Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter releases on April 24 from Europa Editions in trade paper. I’ve already reviewed it on Three Guys.…
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Author: Dennis Haritou
The Petrified Forest of Book Marketing and the Great Chain of Other People’s Writers
I call petrified any form of book marketing that is doesn’t encourage the end user to give back. Example: newspaper ads. …
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Dead Tree Readers
There was this French guy in the later 19th century who wrote a controversial Life of Jesus. Ernest Renan’s premise was that Jesus was a historical figure who should be investigated scientifically just like any other historical figure.…
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Over There
I recently wrote an ecstatic review of a book by a U.K. writer. Fortunately, I wasn’t beholden to the U.S. publisher at the time.…
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The Reader’s Resume Cover Letter: I’m The Reader You Should Want
Dear Writer, Thank you for allowing me to apply for the job as your reader. You will find attached a list of the principal works that I have read in recent years.…
Read MoreOn Adopting a Writer
I recently passed on reviewing a poetry collection. It’s difficult to write about verse. I’ve only tried it once or twice.…
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Pure by Andrew Miller
For most of the 20th and our own time, historical fiction has been considered an excrescent stump of serious literature, a form of genre writing like science fiction or mysteries.…
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The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood, the conclusion
In no television show in the land will you find a guest who will complain that they suffer from high self-esteem.…
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The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
Praise be, a brilliant debut novel reminiscent of the moral explorations of Iris Murdoch and Zadie Smith but younger in temperament, more directly passionate and theatrical.…
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Independent Bookstores and the Rise of the Zombie
Here’s an apocalyptic vision for you: Imagine a world without independent bookstores. Think of all the money consumers would save if they didn’t have an independent literary culture in their neighborhood!…
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Diaboliad by Mikhail Bulgakov
I don’t need to tell anyone who has read it, but Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterwork, The Master and Margarita, is one of the seminal reading experiences of anyone’s life.…
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Crusoe’s Daughter by Jane Gardam
Jane Gardam says somewhere in Crusoe’s Daughter that a writer’s discovery of a great character is a divine accident. Perhaps in Polly Flint, the lead character in CD, Gardam imagined someone as intelligent and resourceful as herself but fictionally stranger.…
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Best of 2011, Part 3: Dennis Haritou
With respect to Johnny’s sleepers concept, I’d rather name my choices after the espressos that I can no longer have. I’ll call them doppios.…
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Hemingway on The Chauffeurs of Madrid
If you were a reader of the New York Times on May 23rd 1937, you would have come across a short column on the Spanish Civil War by Ernest Hemingway.…
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