It was not a coalition of factions that brought down Anne

It was not a coalition of factions that brought down Anne but Henry’s disaffection caused by her miscarriage of a defective child, the one act, besides adultery, that would certainly destroy his trust in her. Retha Warnicke O death, rock me asleep, Bring me on quiet rest, Let pass my very guiltless ghost Out of … Read more

Business Musings: The Aging Writer

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: This past week, I had a fascinating text exchange with one of my very best friends. We have known each other for more than forty years. We met in college—and no, this friend isn’t Kevin J. Anderson. This is another friend. We worked in different professions, but we’ve been at each … Read more

The Murky Path To Becoming a New York Times Best Seller

From Esquire: Anyone who’s worked for a major book publisher in recent memory knows the energy that crackles through the office at 4:59 P.M. on Wednesday afternoons, right before the preview of next week’s best seller list arrives from The New York Times. After months of pitching reviews, planning marketing campaigns, doing bookseller outreach, and begging for budget, … Read more

How to Create Character Mannerisms from Backstory Wounds

From Jane Friedman: The best way to deepen and enrich our characters is to develop them from long before they enter the story we’re writing. Every character (really, every human being) struggles with one or more wounding experiences that create life-long emotional responses. These backstory wounds result in the lies our characters tell themselves, or … Read more

The Stages of Womanhood

From Electric Lit: It was in the midst of these days when I was struggling to complete the—what would it be?—seventh, no, sixth stage of my growth as a woman, being a year late already with that, according to the (ineffective) anthroposophic doctor I had consulted about my persistent ear infections, when I was awoken … Read more

How Did He Get Away With It?

From The City Journal: Long before the rest of us were talking about blue and red America, Tom Wolfe not only recognized the cultural divide; he bridged it. When he began his career in the 1960s, the liberal establishment was more dominant and even smugger than it is today. There were no pesky voices on … Read more

Never Enough

From The Wall Street Journal: A hardworking teenager—let’s call her Amanda—excels at school. She’s a pianist, a varsity athlete, an honor student and the president of the debate club. She gets early acceptance to an elite university, lands the right summer internships, and, after graduation, secures the job of her dreams. Amanda has run the … Read more

A fine balance

From The Bookseller: Children’s books can carry important social messages – but how to stop them sounding preachy? Books have played a huge part in my life. I’m a mum of four, a former primary school teacher, and a children’s author. My kids devoured stories, from The Faraway Tree to Roald Dahl. Books taught them … Read more

A Considerable Aura: On Adam Shatz’s “Writers and Missionaries”

From The Los Angeles Review of Books: THE NEW COLLECTION from London Review of Books editor Adam Shatz, jointly published by the LRB and Verso, comprises mostly essays previously published in that magazine. And despite its title—Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination—it is less the missionary function of writing than the value of that periodical that the … Read more

Reddit, Tell Me Where I Went Wrong

From Electric Lit: My neighbor (32F) is not speaking to me (44M) because I made some repairs to her home while she was out of town. These were mostly exterior and relatively minor (clearing debris, replacing deck boards, adding a utility sink, installing a rain cap), but I did climb onto her roof. She says … Read more

The virtue of discretion – When the rules break down, you must judge what to do on your own. Discretion is necessary for navigating the muddle of life

From Aeon: It is midday, the sixth hour, sometime between Easter and Pentecost, at a Benedictine monastery, and the monks are gathered for the main meal of the day. It could be any century between the 6th and the 21st, and anywhere from southern Italy to South Korea. Although each monastery is autonomous, governed by … Read more

An Editor Confronts Her Writer’s Block

From Publisher’s Weekly: I’m an editor by trade, and that’s where my talents lie. My superpower is my ability to polish any piece of writing until it shines, and I’ve been making a living off that gift for years now. But any editor will tell you that they’re also a writer at heart—and I’m no … Read more

Finding Yourself in Prince Harry’s Memoir

From Publisher’s Weekly: Though I’ve been called a Jewish princess by disgruntled ex-boyfriends, on the surface I have nothing in common with the British Christian prince now residing in California. Yet as a Manhattan memoirist who writes provocative books my parents detest, I’m completely overidentifying with Harry. Except for his $20 million advance; interviews with … Read more

The Half-Madness of Prince Harry

From The Wall Street Journal: Prince Harry’s book is odd. There’s even something half-mad about it. He opens with a dramatic meeting at Frogmore, his former mansion on the grounds of Windsor. It is just after the death of Prince Philip, Harry’s paternal grandfather. For months Harry has been estranged from his father, Charles, and his … Read more

The Good Life

From The Wall Street Journal: What constitutes a life well-lived? What are the ingredients for lasting happiness? In their captivating book “The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger and the clinical psychologist Marc Schulz convey key lessons that arise from studying the lifetimes of hundreds of … Read more

