What kind of writer would Jane Austen have been if she’d lived beyond her forties? We can never know, but Freya Johnston has some ideas.
Sense and Senility
Turkish … Delight?
C.S. Lewis’s greatest fiction of all time was convincing American children that turkish delight was going to taste good. Here are a couple pieces on food and writing to sate your unjustly titillated appetite.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Baker; Sauma; Shawn; Moore; Moore
Out this week: Our Little Racket by Anjelica Baker; Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma; Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn; The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues by Edward Kelsey Moore; and New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Not the First Ebenezer
Our own Kevin Hartnett has an interesting theory as to how Charles Dickens came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. At The Boston Globe, he looks at the evidence that Dickens got inspiration from the amateur writings of millworkers in Massachusetts.
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Bad Review Bingo
Print out your playing cards and start sifting through the comment sections of negative book reviews. It's a new game called "bad review bingo." (inspired in part by the frothy commenters to our own Janet Potter's blistering review of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.)
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The FBI Analyzes Gone Girl
Recommended viewing: an FBI agent takes a look at Amy Dunne's story from Gone Girl and, surprise!, finds it a little lacking.