any better. The main character is still annoying and, worse, a... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2016-02-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The FutureBook Conference celebrated its fifth anniversary with a line-up including rapper Akala, the leaders of some of UK publishing's biggest companies, and the first BookTech Showcase. The use of data and the increase in mobile users were major themes of the event, which also saw the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-12-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In the main section of today's print edition of The New York Times, readers will notice a whole lot of nothing on pages 9 and 10. The two virtually blank, back-to-back pages are actually an ad for 20th Century Fox's upcoming film adaptation of Markus Zusak's best-selling novel, "The Book Thief,"... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2013-10-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A lawyer and a caretaker with similar backgrounds follow different paths in contemporary Jerusalem with the same motivation: to leave their small-town Arab lives behind and be accepted for the new personas they have created.Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-05-17 00:00:00 UTC ]
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