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‘One big virtual love-in’: how children’s book authors are creating online sanctuaries

Authors are going online in real time to engage children and create a safe place where imaginations are fired The childrens author and illustrator wunderkind live on Instagram. And they are pure magic. Jeffers, in quarantine in Belfast, is reading a story a day, having started with his first ever book How to Catch a Star. According to Jeffers, [This is] for all you folks stuck at home in the coming weeks due to Covid, I will be reading one of my books every weekday, and talking about some of…

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Is My Dark Vanessa the most controversial novel of the year? Author Kate Elizabeth Russell speaks out

Exploring issues of abuse and consent, Russells novel My Dark Vanessa could not be more timely. She talks about the pressure to write a likeable victim and the line between fiction and memoir When, in 2018, Kate Elizabeth Russells agent presented publishers with her first novel, Kristen Roupenian. After years spent studying in near-penury, having money in the bank feels weird, Russell tells me. She had always told her husband, who works in academia: Ill move wherever you get a job, just dont expect me to bring in money. In…

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I knew pretty quickly I was on to something: James Ellroy on writing The Black Dahlia

The death of wannabe starlet Elizabeth Short became entwined in Ellroys mind with the murder of his mother and inspired his bestselling novel I had written six novels before Dahlia, but my primary income throughout this time had come not from books, but from being a golf caddy. At first, I worked at the Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, but around the time my first book, Browns Requiem, was published in 1981, I moved to Westchester County, about half an hour outside New York City. I had first heard…

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Suffrage review: epic retelling of US women’s long battle for the vote

A century after the 19th amendment, Ellen Carol DuBois makes the familiar new and sheds light on a fight against injustice It was a decidedly anticlimactic end to a life-changing campaign. The document was sent by train to Washington in the middle of the night. A government employee met the train and rushed it to the secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, who signed the Proclamation of Ratification at dawn, three days after Tennessee became the 36th state to vote for womens suffrage. There were no photographers to record the moment,…

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Trump reportedly calls John Bolton a ‘traitor’ and wants to block his book

President reportedly told aides and media figures book shouldnt be published before Novembers election John Bolton is a traitor and his reportedly told aides and media figures. The presidents views on news of a book deal for fired in September last year. He offered to testify in the Senate but Republicans voted not to call witnesses during a trial which duly ended in Trumps acquittal, despite leaks from Boltons book manuscript seeming to show The Room Where It Happened was slated for publication in March but it has been held…

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Real censorship: Roxane Gay responds to American Dirt death threat row

The author argues the debate around Jeanine Cummins controversial novel shows how people are threatened for daring to have opinions As writers and critics reveal the death threats theyve received in the wake of the uproar surrounding Jeanine Cummins novel, American Dirt, the cancellation of Cummins tour for her controversial novel American Dirt, over concerns for her safety. The novel has been widely criticised for its stereotypical portrayals of Mexico and Mexicans, with tweeted Stephen King, an early fan of American Dirt, in response. But the had admitted the author…

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Beyond American Dirt: the best books to understand Latinx culture

Mexican ghosts, a Splanglish coming of age saga, and trauma on the US border Myriam Gurba picks books exploring the Latinx experience I believe the publishing industry made a profound mistake publishing Jeanine Cumminss wannabe narco-novel Juan Rulfos Pedro Pramo is often hailed as the great Mexican novel. TheHouse of Broken Angels, evokes Rulfo in both style and content, even down to the opening line: Big Angel was late to his own mothers funeral. Urreas prose style is pure chingn: confident, sleek and funny. Like Pedro Pramo, House of Broken…

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Moral of the story: 2019’s boldest culture asked what it means to be good

At a time when deceit is trumping decency, artists from Kanye West to Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge have taken it upon themselves to pose questions about virtue and privilege In Little Women, a haughty publisher dismisses Jo Marchs stories as unfashionable. Morals dont sell nowadays, he tells the aspiring author. People want to be amused, not preached at. Hopefully the statute of limitations has expired on spoiling a 151-year-old story: March an avatar for her creator, Louisa May Alcott proves him wrong. As has Gerwig, reviving Little Women in…

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Odds and Ends 

Can America ever rebuild its neighborhoods and communities?

We talk a lot about startup ecosystems around these parts, and for good reason. Strong ecosystems have great reservoirs of talent congregated close together, a culture built around helping one another on ambitious projects, and sufficient risk capital to ensure that interesting projects have the resources to get underway. Strip off the ecosystem layer though, and you are left with the actual, physical manifestation of a city or region — its housing, its transportation and mobility options, and its infrastructure. And if Charles Marohn’s Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to…

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