Readers might expect celebrities to hire professionals to help them with their memoirs. But when it comes to fiction, things get more complicated. Read more
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Category: Miscellaneous
Octavia Butler Wrote a ‘Parable’ That Became a Prophecy — Now It’s Also an Opera
“Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower was published 30 years ago, in 1993. This Afrofuturistic book about a dystopian America set in our time now seems positively prophetic — and a new musical interpretation of Butler’s novel is touring the country.” Read more
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Five Great Books from the Borderlands of Mystery, Horror, and the Psychological Thriller
Scott Adlerberg on masterpieces of the uncanny, marvelous, and strange. Read more
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Charlie Watts’ Book Collection to be Auctioned
His library contained dozens of rare first editions, including signed first editions of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Now, two years after his death, some of those gems will be put up for auction. The drummer’s collection of jazz memorabilia is also being sold. Read more
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How Milwaukee Celebrates the Typewriter’s Long, Local History
Held from June 23 to June 25, QWERTYFEST was an inky paradise for collectors, artists, history buffs, and word nerds alike. The event featured live music, typewriting workshops, typewriter poetry ‘busking,’ and a local market featuring honey made by cemetery bees and a typewriter autographed by well-known typewriter enthusiast Tom Hanks. Read more
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The Year of the Slim Volume
Thanks to factors like dwindling attention spans, less leisure time, and price hikes across paperbacks and hardcovers, short texts—novellas, standalone short stories, poetry collections, plays, and experimental cross-genre works—are finally getting their due. Read more
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The Greatest Tech Books of All Time
We were less interested in works that are supposedly influential and more in ones that have endured, with ideas that are still relevant today, stories that have captured something essential about technology, and writing that’s made us stand up in our seats. These books don’t project a single vision of what tech is but continue to challenge what it can be. Read more
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How Review-Bombing Can Tank a Book Before It’s Published
The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. Read more
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Nine Books That Will Actually Make You Laugh
Let’s be honest: What passes for funny in book marketing falls beneath the standard just about everywhere else. The number of published works that say “Hilarious!” on their cover but turn out to be merely quirky—or the dreaded wacky—is enough to make a reader cynical. Read more
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Read Your Way Through the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
The poet and novelist Luis Alberto Urrea thinks the borderlands are the most interesting book in the world, being rewritten every day. These are his recommendations. Read more
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