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Join NOW!There’s a piece of writing advice that tritely insists that great pain makes for great writing. In reality, it often takes years to find the words for a painful event, and even then there is the nagging insufficiency of words and the threat of ego that comes with writing one’s own pain. For BuzzFeed Books, […]
...more…one day she offered me an even better, bigger bribe: If I mastered all my writing skills and got up to speed on my classwork, I could write a play, which would be performed at school. For BuzzFeed Books, Charlie Jane Anders recalls how her Special Ed teacher made her the writer she is today.
...moreShe’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle. George at the desk next to yours says “Charity shops?” and the newcomer says “Yeah, […]
...moreI came to her place to take a picture of Baldwin’s typewriter. This is what I told her. But I think I also came because I wanted to see someone who is his flesh and blood. I wanted to see that he was really theirs, their Uncle Jimmy. Because if he was theirs, the logic […]
...moreSometimes it feels like New York isn’t full of interesting people so much as people who are more interesting than you. For BuzzFeed Books, John Wray describes the mediocrity of being surrounded by greatness: Who did I think I was, with my childish, provincial, self-indulgent scribblings?
...moreWhy is it not a memoir, people will ask. I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. Alexander Chee gives step-by-step instructions on how to write an autobiographical novel, and it’s beautiful.
...moreRiding my bicycle over the Manhattan Bridge, I see the city, instead of scuttling beneath it. And it is beautiful. Parks. Markets. Blossoms. People. Dresses. Pavement. This city is alive and full of wonder and I am just one lost person in it, but I wouldn’t want to be lost anywhere else. That’s the flip […]
...moreAt Buzzfeed Books, a great, pithy interview with novelist and journalist Renata Adler, whose collection of nonfiction and journalism, After the Tall Timber, was released earlier this year.
...moreAll we knew was that Casper, with his genius IQ, his measured laugh, his wicked weltanschauung, was somebody really, really interesting to hang out with. A neighborhood kid like anybody else, only not like anybody else. One of us, only not one of us. Over at BuzzFeed Books, T.C. Boyle reminisces about being friend with […]
...moreOften I wouldn’t be able to keep up, like with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, but it made it feel like a whole new world of books had been opened up to me, dangerous and menacing and completely appealing to my teenage self. A rite of passage, similar to my first time drinking or my first time […]
...moreThrough the South, I tried to make sense of what seemed similarly wrong with the North. Over at BuzzFeed Books, James Hannaham explains why he decided to be a “Southern writer” despite his New York origins.
...moreAfter hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box in my literary grandfather’s attic and finding something utterly derailing”: If Vonnegut could see through […]
...more“For a certain sort of person, sharing a book can be as intimate and exhilarating as sharing a kiss,” writes Helen Rosner in her moving essay about books, love and relationships over at BuzzFeed Books.
...moreYA author Kathleen Hale became obsessed over a negative Goodreads review of her first novel, to the point of finding the reviewer’s address and deciding to stalk her in real life. She wrote about the experience on the Guardian last week, and now BuzzFeed Books has collected the reactions to Hale’s story.
...moreEdan Lepucki and Stephan Eirik Clark talk to BuzzFeed Books about how their successes have been affected by the “Colbert Bump.”
...moreMany people who buy exclusively e-books still like to browse in physical bookstores and look at physical books. The printed book is far from dead. At BuzzFeed Books, Lincoln Michel has an essay on the future of the ongoing battle between print and e-books—and it has a happy ending.
...moreI always think of you as a more novelistic novelist than I am. I’m not predisposed to like poetry. I’m not the kind of person who thinks of poetry as charming or who says of something, “it’s like poetry,” as a turn of phrase. I like poetry, but if I like a poem, it’s earned […]
...moreAt Buzzfeed Books, novelist Catherine Lacey writes about an interview she had with a reporter who assumed Lacey had based the protagonist of her first novel on herself. To an extent, Lacey finds this frustrating, but then she considers the way all writers are and are not their characters: What I should tell anyone who […]
...moreAt BuzzFeed Books, Anne Helen Petersen expresses nostalgia for the reading she did as a teenager. It’s not so much that she misses the books themselves, though, but rather the “style of reading” associated with being a teen, the kind of full immersion that one isn’t able to achieve as an adult: As adults, we’re taught […]
...moreOver at BuzzFeed Books, Lincoln Michel asks Alena Graedon, Scott Cheshire, Julia Fierro, and D. Foy, who all just released their first novel, to talk about their writing influences, literary commitments, and elevator pitching their first books.
...moreI worked the same way with alcohol and drugs, and my whiskey elves, my beasts, never disappointed. I mean, they didn’t always write the prettiest prose — cocaine isn’t known to instill poetry — but they usually unearthed interesting images and haunting motifs. It was completely sub/unconscious writing, with me having no idea what’d I’d […]
...moreYou didn’t ask directly about gender, but I’ll answer anyway: I stuck with men for a more personal reason, which is that my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and the subject was just too painful for me. That’s a book I hope someone writes. Buzzfeed’s interview with Olivia Laing, author of The […]
...moreParents, kids, and other fans of children’s literature will enjoy renowned YA author Lemony Snicket’s interview with Kate DiCamillo, who just won the Newbery Medal for her novel Flora & Ulysses. DiCamillo is also the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and has lots to say working with an illustrator, her favorite stage of the writing […]
...morePerhaps American sci-fi is made to tell immigrant stories. And maybe there’s a reason why, during a 24-hour travel back to Taipei, I felt welcomed home by the collective voice of B-more. Kevin Tang’s review of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea for BuzzFeed Books brings to bear his experience growing up in late-’80s Taiwan, […]
...moreCritics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” our essays editor Roxane Gay talks about the knotty issue of […]
...moreThis past weekend, an event of historical import occurred: the #candylit hashtag on Twitter. Started by Lincoln Michel with a “Fall of the House of Gushers” pun, it combined book titles with the names of confectionery treats. BuzzFeed Books rounded up a few of their favorites, including the Rumpus’s “Dubli-nerds by James Almond Joyce” gag, and […]
...moreIf it’s always been your secret ambition to write a children’s picture book, Buzzfeed Books can help you get started with this handy-dandy thirteen-step guide, illustrated by the Rumpus’s own Jason Novak (with a little help from his daughter Gertie). There’s some golden advice in there: probably avoid rhyming, send to agents instead of publishers, and don’t try to […]
...moreWhen I started writing a novel I thought, I’m not ready, because I’ve only written short stories and nobody wants them, but I also thought, For Christ’s sake, what am I going to do? I can’t keep on like this. I started writing the novel and I instantly felt like, Finally I can breathe. For […]
...moreOur dear friend and co-owner Isaac Fitzgerald is moving to New York for his spiffy new job as Buzzfeed Books editor. Dan Weiss (of Morning Coffee fame) and his band the Yellow Dress wrote a song to send Isaac off in style! It’s upbeat and awesome and you can listen to it here. Plus there’s this […]
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