Stocking Self Published Novels

Richard Wright‘s 106th birthday passed this last week, and in celebration The Paris Review posted an excerpt from a 2003 remembrance. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling‘s review of Wright’s Native Son.

There are few better ways to spice up a Monday morning than with a Shakespearean choose-your-own adventure story. If it please thee, proceed to McSweeney’s. Then come back to The Millions and check out these pieces on the Bard.

How do you know if the book you’re writing is going to fly or flop? Try writing the first 80 pages without worrying about the outcome as Meg Wolitzer does. “Eighty pages is enough pages for a writer to feel she’s accomplished something, but it’s not so many pages that, if she decides to put aside the book, she’ll feel as if she’s wasted her life,” she told the Daily Beast for its “How I Write” series. It must work because we loved The Interestings.

“Bengali children’s fiction’s limitless supply of ghost stories is matched by little other than its readers’ appetite for it,” writes Siddharthya Swapan Roy. “Anthologies dedicated to ghostly thrills come out with unfailing regularity and every publishing house that does not wish to upset its child readership pays due respects to ghosts and their stories.”