Maybe it's with rose tinted glasses that I remember my youth, but swearing was a big deal! My world is different. Daily, I am faced with naked aggression and swearing of pulse raising proportions.
Munro has some limitations as a writer and there is repetition in her subject matter and use of the story form. Those who overstate her 'greatness' may have done her no favours, if such rhetoric detracts from her very real qualities. Munro's work is original and much more subtle than either Wu or Lorentzen allow.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction has announced a new partnership with Baileys, the cream liqueur beverage. From 2014, the competition will be known as ...
The real issue is that publishers make some terrible assumptions about what men and women like to read (or ought to read). In an attempt to capitalise on the dwindling 'mass market' they have carved the reading population up by demographic and crudely assumed that each 'segment' is a homogenous group with similar tastes.
Whether you're writing an essay, editing a novel, or just cleaning the flat, procrastination is always sure to rear its ugly head. Procrastination occupies the middle ground between work and play, but doesn't really count as either. Like watching an Adam Sandler film, you've got to work hard to pretend you enjoy procrastination.
My first thought was - hurray! That's my May reading sorted. I know it's not very cool to like Dan Brown, but I do. Not wholly unlike The Abomination, I thought. Oh. Wait a second. The Abomination. Our big white hope. The book that would make us millionaires, give us iPads For All.
I left school in 1983, the same month Margaret Thatcher won her second election. In my Yorkshire hometown there was disbelief that once again the south had returned to power someone who had transformed the industrial heartlands in much the same way the US infantry transformed Baghdad.
Can you have a mancrush as a woman? I do. This book was a requested Christmas present. I loved Bakopoulos' first book so much I decided to dig into his second.
Isn't it odd how some people take for granted an outstanding talent they possess in sacrifice of a dream they are never going to achieve? They just don't know, or won't accept, what they are good at.
It was something I saw on Facebook. A local library somewhere was promoting reading with something new, urging readers to risk a Blind Date With A Book.
I had read the quotes and looked at the statistics, but it wasn't until I started speaking to victims of domestic abuse and listened to heartbreaking tales of control and fear that I began to see a different picture.
Earlier this month, Elizabeth Day wrote an article for The Observer about reading stories aloud. She made the interesting point that audiobook downloa...
With an estimated 530,000 different books released per year in the UK and America alone, which of them make it past the panels of book awards - from t...
2012 was declared the year of the short story and back in March I wrote an article exploring the immediate repercussions of such a statement. Now, here in November, as the final days of the year come swift and cold, I thought it pertinent to inspect the year's legacy.
Fortunately, little by little, comics are creeping into national consciousness. It's accepted that the comic format can and regularly does have the same depth as a prose novel. Though tensions are still high in places, the graphic novel at least is broadly accepted as an equal citizen in the literary world.
Last year it was Libya. Today it's Syria. 20 years ago Bosnia and the break-up of Yugoslavia was the focus of human suffering through civil war -- and in between there's been Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Liberia, Chechenya and many others that never reach our television screens.
I was an early reader and by the age of 10 I had read every book in my local children's lending library in Liverpool, and was given a special dispensation by the head librarian to gain entry to the adult library. That love of books has stayed with me and sustained me right to the present day.
I started the book pre-disposed to hate it, and read it through a haze of increasing envy and rage. It was very good, and she probably wasn't in the year above at all, but had just spent more of her time writing, and less watching ANTM.
If the name David Frum is at all familiar to British ears, it is generally closely accompanied by "the man who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil'". This may be enough for some readers to dismiss anything he has to say as the work of a crypto-fascist, imperialist running dog, but they do so at their peril.
I have been fascinated with Marilyn Monroe since I read Fred Lawrence Guiles book about her at the age of 12. When the editor of High50 suggested this idea to me, it was a real pleasure and challenge to imagine how her life could have been if she had been saved that night.
Why did you write a novel about her? About Myra Hindley, a woman who killed children? It's the question I'm most frequently asked about my novel, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth, and is both hard and easy to answer. The material was dark and disturbing, and many people can't understand why a writer would persevere with it. But that's the point. Unless we look, really look at the terrible things human beings do to each other, we have no chance of understanding how and why they happen.
Joy Stephens would appear to have everything to live for - she's a successful City lawyer, about to be made a partner at the age of 33 - but she is planning to commit suicide before the day is out.
I am just back from The Literary Consultancy's (TLC) http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk/ revolutionary Writing in a Digital Age conference. Organise...
How many of us have purchased a book because there's been a movie adaptation, or because it's synonymous with a television programme?
In 2009 I was asked to be one of the Orange Prize for Fiction judges. I loved it. Although my boyfriend groaned every time I opened another book, I revelled in it.
