“Poised to shake up the genre with its daring choice of protagonist, a groundbreaking young adult novel released this week by author Joan Berman reportedly makes the bold choice of following a moody, independently minded high school student who could be described as something of a loner.” The Onion pokes fun at YA fiction.
Bold Move
Goodbye, Byes
Recommended Reading: Jason Arthur’s farewell to goodbye-to-New-York essays.
●
●
Raymond Chandler on How to Write Detective Stories
“The good detective story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well. And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never goes out of style.” Raymond Chandler’s 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” is a real gem.
“The grand and minute violence of everyday life”
Recommended Reading: Seth Cosimini on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Tuesday New Release Day
New releases this week include the much-hyped The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I. Also out in nonfiction is President Obama’s picture book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (author of Seabiscuit), as reviewed by the New York Times, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and, for hip-hop fans, Jay-Z’s memoir Decoded.
There Goes Ten Minutes of Your Weekend
The visual wizards of Pop Chart Lab have put together yet another mind-bogglingly thorough visual taxonomy. This time, instead of cocktails or monsters, the graphic artists have turned their attention toward “The Magnificent Map of Rap Names.”
●
●
Now Serving: A Delicious Slice of the Blogosphere
The ever-entertaining writers at The Bygone Bureau have published their very first ebook, a collection of food writing chronicling everything from a Micronesian pig roast to a Chilean bread riot titled The Biggest Yam.
●
●
I guess this is why Mavis, the unrepentant former high school Queen Bee of the movie “Young Adult” (2011) was so refreshingly, delightfully awful a character.
Watching this with a group of people is some sort of weird Rorschach test!