The Guardian
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Where Have All the Grandparents Gone?
You can find forever-young baby boomer grandmas falling in love at 60 and novels about spirited older women finding self-fulfillment, but novels about grandparents’ relationships with their grandchildren seem in short supply. Over at the Guardian, Helen Harris shares her experience of…
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Finding Comfort in Repetition
How many times do you need to reread Hamlet? Stephen Marche says he’s reread the play more than a hundred times. And all that reading has not been without effect. Marche says that by rereading Hamlet, its meaning has changed: The main…
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Open Endings
From Chekhov to Woolf, to Colin Barrett and Eliza Robertson, the Guardian explores unresolved endings in short stories.
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Book Covers Judge Back
The Guardian reports on a playful man bites dog story from Dutch design firm Moore: a book that judges potential readers by their covers. The prototype uses facial recognition to identify expressions, and will only unlock the book if it…
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Why Matilda Got Her Measles Shot
Since much of the rhetoric around recent outbreaks of the measles revolves around concern for the well-being of children, perhaps the strongest advocate to answer our concerns is a beloved author of children’s literature. The Guardian shares an emotional letter…
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Shock and Awe
There’s a misconception about what is truly shocking – that the shocking is the purely explicit. It seems to me that’s easy, and it’s been done in literature for centuries. What’s problematic, the real way to be shocking, is to…
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Writers’ Wages Keep Falling
A not-too-surprising result of a new poll shows that authors’ annual wages continue to fall and are now below $5,000, reports the Guardian. Authors who split their writing between traditional and self-published methods seemed to fare best, on average. Overall, half of the…
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Rushdie Goes Medieval
Salman Rushdie, no stranger to controversy, now finds himself under scrutiny from a different sort of institution: the Times Literary Supplement. Michael Caines, writing for TLS, takes issue with Rushdie’s recent use of the word “medieval” in a statement made…
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There and Back Again
The Guardian profiles Alex Malarkey, co-author of the bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. After admitting that, among other things, he’s never actually been there, his publisher looks to backtrack, evangelists work at damage-control, and the Malarkeys try…
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The Games Writers Play
The Guardian looks at the different games writers play to take their minds off of their work, including chess, poker, and Minecraft.
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Memoir by Guantanamo Prisoner Published
After partial redaction and six years of legal battles, Guantanamo Diary is now the first-ever published book by a current Guantanamo detainee. Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been imprisoned there since 2002, and his memoir details his thirteen years of confinement…
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Carol Ann Duffy’s First Ladies
In a playful reflection on the work and philosophy of poet Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson explores the possibilities for storytelling, feminism, and everyday entertainment through poetry. Winterson excerpts poems from The World’s Wife in the voices of historical better…