‘A lot of people start studying history from my books - I can't tell you how many people have told me that they read one of my books and then they started reading history, went to university and are now graduating...
I didn't have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do as a young person at all. I knew I needed a job, and I wanted to do something that didn't bum me out. Read more
The 1970s detective would not be an American pacifist ready to burn his draft card down on Main Street, nor would he be a Lieutenant Calley, murdering civilians and singing his own battle hymn. Detectives of this era attempted at once to recreate and to atone for a manliness of the past in order to situate themselves in the strange new present. Read more
My dog has a carbon footprint. She loves food for one thing, especially meat, and sometimes I keep the heat turned up a few degrees for her when I leave the house. In a strictly economic sense, her productivity (the ratio between output and input volume) is zero. She has no measureable output-she doesn't work, which is ironic because she's classified as a "working dog," bred to herd cattle. Read more
Of all of the forms of fiction, "flash fiction," which is typically defined as being a story less than 1,000 words, is the only one described with a metaphor. As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife about what to call these short stories of under 1,000 words. Read more
The popularity of Nordic noir may seem to be fading after its heyday of the early-2010s but Norway's biggest-selling author would beg to differ. Public tax information revealed that Jo Nesbø's two companies took in more than NOK 58 million ($6.5 million) in 2019, of which NOK 45.5 million ($5.1 million) was classed as book royalties.
If it hadn't been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I'm not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. Read more
As the weather turns and the days shorten, as trees bend low with fruit and blackberries darken the hedges, bookshops are bracing for a bumper crop of their own. September and October are always rich, but this year is exceptional: nearly 600 books will reportedly be published in the UK on 3 September alone. Read more
When U.K. bookseller James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble a year ago, after a sale that landed it in private hands, he faced the formidable challenge of rescuing the chain from troubles largely of its own making, in the shadow of Amazon's prowess in the segment. Read more
Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating commerce. They viewed the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor as a victory for liberty and a blow against the British East India Company's trade monopoly.
'It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.'