So you wanna be an author? Here are 5 painful and incredibly difficult steps to becoming an author, from Craked‘s Robert Brockway.
5 steps to authordom!
Money, not ethics, ultimately motivates censorship
Ariel Bogle has a good round up over on Moby Lives about Paypal, Amazon, Apple, and censorship in publishing.
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King’s Revival
Last week, we reported that Stephen King’s first hard-boiled detective novel, Mr. Mercedes, will be out this June. If thrillers aren’t your thing, though, King has another horror novel coming out this November, Revival. It tells the story of the dangerous bond between a charismatic minister and a heroin addict musician.
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Purely Comedic
Fresh Air’s Terry Gross sits down with Jonathan Franzen to talk about Purity, writing, and the possibility of parenthood. “I’ve always thought of myself as a comic novelist. It’s a tough road to hoe because comedy means light in people’s mind. There was an ambitious part of me that kind of chafed and was secretly relieved when the comedy was overlooked, but at a certain point, it becomes wearing for people not to get the humor.” Pair with our review of the novel.
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Vintage Hemingway
The Toronto Star is re-releasing the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote for the paper in the early 1920s. I particularly recommend his column on bullfighting, “Bullfighting is Not a Sport – It is a Tragedy.”
“A piece of ultimate Lovecraft fiction”
Watchmen and V for Vendetta author Alan Moore was interviewed recently, and among the topics discussed was Moore’s forthcoming twelve-part series Providence – which he describes as “my attempt to write what I would consider to be a piece of ultimate [H.P.] Lovecraft fiction.”
Hunger Games Madlibs
Happy Hunger Games! To celebrate the release of Catching Fire, read Ben Blatt’s textual analysis of the most popular adverbs, adjectives, and sentences used by Suzanne Collins in The Hunger Games trilogy, Stephenie Meyer in Twilight, and J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter series. Unsurprisingly, the most popular sentence in Twilight is, “I sighed.” We’re sighing, too. Pair with: Our essay on how teen fantasy heroines need to grow up.