The author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and 10 other novels, along with much nonfiction and several children’s books as well, Winterson says, “People always say ‘let’s get the technology out there and lots of people will benefit in time.’ Well, no, because by that point, the technology will change and the rich will control it completely. The world is moving too fast for the trickle-down effect.” – The Guardian (UK)
Category: words
The Bestselling Adult Novel Of 2019 Started Small In 2018, And Has A Very Long Tail
It’s a tough selling environment for fiction; the numbers are bleak and falling fast. But Where Late the Crawdads Sang has been going, and going, and going, and going … “Crawdads has sold more print copies than any other adult title this year — fiction or nonfiction — according to NPD BookScan, blowing away the combined print sales of new novels by John Grisham, Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. Putnam has returned to the printers nearly 40 times to feed a seemingly bottomless demand for the book. Foreign rights have sold in 41 countries.” What the heck? – The New York Times
Christmas, With Its Fights And Fury And Beauty, Is A Gift To Novelists
And, famously, short story writers. Why? “It’s a chance to bring together a wide cast of characters at a time when the sense of occasion allows them and the novelist to take the long view of their lives.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Ten Top-Selling Books Of The 2010s
Though the list is all fiction, overall the trend is moving towards nonfiction on the best-seller lists. According to Lee Graham of the NPD Group, “In 2010, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling titles were fiction, and by 2019 that percentage dropped to 32 percent.” – LitHub
Words For Emotions Tend To Translate Poorly From One Language Into Another: Study
“[Researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill] report how they carried out an analysis of 24 emotional concepts, such as anger, love and pride, across 2,474 languages. The study also included more than 2,400 non-emotional concepts — such as ‘quarrel’ — that were used to further explore meanings and context of emotion words.” – The Guardian
The Politics Of Self-Plagiarism
“As a transgression, plagiarism comes with a fully operational stigma attached. Not so with self-plagiarism. It can be forbidden but without the benefit of shame as a reinforcement. I did find it denounced as unethical while reading through some 50-odd articles or papers mentioning it, most of them from scholarly journals. At least as frequent, though, were suggestions that a certain amount of self-plagiarism is inevitable — and perhaps even necessary.” – Inside Higher Education
Science Fiction Wasn’t Great At Predicting The Future. Who Cares?
What ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre. – The New Republic
Poetry Anti-Slams, Where Bad Is Good
“The anti-slam was created by British performance artist Paula Varjack, inspired by poet Jamie DeWolf’s self-reflexive and satirical performance piece, The Worst Poem Ever. In DeWolf, Varjack saw an opportunity to push performers to be more creative by challenging the competitiveness of a traditional slam. … The first anti-slam took place in Berlin in 2009. Since then it has gone on to captivate audiences around the world.” – The Guardian
How Some Writers Lose Control Of Characters They Have Created
John Foxwell’s research found that 69 percent of authors hear voices of their characters, and 42 percent can enter into dialogue with them. Sixty-five percent say they can act on their own accord. – LitHub
What’s The Best Way To Sell Your Book These Days? Kendall Jenner Being Photographed Reading It
Rarely has the power of “influence” been felt so acutely in an industry in which a media blitz usually involves not much more than a handful of speaking events at local bookstores. For the kinds of people who post Ben Lerner galleys on their Instagram stories to telegraph good taste, intelligence and access, Jenner’s paparazzi images created a sort of cognitive dissonance. – W Magazine