Guardian
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Literary Fiction is Popular Fiction
Some authors feel insecure about writing genre fiction and consider literature a luxury brand. Genre fiction, after all, is supposed to be the goose that lays golden eggs and includes books people actually want to read—except that may not be…
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Not All Books Are Right for All People
The Captain Underpants series has topped banned book lists around the world. Dav Pilkey, the author of the popular children’s books, explains what it feels like to have written a famous banned book: People often ask me how I’d want to respond…
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Young Writers Turn to Hashtags
Oxford University Press has concluded that “hashtag” is the UK children’s word of the year, with kids using the term to connote emphasis and emotions. The press analyzed more than 120,000 short story entries from British children under thirteen to…
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Using Language to Combat Violence
Feminism needs stronger language to combat violence against women, argues Jacqueline Rose in the Guardian. Fourth-wave feminism must confront the issue of male-on-female violence globally, crafting new language “that allows women to claim their place in the world.” She points…
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Philip Roth is a Loser
He has won every other literary prize in the book, including the Man Booker International, the Prix Medicis Etranger, the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, a position of dominance that, in line with European-held stereotypes about his countrymen generally,…
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Killing Margaret Thatcher
As a citizen I suffered from her, but as a writer I benefited. In the Guardian, author Hilary Mantel discusses her new short story about assassinating Margaret Thatcher and why it took her over 30 years to write it.
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Little Jack’s Love Letters
I shall worship her with quiet dignity. I shall draw her attention to me by exploits, success, and possibly a small measure of fame,” wrote a young, romantically inclined Jack Kerouac to a friend in one of a cache of…
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Books about Books
In 2011, Phyllis Rose read every book on the LEQ-LES shelf in the New York Public Library and wrote about the experience in an essay collection called The Shelf. In doing so, Rose joined the long tradition of “bibliomemoirs”—a blend…
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Never Judge a Book by Its Blurb
Book blurbs are the new books covers. And at the Guardian, Nathan Filer says you shouldn’t judge a book by either: Cover blurbs aren’t reviews. They’re advertisements. No space for balanced, nuanced positivity. Nothing can be interesting; it must be…
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The Hawking Index
The Hawking Index was created by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg to measure how much of a book readers were actually reading, by analyzing Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature on Kindle devices. Over at the Guardian, writer and literary critic Alex Clark and…
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Publishers Are Rich
Writers have been getting poorer, and it turns out publishers are partly to blame. The Guardian reports that while authors are expected to do more when it comes to marketing and promotion, and though electronic books have lowered costs for publishers,…