Lisa Yaszek on the woman known as Francis Stevens, an early female pioneer of American genre fiction. Read more
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Category: Authors
Was the ‘Worst Novelist in History’ In on the Joke?
Over the course of her career, [Amanda McKittrick] Ros became better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared as a result. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), whose operatic warbling was so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as consolation for her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling. Read more
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Two Centuries After His Death, Why is Lord Byron Still Seductive?
“…the poet is mostly recalled in the context of the Byronic hero: a dark, brooding, sexy rebel, derived partly from Byron’s celebrity persona and also from his works, such as his autobiographical masterpiece, “Don Juan”. In England the bicentenary has been marked by new books and events. But many are also taking place abroad, in the countries that hosted his self-imposed exile. In Italy, where he wrote some of his greatest works, including “Don Juan”, he is claimed as something of a national poet. The Keats-Shelley House, at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, is holding a year-long festival of readings, exhibitions and performances. Read more
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Chattanooga Hosts Third Annual James Baldwin Festival of Words
The 3rd annual James Baldwin Festival of Words celebrates black excellence in the literary arts with a full slate of events. The festivities kick off on Friday, August 2nd at 4:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chattanooga Public Library Downtown and is free to the public. Read more
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The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka
One hundred years after his death, the Czech writer circulates as a pop idol of digital alienation. Read more
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The Essential Don DeLillo
His fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here’s where to start. Read more
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She Left the CIA in Frustration. Now Her Spy Novel is Racking Up Awards.
Berry’s debut novel, “The Peacock and the Sparrow,” was released by Atria Books in May 2023 under the pen name I.S. Berry. The book was feted by both the New Yorker and NPR on their annual lists of the best books of the year. This month, the novel also won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel by an American novelist, a significant industry award whose past recipients include Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tana French. Read more
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Record Number of Writers Were Jailed Globally in 2023, PEN America Says
For the first time, China has more than 100 incarcerated writers, and Israel and Russia entered the list of the 10 countries with the most imprisoned writers. Read more
The Essential Joan Didion
Didion was not really out to inspire us. She was looking at us and telling us what she saw, including our compulsion to weave myths for survival. Her distinctive prose and sharp eye were always tuned to an outsider’s frequency, even when she was actually an insider (as with most of her writing on Hollywood). Her essays are almost reflexively skeptical; she wrote with authority borne not so much from experience as from a refusal to give in to dogma. Read more
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A Novelist Who Finds Inspiration in Germany’s Tortured History
She became a writer because her country vanished overnight. Jenny Erpenbeck, now 57, was 22 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall cracked by accident, then collapsed. She was having a “girls’ evening out,” she said, so she had no idea what had happened until the next morning. When a professor discussed it in class, she said, it became real to her.
The country she knew, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, remains a crucial setting for most of her striking, precise fiction. Her work, which has grown in acuity and emotional power, combines the complications of German and Soviet history with the lives of her characters, including those of her own family members, whose experiences echo with the past like contrapuntal music.
Her latest novel to be translated into English, “Kairos,” has been a breakthrough. It is now on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize and considered a favorite to win the award late next month. Read more
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