OverDrive Releases 2022 Digital Book Circulation Data and Highlights

From Yahoo Finance: In 2022, digital book lending grew significantly due to innovations that high-performing public libraries, schools and other institutions used to serve their readers. These efforts resulted in record circulation of digital books, with ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and comic books each greatly contributing to year-over-year growth, according to industry leader OverDrive. During the … Read more

Canada’s CBC Books Names Five Finalists for Its 2022 Poetry Prize

From Publishing Perspectives: Like its annual show and competition Canada Reads, the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Poetry Prize program is another enviable example of the public services performed by CBC Books. That program’s literary prizes include not only this poetry competition, but also one in nonfiction and one in short stories. In the case of … Read more

15 Cozy Books To Get Wrapped up in This Fall

From TheEveryGirl: In my humble opinion, as soon as the clock strikes midnight on September 1, it’s officially fall. Is it still blazing hot out? Yes. Does fall not technically start until September 22? Yes. But, as someone who waits all year long for fall to roll back around, I could never let mere technicalities … Read more

From Book Browser to Published Writer

From Publisher’s Weekly: For 16 years [my mother] recommended the perfect books to people and shared her love of reading with others, spreading that joy the same way she blessed me with it. Whenever my mother and I drove through our little downtown in Madison, Ct., we always stopped at our local bookstore, RJ Julia. … Read more

What You Should Know About Writing a Co-Authored Book

From Jane Friedman: When people hear about my feminist, humor book, Jokes to Offend Men, first they ask: Do you actually hate men? (The answer of course is no, only on Thursdays). And then they say: Wait there’s four authors? How does that work? A four-person book is an outlier, but what’s even stranger to me is that I am … Read more

Where Is All the Book Data?

From Public Books: Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to use their data to study them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series … Read more

The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books

From The New Yorker: You were a girl who wanted to choose your own adventures. Which is to say, you were a girl who never had adventures. You always followed the rules. But, when you ate an entire sleeve of graham crackers and sank into the couch with a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you … Read more

Strangers to Ourselves

From The Wall Street Journal: When Rachel Aviv was 6, she stopped eating. Psychiatrists diagnosed her with anorexia nervosa, a disorder typically brought on by reading magazines that present thinness as the ideal of femininity. But young Rachel was only just learning to read; she didn’t yet have a concept of ideal femininity. Her case … Read more

The Power of Generational Storytelling

From Writer Unboxed: As I hurtle toward the publication of my debut, it struck me the other day that I’ve spent over a decade crafting an elaborate 1,500+ page setup. It’s true. In 2011, after two years of collecting rejections for my first epic fantasy story, I convinced myself that the only thing keeping me … Read more

The Unlikely Author Who’s Absolutely Dominating the Bestseller List

From Slate: This has been the summer of Colleen Hoover, a recent viral TikTok announced, editing together clips of young women at the beach reading books by the Texas novelist. Furthermore, just a couple of months ago we had a Colleen Hoover spring and before that a Colleen Hoover winter and before that a Colleen … Read more

The Wedding Present

From The Atlantic: During my very first term of high school, I failed elementary algebra, and as a consequence was doomed to study German. It was 1942, when the war was well under way—the Second World War, for my generation always “the” war, despite all that came after. Mine was a traditional school that claimed old-fashioned … Read more

The lasting anguish of moral injury

From Knowable: On a Sunday evening in September 1994, David Peters drove to a church service in Beckley, West Virginia, as the sun set over the horizon. He was 19 years old, just back from Marine Corps boot camp. He hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car all summer. The road curved, and Peters … Read more

The Mirrored Politics of SciFi and Fantasy

From Gizmodo: Fantasy, especially secondary world fantasy, is a genre about imagination, creating new worlds with different views of everything from culture to economics to the limits of physics, and in many respects, presuming no limitations at all. In that imagining (to paraphrase Max Gladstone), it implies a critique, a perspective on our present reality. All art is in conversation with its … Read more

Jobs In Books

From Woman Writers, Women’s Books I wanted to move to New York from the time I first learned what New York was. I grew up on a farm and dreamed about moving to the city the way some kids dream about becoming marine biologists. Reading books like E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. … Read more

Writing (and Living) in the Midst of Fear

From Writer Unboxed: In Seattle, June is the cruelest month. Terrifying. Violent, too. A month where people rarely leave their homes, and if they must, they hurry from house to car, exhaling only once safely inside, windows rolled up, doors locked. In June, schools forgive truancy. Non-urgent appointments–dental check-ups, meetings with financial planners, eyebrow shaping–pretty … Read more

