Are you qualified to talk about books for Fox News? I was reading this thoughtful and not at all ideologically-driven piece about The Hunger Games on Fox News today when I was struck by a thought: what does it take to qualify one to talk books at Fox News? In fairness, Dr. Keith Albow is [...]
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Boy does the internet like a list. And boy, does the bookish internet love a book list. Here’s a round-up of recent bookish lists that caught our attention. See previous installments here. At NPR, 3 Books on Writing Well. At The Huffington Post, 13 Unlucky Characters in Literature At the new Picador Books tumblr: 140 Literary Songs [...]
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Winning the award was a blessing, but also a curse. “I’ve had trouble writing since I won,” Ward admits. “I feel the weight of that list.” She now stands in the company of, among others, William Faulkner and Alice Walker, who she counts among her influences. I can only imagine how this must weigh. [...]
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This is a guest post from Monte Schulz, who published his first novel, Down by the River, in 1990, and spent the next twelve years writing a novel of the Jazz Age,which is now available in three parts: This Side of Jordan, The Last Rose of Summer, and The Big Town. He wrote it for [...]
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This week, Name That Author! is sponsored by Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It’s a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all [...]
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I’m about to scale the literary mountain known as Toni Morrison’s Beloved for a re-read, and the fact that I know it’s going to destroy me has me pulling out all my favorite stalling techniques. How do you motivate yourself for a read you know will be difficult but worth it? And what’s on your [...]
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America! You’re super neat. I’m a big fan of yours, in fact. I like lots of American things: John Cusack, Target, Land’s End Canvas, Kate Spade, and American Shorthair cats. And literature-wise, you guys are pretty great. We’ve been talking about Great American Writers here at Book Riot over the last little while, and some [...]
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The title is not meant to suggest that Jimmy Fallon has a problem with the Audies. I don’t know if he does or not. I don’t even know if he knows what the Audies are. (Jimmy, if you’re reading this, the Audies are the audiobook industry’s award for the best audiobooks of the year.) What [...]
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Chances are good that the three novels recommended by this year’s Pulitzer jury — “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace — are the only three serious new novels many of the board members read last year, apart, perhaps, from one or two others. These [...]
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To me, one of more difficult things about being a reader is explaining why I didn’t like a novel without sounding like a) a jerk, b) a passive-aggressive dweeb, or c) a small-minded fool. The rub is thus: You want to be discerning, without sounding douchey. But that’s so much easier said than done. What [...]
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E-book production “costs 10% less” than print book production, said Molly Barton, Penguin’s global digital director. Hardly the vast savings that many consumers imagine. “But the largest expense is author payment and always has been.” I guess the real savings would be if you just didn’t have to worry about print book production at [...]
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Time now to reveal the answer to last week’s Name That Author!. But first, a recap of the clues. 1. I have been a member of the NRA for more than thirty years. 2. I dedicated at least one of my novels to Ronald Reagan. 3. I was introduced to my second wife by Colin Powell. Seems like [...]
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Juliana C. was selected as a finalist in our Outlandish Stories from the Dating Scene giveaway, sponsored by Gotham Books and Girl Walks Into a Bar. The winner will be the one whose entry reposted on BookRiot.com gets the most Facebook “likes” by 11:59PM EDT, Friday, April 27. The ONLY way to vote is to click the Facebook [...]
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Sally P. was selected as a finalist in our Outlandish Stories from the Dating Scene giveaway, sponsored by Gotham Books and Girl Walks Into a Bar. The winner will be the one whose entry reposted on BookRiot.com gets the most Facebook “likes” by 11:59PM EDT, Friday, April 27. The ONLY way to vote is to click the Facebook [...]
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Abby S. was selected as a finalist in our Outlandish Stories from the Dating Scene giveaway, sponsored by Gotham Books and Girl Walks Into a Bar. The winner will be the one whose entry reposted on BookRiot.com gets the most Facebook “likes” by 11:59PM EDT, Friday, April 27. The ONLY way to vote is to click the [...]
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Inspired by Rachel Dratch’s new memoir Girl Walks Into a Bar…, we asked you to send in your most disastrous and legendary dating stories, and you did not let us down! The entries ranged from hilarious to kinda sad to downright cringeworthy, and they made us love you, the Book Riot community, a little bit [...]
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One time, my sister jokingly told me that she had only ever finished one book in her life: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. I suppose if you were 10 and only going to read one book in your life, there are worse books you could have chosen, but I’ll never forget how [...]
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Humor is such a slippery concept. What’s funny? And I don’t just mean what makes something funny, but what is the definition of funny? Funny is different from humorous, and humor is different from comedy, right? I think? Sometimes I get bogged down in the semantics when someone asks me why I like a book [...]
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As most of you know, the Pulitzer board spit the bit this year and couldn’t pick a fiction winner. Apparently, none of the three finalists got a majority of the votes, and so no prize. Can we do any better? Here’s the task: let’s play Pulitzer Board. Vote for one of the three finalist below, [...]
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