From Slate: Until recently, Kosoko Jackson was considered an expert in the trapdoors of identity-related rhetoric. Jackson worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishers of YA fiction, a job that entails reading manuscripts and flagging them for problematic content. His own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, was promoted as an “#ownvoices” book, a hashtag attached … Read more
It’s interesting to watch the evolution of The Wall Street Journal as it tries to destroy the NYT. On Friday, WSJ had a big summer books feature. Excerpts: As he devours a young man alive, the protagonist of Glen Duncan’s forthcoming novel, “The Last Werewolf,” thinks of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Mariana.” “I would that I … Read more
From The American Scholar: Willa Cather loathed biographers, professors, and autograph fiends. After her war novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer in 1923, she decided to cull the herd. “This is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she told one researcher. Burn my letters and manuscripts, she begged her friends. Hollywood filmed a … Read more
Write the first paragraph for a children’s book that includes a little girl, a unicorn and a lazy wolf. Once upon a time in the enchanting land of Fairytale Meadows, lived a spirited little girl named Lily. Lily had golden curls that danced in the wind, and her eyes sparkled with curiosity. One day, while … Read more
From Jane Friedman: KRISTEN TSETSI: What did you like to read when you first got into book reading, and how did you veer into reading—and then writing—romance, whether paranormal or, as a few of your novels are, darker? KITTY THOMAS: I used to love the Goosebumps books as a kid. I wanted to be RL … Read more
From c/net: Author Soman Chainani has spent 10 years working on his children’s book series The School for Good and Evil. He finished the sixth, and last, book in the series, One True King, in March 2020, and says he was ready to take the rest of the year to relax and head out on … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Hong Kong’s national-security police arrested five people for allegedly conspiring to commit sedition through a series of picture books that portray sheep being targeted by wolves—an allusion to China’s crackdown on pro-democracy supporters in the city. Hours after police detained five members of a speech therapists’ union, police displayed three … Read more
From Writer Unboxed: The best choice for readers is what might be called “gentle books,” straightforward tales of ordinary people in mostly every-day, low-key situations. No psychotics, no wrenching twists, no gore, no vampires or werewolves or demons. Often comic, sometimes inspiring, these sorts of books were popular from the thirties right through WWII and … Read more
From The New York Times: The sweeping, authoritative and genuinely intelligent thriller — the sort of novel in which the author employs a bulldozer and a scalpel at the same time — is a rare specimen. Lawrence Wright’s second novel, “The End of October,” is one of these. The fact that it’s about the world … Read more
From Everyday Health: From “Sophie’s Choice” author William Styron to poet Sylvia Plath to J.K Rowling, the mastermind responsible for the Harry Potter series, the list of famous depressed writers — many of whom have documented it in their prose — is expansive. Though there are no firm statistics on how many writers experience depression, researcher Kay … Read more
From Frostbeard Studio: We love romance books, and we’re proud of it. There’s no shame in breaking out your favorite trashy romance novel and settling down for some steamy scenes in idealized worlds. But sometimes you want a little more. When we come across an adult romance novel that brings a little something more to … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Casey Kidik was in fifth grade when she came across a copy of “Julie of the Wolves.” She had checked it out as a second-grader from the public library in Carver, Mass. By the time she rediscovered the book, the family had moved to Plymouth. “I found it and then … Read more
From The New Yorker: Late last month, the author Kosoko Jackson withdrew the publication of his début young-adult novel, “A Place for Wolves,” which had been slated for a March 26th release. The book, which follows two American boys as they fall in love against the backdrop of the Kosovo War, had garnered advance praise(“a … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: This post is strictly my personal opinion about something I care deeply about—children’s books—and view as having saved my life as a child. I have loved children’s books for 57 years, 28 of them as a bookseller. It is no accident that children’s books are filled with portals leading to other dimensions, … Read more
From The New Yorker: In the early nineteen-fifties, before she published any of the novels that established her as one of the twentieth century’s great children’s-book writers, Joan Aiken lived on a bus. Aiken and her husband, the journalist Ronald Brown, had acquired a piece of land on which they meant to build a house. … Read more
From Electric Lit: Pretty much everyone who reads sometimes uses books as a way to escape. A book is a door to another world, a way to get away from reality for a few minutes or hours and focus on characters and circumstances wholly and blessedly unrelated to one’s own life. Sometimes, the more unrelated … Read more
From New York Magazine: Except for the few people who were privy to Michiko Kakutani’s growing estrangement from the job of country’s most powerful book critic, most readers were surprised by her decision last month to take a buyout after 38 years at the New York Times. But one book publicist did have a premonition a week before … Read more
From The New Yorker: “Frontier,” a mesmerizing novel by the Chinese author Can Xue, which was published in translation earlier this year by Open Letter Books, begins with a young woman named Liujin who has decided to make a life for herself in Pebble Town. The area is unusually abundant with animal life: the novel’s … Read more