At The New York Times, Alyssa Cole discusses her new book, When No One Is Watching, with Concepción de León, and the difference between writing romances and thrillers. “When I’m writing romance, I’m leaning more into the good,” Cole says. “In every romance you have to also make the reader feel bad sometimes, but you lean into certain beats that will make the reader feel happy, feel hopeful and excited. In this, it was fun to be able to lean into things that would make the reader feel anxious, because I was anxious in writing it. I could explore the kinds of things that can be done in the story when focusing on that slate of emotions as opposed to romantic emotions.”
Alyssa Cole on Leaning Into Anxiety
Where Every Novel Takes Place
Electric Literature has posted a “Map of the City Where Every Novel Takes Place,” so now you can know exactly how to get from Middlemarch to The Jungle Book via Jurassic Park.
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The New Gutenberg
In the latest issue of Harvard magazine, Nathan Heller writes about Arion Press, the last remaining “full-service letterpress in the United States.” Apparently Arion, which has “an in-house foundry where lead is melted into ingots,” sells editions of canonical titles (like Ulysses) that retail for thousands of dollars. (h/t our own Kevin Hartnett)
Joan
Sara Davidson’s Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion is an intimate portrait of one of America’s most revered and private writers.
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More Kindle Price Cuts
Amazon is continuing the Kindle price cut action, introducing a new, enhanced version of the larger Kindle DX (this is the one that’s optimized for things like reading newspapers) and dropping the price by over $100.