Lord of the Flies is perhaps the best example of a book that forces readers to confront how wild we are. But there’s a whole corpus of books that accomplish the same thing. In The New Statesman, Erica Wagner writes about Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border.
Wild Thing
Hard to Define
“Every single book or painting or piece of music exists and we take from it what we need and love and shape it into another narrative that goes out into the world or stays within us, so it’s this great thing of one narrative piling onto the next. It’s hard to define.” Miriam Toews talks with The Rumpus about her novel All My Puny Sorrows and the distinctions, or lack thereof, between autobiography and fiction.
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The Winds of Winter Excerpt
“Somewhere off in the far distance, a dying man was screaming for his mother.” Entertainment Weekly has the first paragraph of the next installment of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.
Tuesday New Release Day: Chevalier; Makumbi; Segal; Smith-Stevens; Southwood; Bell; Hadley
Out this week: New Boy by Tracy Chevalier; Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi; The Awkward Age by Francesca Segal; The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens; Evensong by Kate Southwood; Behind the Moon by Madison Smartt Bell; and Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Robinson, Lila and NPR
Recommended listening: Marilynne Robinson talks with NPR about about her latest novel, Lila, which we covered in our “Great Second-Half 2014 Book Preview” and which Leslie Jamison recently reviewed for The Atlantic.
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Trigger Warning: Literature
Students at the University of California Santa Barbara, Rutgers, Oberlin, and others have been requesting “trigger warning” labels on literature from The Great Gatsby to Huck Finn. In The Guardian, University College London Professor John Mullan snipes, “You might as well put a label on English literature saying: warning – bad stuff happens here.”
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Gandalf Set Up the Fireworks
The Paris Review starts the year off right with a post on Tolkien’s birthday.
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The Thriller Code
“Rather than outlining your plot in chronological order, try outlining your plot as if it were a candle burning at both ends. Begin the process by writing your first and last chapter simultaneously.” Amazon Author Insights gathers, well, insights on writing from Dan Brown and other famous crime and thriller novelists. (Full disclosure: Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!) We will also never not recommend this evergreen piece from our own archives, of writers on the best advice they ever received.
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fragment:story
If you know what the phrase “hypertext story” means, you’re likely at least passingly familiar with new media literature, which first appeared all the way back in the days of floppy disks. At Ploughshares, a brief introduction to the genre, with a nod to hypertext ur-teacher and novelist Robert Coover. You could also read Guy Patrick Cunningham on writing in the digital age.