'I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.'
‘I never planned to be a writer. It is a very odd way to make a living. Just telling lies... I do have a visceral sense of breaking through the shell of something when I walk into my study in the morning. Now I just go and do it.
Recently I have found myself wondering about the prevalence of rough sex in new fiction written by women. It's viscerally present in You Know You Want This, the new short-story collection by Kristen Roupenian (who shot to fame last year with Cat Person, published in the New Yorker): I found some of the scenes so unpalatable that I had to keep putting it down.
In 1988 the 14th novel by a little-known 63-year-old British author was published in New York. The Shell Seekers, the 500-page story of a woman, Penelope Keeling, looking back on her life and loves during the second world war, took the US by storm. Read more
More than 750 people have signed a Society of Authors (SoA) letter demanding the Internet Archive stops its Open Library project lending scanned books online in the UK. Read more
When asked, Marlon James is hard-pressed to name his favorite story. It's admittedly a nearly impossible request to make of anyone, and surely more so of a novelist, whose trade relies so deeply on both intake and telling, however tangled, of tales. Unable to name just one, James improvised. Read more
Christobel Kent is among the English language's finest crime writers-and finest writers, as far as I'm concerned. In poetic, nuanced prose, she constructs powerful stories about misogyny and violence. Read more
Joseph Heller once told The Paris Review that his editor, Robert Gottlieb, thought "it was a shame" that the reader didn't get to a particular chapter until late in Catch-22. Read more
As self-published works grow in popularity, indie authors are increasingly in a position to market their book to foreign publishers or to agents and producers working in film, TV, and theater. But before authors can do that, they need know their rights. Read more
It should come as no surprise that the long literary con of Dan Mallory began with a fake memoir. Fabricating pain for profit is, after all, a time honored publishing tradition. Read more