In terms of memoirs Karr’s latest isn’t exactly high-octane, which her first was. The drama is mild if put against a recovery narrative like Jerry Stahl’s classic “Permanent Midnight,” or a stylistic tour de force around divorce like Abigail Thomas’ “Safekeeping,” or a harrowing “Girl, Interrupted”-type vision of a psychiatric hospital, or a fervent Catholic conversion account on the order of Heather King’s “Redeemed.”
Read the full story at the LA Times.
During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.
Read the full story at Wired.
Tags: Gary Small, Nicholas Carr
Tags: Ashley Judd
It’s not every day you read something that makes you laugh out loud every other page. Then again, Tina Fey doesn’t write a book every day. Maybe she should. If you’re a fan of the Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock star, famous for her spot-on imitation of Sarah Palin, you will love this collection of autobiographical essays. Even if you’re not a die-hard fan, you’ll still laugh now and then. You can’t help it.
Read the full story at USA Today.
Tags: Bossypants, Tina Fey
Tags: Andre Dubus, Townie
Sage Cohen has made a big and positive difference in my own writing life, both as a poetry teacher (I’ve taken both her Level I and Level II online poetry courses), as an inspiring author, and, most recently, as a kind and supportive friend. I am delighted to share her wisdom and creative energy with you in this interview, which focuses on her newest book, *The Productive Writer: Tips & Tools to Help You Write More, Stress Less & Create Success*.
Sage is also the author of *Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry* and the poetry collection *Like the Heart, the World*. Her essay “The Word is the Way” appeared alongside thought leaders such as Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Thomas L. Friedman in the anthology *How to Achieve a Heaven on Earth*. She has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lectures and teaches widely (including a range of interactive, online classes) and publishes the Writing the Life Poetic Zine.
Read the full interview at ErikaDreifus.com.
Tags: Erika Dreifus, Sage Cohen
“The Pale King” is less inventive and exuberantly imagined than Wallace’s previous novels: no herds of feral hamsters roaming the land, no artificially created deserts in Ohio, no ad-bearing Statue of Liberty. But like “Infinite Jest” it depicts an America in thrall to myopic consumerism, and like his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” it grapples with corrugated questions of identity and the difficulties of communication.
Read the full story at The New York Times Books.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, author and former politician Jeffrey Archer speaks about England’s decline as a financial center, his quirky writing habits and the rising value of the e-book market.
Tags: Jeffrey Archer
Tags: jonathan franzen
The 26 year old signs a four book deal for over $2 million. Catch what she says about the deal on her blog at http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2011/02/announcement.html.
Tags: Amanda Hocking, book deal
HOWARD JACOBSON admits that he has been practising his acceptance speech for the Man Booker prize since he published his first novel, in 1983. Now 68, he suspected his time would never come. But this year he surprised many by taking the prize for “The Finkler Question”, a funny-sad novel about three old men in north London. So he can finally shake off the distinction of being an under-rated author.
Read the full story at The Economist.
Tags: Howard Jacobson
“His dead wife pressed her lips to his forehead, then said, “You can tear a man’s ear right off, rip it like a leaf from a branch.”” About his last line: This line comes from very near the end of the novel I’m finishing, and it’s currently, in my humble opinion, the greatest line ever written. This opinion will change soon. It always does.
Read the full story at Esquire.
Tags: Bret Anthony Johnston
Anne Roiphe: My Late Husband’s Words. It was mid-December of 2005. I don’t know why he said it. I don’t know if a shadow had fallen across him, something appalling he saw out of the corner of his eye. I don’t know if it was just coincidence or intuition that prompted him, but about a week before my seemingly healthy 82-year-old husband suddenly died, he emerged from the kitchen ready to go to his office, his face clean-shaven, his eyes shining, smiling shyly, holding the copy of the Anthony Trollope book he was rereading, and said to me, “You have made me very happy. You know that you have made me a happy man.” There I stood in my work outfit, blue jeans and a T-shirt. There I stood with my white hair and my wrinkles and the face I was born with, although now much creased by time, and I felt beautiful.
Read the full story at Real Simple.
Tags: Anne Roiphe, Asha Bandele, Kathryn Harris, Lori Leibovich, Winifred Gallagher
As a creator, writer, producer and star of “30 Rock,” the Emmy-award winning NBC sitcom, Ms. Fey is singularly bossy for television, though she might not put it that way. As she writes in the book, for which she received a reported $5 million advance from Little, Brown — just shy of Hillary Clinton money — her tips for making it in a male-dominated workplace are: “no pigtails, no tube tops. Cry sparingly” — though if “you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.” Also, “don’t eat diet foods in meetings.”
Read the full story at the New York Times.
Tags: Richard Ford
Six years ago Paul Harding was just another graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with a quiet little novel he hoped to publish. He sent copies of the manuscript, in which he had intertwined the deathbed memories of a New England clock repairer with episodes about the dying man’s father, to a handful of agents and editors in New York. Soon after, the rejection letters started to roll in.
Read the full story at The New York Times.
Tags: Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize
“Why this is happening, and how it can happen, is a question that’s been explored by other indie writers experimenting with sales on the Kindle store. J.A.Konrath is arguably the best authority on this, and the logic goes roughly as follows:”
Read more at Novelr blog: http://www.novelr.com/2011/02/27/rich-indie-writer.
Tags: Amanda Hocking, Kindle
Truth to tell, I have a real love/hate relationship with memoirs. Because I very much enjoy reading about people’s lives (an unappreciative therapist might term my predilection voyeurism), I gravitate toward the biography and memoir section of libraries and bookstores. But despite the fact that memoirs are, by definition, self-referential and are therefore — to one degree or another — filled with variations of me, me, me, I don’t really enjoy (and therefore tend not to read) what I call the “Children of Job,” subgenre of memoir-writing. You know the type, and I don’t need to name any names. Rather, what I’m looking for are engaging characters, enlightening and/or entertaining stories and good writing. Here are some of my favorites.
Listen to the full story at NPR.
Tags: Bernard Cooper, Edmund de Waal, Edward Conlon, Eugenia Ginzburg
Remarkable! One of the best autobiographical business books I have ever read. “Lofty Pursuits” is a story about Mark Schuster’s challenges in an entrepreneurial world. It’s a historical memoir that captures the spirit of hard old-fashioned work while practicing good ethical behavior, inspired by the author’s mentor and role model, his grandfather. Blending the old with the new, sustaining our ties with our heritage while planning for the future, and acting with environmental best practices are just a few key themes running through “Lofty Pursuits: Repairing the World One Building at a Time.”
Read the full review at Reader Views.
Tags: Mark Richard Schuster
#1 Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
The author of “The Corrections” is back, not quite a decade later, with an even richer and deeper work — a vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when the creedal legacy of “personal liberties” assumed new and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures this through the tribulations of a Midwestern family, the Berglunds, whose successes, failures and appetite for self-invention reflect the larger story of millennial America.
Read about the other nine at the Sunday Book Review.
Tags: Ann Beatie, Emma Donoghue, Isabel Wilkerson, Jennifer Egan, Jennifer Homans, jonathan franzen, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Stacy Schiff, Stephen Sondheim, William Trevor