The Empress and the English Doctor

From The Wall Street Journal: What a cursed kind of privilege it is to be the physician in charge of the life of a world leader. In April 2020, stories circulated about doctors from the intensive-care unit of London’s St. Thomas’s Hospital texting the Downing Street communications team when Covid-suffering Boris Johnson, as the prime … Read more

Writing Fiction for US Adults

From Daily Writing Tips: Writers of children’s fiction are constantly aware of the need to write with their readers’ reading level in mind. Writers of adult fiction—perhaps not so much. Technical writers agonize over the need to simplify product information and guidelines, but I suspect that novelists generally tend to assume that adult readers read … Read more

The Book Business Ecosystem Is Under Attack

From Publishers Weekly: We live in unprecedented times. We read and hear that slogan incessantly. It is often wrong—but with respect to the implications in general and the active threats of today’s book banning campaigns, it is chillingly correct for publishers, authors, readers, young people, free speech, democracy, and humanity. We urgently need to connect … Read more

Traveling this summer? Here are book picks for all 50 states (and then some)

From NPR: As the summer travel season kicks off, many of us look forward to exploring new places on trips away from home. To help with this, NPR asked poets laureate, state librarians, bookstore owners and other literary luminaries from all 50 states — plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — to recommend … Read more

The Sad Young Literary Man Is Now a Middle-Aged Dad Keith Gessen wrote a memoir about family life. His wife, Emily Gould, is mostly okay with that.

From New York magazine: Raffi Gessen-Gould, age 6, is an expert on these topics: Greek gods, international currency exchange, sharks, geology, when his father will go bald (when Raffi is a teenager), invisibility cloaks, waffles, slingshotting stretchy rubber snakes across the living room, making slime without his mom, and the benefits of getting slime stains … Read more

The Commodification of Jean-Michel Basquiat

From Jacobin: In April, Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure opened at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Manhattan. Organized by the late artist’s family, the exhibition includes over two hundred Basquiat pieces, many previously unexhibited. As Lisane Basquiat, the artist’s sister and comanager of his estate, told Rolling Stone, the show is meant to offer “insight into Jean-Michel’s journey and the context within … Read more

What Makes a Great, or Terrible, Audiobook Performance?

From Vulture: During the first days of the 2019 impeachment hearings, the headline of an essay by the Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse floated the question “What does female authority sound like?” One of the earliest witnesses had been the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., a rather ordinary, if genial, middle-aged man. Afterward, Hesse noticed the … Read more

I Believe the Man in the Attic Has a Gun

From Electric Lit: “The Old Man with No Name” is the opening tale of Budi Darma’s short story collection People from Bloomington. He penned the set of seven stories in the 1970s, during the years he spent as a master’s and doctoral student in the English department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Except for a fleeting mention … Read more

What is it Like to Be a Blind Writer Writing for Sighted Readers?

From The Literary Hub: What is it like to be blind in an industry overwhelmingly dominated by sighted individuals? Jessica Powers, founder and publisher at Catalyst Press, spoke to George Mendoza and Kristen Witucki about crafting stories for sighted readers, finding community and release in fiction, and battling ableism in traditional publishing and publicity. Jessica … Read more

Let Fiction Be Fiction

From Publishers Weekly: Since my debut novel, Other People’s Children, was published last April, I’ve been thinking a lot about who gets to tell which stories. Some of my readers don’t seem to think that I should have been allowed to write the book that I wrote. I’m probably not the first new writer to … Read more

Can We Repair the Past?

From Public Books: n late 2020, I, an American citizen, became an Austrian, through a new law granting citizenship to the descendants of victims of the Third Reich. (Germany has long had a similar law; Austria, far worse in their anti-Semitism, according to my late grandfather, was much slower on the uptake.) My family was … Read more

The Dress

From The Paris Review: I bought the dress known in inner circles—that is, in the echo chamber of my closet—as the Dress in 1987, for a rehearsal dinner in New York for a couple I’ll call Peter and Sally. I found it on sale at Barney’s on Seventeenth Street. On the hanger, it looked like … Read more

Fear Thesaurus Entry: Being Capable of Harm

From Writers Helping Writers: Debilitating fears are a problem for everyone, an unfortunate part of the human experience. Whether they’re a result of learned behavior as a child, are related to a mental illness, or stem from a past wounding event, these fears influence a character’s behaviors, habits, beliefs, and personality traits. The compulsion to … Read more

Crave Rejection? 7 Never-Fail, 100% Guaranteed Tips for Raising your R-Score.

From Anne R. Allen’s Blog… with Ruth Harris: Here’s some advice for those who feel they are missing out on one of the basic building blocks of a successful author’s career: Rejection. For those who feel they are not paying their dues. For every writer who is not receiving an adequate, soul-satisfying number of rejections, … Read more