Still feeling somewhat wishy-washy - not sure if this is reaction to the shots (booster site still a bit sore, for the record) - or whether it is merely the product of unwonted physical exercise, i.e. walk to health centre, standing for a considerable while in a queue, walk back (mostly uphill), not to mention the psychological effects of seeing so ( Read more... )

Came across this a couple of weeks ago:
A master of self-promotion: letters reveal how Philip Roth ‘hustled’ for prizes: Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who studied the correspondence while writing a book about Roth, was surprised by how pushy the author was and by his wheeler-dealing with friends and colleagues from the worlds of publishing, ( Read more... )

I have been wont, for some considerable time, to take a small daily amount of Vitamin C, on the grounds that it is supposed to improve immunity, especially in the common cold season.
But I also consume what I would suppose to be a reasonable amount of ascorbic acid in my daily diet and therefore I very much doubt that I need to neck down the entire ( Read more... )

Natural Cycles was hailed as a stress-free, hormone-free contraceptive. Then women began reporting unwanted pregnancies.
And it does sound as if by representing it as a lovely natural thing (that you need an app for and that involves what turns out to be a fairly demanding process of monitoring, ahem ahem) that takes birth control out of the realm ( Read more... )

I spotted this list on a friend's FaceBook post (friend is also known in these parts, but I don't know how they feel about crossing the streams, so won't) of words in book blurbs that are a turn-off: Life-affirming
Heartwrenching
Uplifting
Feelgood
Kooky
Heartwarming
Madcap
Quirky
Hilarious

To which I would add ( Read more... )

Would it not be more useful to think in a somewhat more granular fashion about what we are thinking about when we are bewailing the declining popularity of literary fiction, and the fact that litfic writers are unable to support themselves by writing litfic:
Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically.
When one considers that within the ( Read more... )

Well, I am all for quiet carriages and minimising the aural impact of one's fellow passengers, but does not 'psychotherapist and writer' quoted in the article muddle together chosen and unchosen sound effects? There is a difference between having to listen to somebody else's transistor radio and having your own carefully curated mixtape on your ( Read more... )

Or, journos clearly do not even check Wikipedia.
From eggs to bacon - why food scares don’t scare us. But the industry doesn’t bank on consumers forgetting about risk and remembering how much they like burgers; it takes a major effort by food boards, manufacturers and retailers to manage crises. Few have pulled it off as well as the Egg Marketing ( Read more... )

Because I think it's a much longer trend, having been reading blurbs for several decades and marked the tendency to position books/writers in terms of the NEW [whoever] or being the 'love-child of [one writer] and [another writer]', not to mention seen a lot of very derivative works which were presumably buying into this desire for the familiar.
( Read more... )