Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Writers When They Were Young
Have you seen these photos of famous authors as teenagers? The best are the ones with some text around them—for example, a local newspaper’s write-up of Flannery O’Connor’s youthful books about geese, and a yearbook description of “Peggy” Atwood’s “not-so-secret…
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James Deen on His Experience Filming The Canyons
You may remember from earlier this year a much-discussed New York Times Magazine piece about The Canyons, the super-low-budget film wrought from the unlikely combination of writer Bret Easton Ellis, director Paul Schrader, porn star James Deen, and troubled-as-ever actress Lindsay Lohan. With…
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Tom Stoppard Wins PEN/Pinter Award
This year’s PEN/Pinter Prize, “awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit,” goes to Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s plays, including classics like Jumpers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, have been interrogating philosophy, society, and…
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The Good News and the Bad News About Libraries
Bad news first: There are 49 libraries in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Twenty-two of them are about to be closed. Some last-minute budget rearrangements might save six of those, but that will leave sixteen—one-third of the county’s libraries—on the chopping block.…
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The Intern and the Rejectionist
It’s your two favorite formerly anonymous publishing-industry-bloggers-turned-YA-novelists in one post! Which is to say: Hilary T. Smith (aka The Intern) interviewed Sarah McCarry (The Rejectionist) about her new book All Our Pretty Songs. A preview: There is also a weird cultural…
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Online Romance…from 150 Years Ago
From its title (Wired Love) to its tagline (“‘The old, old story’—in a new, new way”), this Ella Cheever Thayer novel from 1880 sounds surprisingly modern. Substitute texting for telegraphs or OKCupid usernames for telegraph operators’ initials, and the book…
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Happy Belated Birthday, Zelda Fitzgerald
In honor of her would’ve-been 113th birthday, check out Gothamist’s collection of photos and footage of Zelda (and F. Scott) Fitzgerald. Okay, okay—her birthday was a week ago, so this isn’t the timeliest post in the world. Still, it’s fascinatingly…
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LGBT, SF, YA, and Other Useful/Distracting Acronyms
In an interview for the Young Adult Library Association’s blog, YA novelist Malinda Lo talks about writing within certain genres—young adult, fantasy/sci-fi, feminist, LGBT—and how it can be both confining and liberating. …I know that labels can be a useful…
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On Becoming a “Glasshole”
In his novel Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart imagines a near-future infested with äppäräts, devices that sort of resemble smartphones, but are more technologically advanced and even more intimately twined into our lives. Recently, as the result of a…
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The Women of Ward 3B
[Alice’s] brown eyes are comparatively lucid in a room filled with women alternately sedated or enraged. She comforts Shania, who believes a bulldozer is parked inside her forehead, and Sabrina, who thinks an ex-boyfriend has taken custody of their nonexistent…
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Peggy Sue’s Rock & Roll Mysteries
You’ve probably heard Buddy Holly’s classic song “Peggy Sue” (and/or its sequel “Peggy Sue Got Married“), but did you know Peggy Sue was a real person? She hung out around Holly while dating his drummer, and stayed on the early…
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Is Penguin’s E-Galley Policy Hurting Authors?
When a book is ready to be marketed, Penguin will print loads of galleys. Great, important, standard. But what they won’t do is give out electronic versions of the book. Not DRM and watermarked copies. Not password protected copies. An…