Dieting tips from Muriel Spark.
New Year, New You
Goodreads launches “Ask the Author” feature
Goodreads has launched a new Ask the Author feature, allowing readers to ask the likes of Margaret Atwood, Khaled Hosseini, and Jesmyn Ward questions “about the new worlds, ideas, and people they’ve discovered in books.”
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Primary Colors for the Age of Obama
Anonymous strikes again: On January 25th, the entity that brought us 1996’s deliciously scandalous Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, offers a roman à clef for the Obama age: O: A Presidential Novel. Then it was Joe Klein, but this Anon. is still Anon. Perhaps better than the insider gossip: The media-fueled whodunit the novel’s sure to inspire.
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2017 Newbery and Caldecott Winners
Kelly Barnhill, author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is the winner of this year’s Newbery Medal for “most outstanding contribution to children’s literature,” and Javaka Steptoe, author of Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, won this year’s Caldecott Medal.
Not a Good Influence
Why should a college student major in English? It’s a question with hundreds of answers, but one of the most common is that reading, more so than other activities, makes you a better person. It sharpens your mind and hones your sense of morality. But what if this comforting idea — as close as you can get to a conviction held by all writers — has little to no basis in reality?
On Not Dating Natalie Portman
Moby, the electronic music producer currently elbowing his way back into the cultural imaginary, has cancelled his upcoming book tour.
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Chum Lit
Some of the best novels out there — Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men — deal largely with fictional friendships. Yet depictions of close friends that are central to the plot are considerably rare in modern novels. At The Guardian, AD Miller notes this isn’t the case for movies and TV shows, and suggests a number of reasons why. You could also read our own Kevin Hartnett on friendship in the age of Facebook.