Jan
26
Confederacy of Funny
January 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment
“Any fool can make you cry,” English novelist Howard Jacobson once stated in an interview. “If I want to see what a writer’s made of, I say, ‘Go on, make me laugh!’” Laughter. There’s never too much. This is why compiling a short list of funny books to read (or re-read) over the coming year is [...]
Jan
4
Shhhh. The Silence Is Coming.
January 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Turn off and unplug why don’t you?
Nov
23
Old School Books Win In The Children’s Book Market
November 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Parents tend to choose old fashioned paper books over e-books for their children…
Nov
12
Humiliation, Eternally Documented
November 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment
When we’re writing, it’s inevitable that we will draw from our own experience. Whether in terms of story or character, there will almost always be shades of the self, flitting like ghosts in the margins. With the rise of blogging, social networks, and reality television, the lines of privacy are blurred to practically nothing. I’ve [...]
Nov
3
A Book We Want To Read, and two other things…
November 3, 2011 | 1 Comment
We want to read this: Nuclear Romance, a debut novel by New York journalist Abby Luby, was written after the devastating accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants in March, 2011. In the novel, the tragic and mysterious death of a 7-year old girl after swimming at a beach across [...]
Oct
26
Thinking Outside The Book
October 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment
These are books. These are also books. …and so is this. What else? Enjoy this TED Talk on next generation digital books: “Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad — with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is “Our [...]
Oct
24
The Revolution will Be Novelized
October 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment
We’ve all seen how literature is a tool of protest and revolution: Publishing your views sure beats throwing molotov cocktails, and it also seems to be much more effective. We’ve blogged on this in the past, here. (I am looking forward to the first books about the Occupy Wall Street movement.) In this vein, friends [...]
Oct
7
Tomas Tranströmer has won the Noble Prize in Literature. Here‘s a bit about it from the LA Times: Nobel Prize winner Tomas Transtromer, in translation Poet Tomas Tranströmer is well known in Sweden, but here in the U.S. he hasn’t become the household name of, say, your average Kardashian. Winning the Nobel Prize in literature [...]
Sep
30
Stories From The Backseat
September 30, 2011 | 1 Comment
Here’s a voice that has been mostly unheard of in books – A Chicago taxi driver has written a book brimming with rich stories of cab life: Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab… A ‘Hack’ Shares Years Of Stories From A Chicago Cab “A cab driver’s job is relatively straightforward: shuttle riders from door to [...]
Aug
24
The Writer in Politics
August 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment
When it rains it pours! We’ve had so many fantastic guest posts recently. Thank you, thank you. And special thanks this week to Leora Skolkin-Smith for allowing us to post her wonderful piece from the Fiction Studio Books blog. Enjoy… The Writer In Politics by Leora Skolkin-Smith The question of “The Writer in Politics†is [...]