Nearly a decade before Samantha Hunt published her haunting novel Mr. Splitfoot and years before The Invention of Everything Else was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, she published The Seas, a poetical and ghostly novel about a girl stuck in a seaside town struggling with the nature of identity and language.…
I’m SORRY, I’m sorry, I apologize in advance for the divisive snickering and focusing on another Melania conspiracy field day (like this and this and this before) which distract from the White House’s untenable apathy and complicity in human suffering. But from a creative writing standpoint, I am so fond of this:
The women of Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body and Other Parties are haunted, invisible, stitched together, loved, in love, alone, dead, and alive at the end of the world. The women who populate Machado’s short stories defy easy categorization, much like her book itself. Her Body and Other Parties is a…
Praise for journalist Rich Smith’s article on The Stranger, “Meet John Smelcer, Native American Literature’s ‘Living Con Job’”: a profile of a fiction writer who starting claiming a strong Alaskan Native identity as early as 1994 and then appears to have run with a twenty-five-year string of inflated credentials and…
Earlier this week, debut novelist Lani Sarem seemed to accomplish a surprising coup: her book, Handbook for Mortals, a fantasy novel slated to be the first in a series, unseated Angie Thomas’s acclaimed The Hate U Give as the top-selling Young Adult book in America. With little pre-publication buzz and none of the fan…
Paula Hawkins’s new page-turner, Into the Water, is set is in Beckford, a small tourist town in northern England. The town is unremarkable excepting its scenery; Beckford sits on an attractive river that draws tourists to play on its sandy banks and lures “troublesome women” to their watery deaths. The bend in the…
Starting today, I’ll be writing a monthly roundup highlighting newish books that should be on your radar. The first installment includes two: Aura Xilonen’s impressive debut novel, The Gringo Champion, and Lauren Elkin’s enjoyable memoir/cultural history, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Toyoko,…
Today in droll coincidences: nearly 150 years ago, an anonymous author published The Odd Trump, a novel whose description leaves no doubt as to the reasons for its obscurity. It’s fanciful and trivial — and it happens to feature a protagonist named Trump with a pal and occasional rival named Clinton.
The brilliant fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins has written an essay called “On Pandering,” a call to action against the stultifying effects of a literary system calibrated to the outsize, vulnerable egos of white men:
Kelly Link is the author of four short-story collections: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters (for young adults), and, most recently, Get in Trouble. At least yearly, I reread "Travels with the Snow Queen," a story about fairy tales, robber girls, and talking reindeer that also manages to be…
Congratulations are in order for Donna Tartt, whose 784-page book, The Goldfinch, a "beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters," has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Raise your hand if you've read it.
If you're intrigued by the words "subatomic bisexual orgy," today is your day. The winner of the 2013 Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. Once again, it's a man!
The literary world was rocked — ROCKED — this weekend when author Helen Fielding released excerpts from her newest Bridget Jones novel Mad About the Boy to reveal that Mark Darcy — the best/creepiest Colin Firth homage to actually eventually be played by Colin Firth — is now dead.
Next week, the first installment of The Mortal Instruments hits screens. Cassandra Clare, who wrote The Mortal Instruments series of YA novels, upon which the flicks are based, says that she purposely created an empowered female character.
Julie Klausner's first YA novel, Art Girls Are Easy, is being released as an original e-book on May 7th; the paperback hits on June 1. Set in the exclusive world of an upscale fine and performing arts camp, Art Girls Are Easy features Indigo Hamlisch, a fifteen-year-old art prodigy. She looks forward to her last…
In a lengthy, worth-your-while essay, Amy Boesky reminisces on the six years she spent ghostwriting Sweet Valley High books. Boesky was a poet and a graduate student in literature at Oxford before she attended a life-changing dinner party and was introduced to SVH creator Francine Pascal.
A tipster sent us the press release for Guesthouse Games, a new erotic novel starring President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Believe it or not, this project is not authorized by the President of the United States.
You're, let's say, a young adult floating in that hazy 18-25-year-old range where you may or may not be resisting grown-up responsibilities by playing Arkanoid and drinking Pepsi Max in your parents' basement. Maybe you recently embarked on a month-long project to re-read all the Harry Potter books and thereby…
Well, this is depressing: female authors are still using male pseudonyms — or ambiguous initials in hopes that prospective buyers won't realize they're ladies — because studies show more people read books written by dudes. Can you blame them?
