Category: literary life

In honor of Halloween, some guy is listing the ten scariest novels. Really, it should just be called: Ten Scary Novels, leaving the superlative out. We’re not particularly terrified. Bonus points for selecting the John Gray book, though.

Helen Fielding’s new book, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, is only barely mentioned in this article, as the author spends most of his time talking about Bridget Jones’ Diary, then adds:

Being funny is never as easy as it looks and very few women novelists find it possible at all. Almost every week a novel is published by a woman, for women, that we are assured will make us laugh out loud and at which one barely smiles. How many women novelists are capable of high comedy? Jane Austen. Helen Fielding. Who else? Nancy Mitford? Anita Loos? Certainly not the current crop of writers marketed under the title of Chick Lit.

It’s the “women novelists” part I’m finding hard to swallow. Anyhow, I’m thankful for the clarification that the zygomatic muscles aren’t connected to the vagina.

Slate has a slideshow of artist Sloane Tanen’s take on chick lit. Ridiculing chick lit is so, like, 1999, don’t you think?

This weekend brought the usual crop of author profiles. The Guardian has an article on Alison Lurie.

This year she published a collection of essays, Boys and Girls Forever , in which studies of children’s classics are linked under a thesis that the authors have “in some sense remained children themselves”. The book follows on from her 1990 collection of essays, Don’t Tell the Grown-ups, in which Lurie asserted that many children’s classics were essentially subversive.

Lurie cites The Wizard of Oz and even Little Women in that category. The rest of the profile is about her birth and upbringing, and how she started writing.

There’s also this profile of Toni Morrison, whose new book, titled Love, is coming out. I’ve seen mixed reviews of it, but the article is all sugar and spice and everything nice.

And VOA has a feature on Kavita Daswani, author of For Matrimonial Purposes. She used her and her parents’ efforts to find her a suitable husband as the basis for the novel.

Dale Peck has a new book out. Dale Peck says he’s “not going to write any more bad reviews.” Any connection between these two statements would be purely coincidental.

Poor, poor Woody Allen. You see, the memoir mess was really just another case of Allen being caught in “a power struggle between two women.”
(Link via Publishers’ Lunch)

So everyone’s talking about the new Amazon.com “Search Inside the Book.” Jeff Bezos’ front page memo picks a conveniently low-frequency word to demonstrate the usefulness of the feature: “resistojet,” which, prior to the installation, returned no results, but now gives a nice set of 8 matches. Problem is, most users need to search for higher frequency words. Take for example the innocuous “morocco orphanage.” You’d think this search would give a somewhat restricted result set. But I ended up with 1,200 hits. How do you sort through that many results? Not convenient. There should be a way to turn the feature on or off when searching.