Reading Luster this week made me think that I do not read a lot of contemporary litfic and I feel somewhat estranged from the conventions that are currently in play, because I have a sense that there are conventions, or maybe tropes, that are perhaps of the zeitgeist, or what is acceptable to publishers at the moment or whatever.

I have remarked ( Read more... )

Suspend your belief on a very fragile thread - though it is a rom-com, so being prepared to accept the dubiously realistic is there from the get go: Tartan and tinsel: a Scottish castle-dwelling novelist on Brooke Shields’ new romcom: [T]his is not a film you want to get into authenticity arguments with.... Obviously, they have never had a ( Read more... )

Apparently there are 'writers brought to a state of despair by the novel' and This seems especially true for the more ambitious writers working today. Where fiction comes with too many formal obligations and a suffocating set of prescribed subjects, in non-fiction it seems you can write about almost whatever you like, and in something closer to ( Read more... )

Idly wafting through Twitter feed, came across this in a last year's article about ongoing foofarraw in the National Trust about the application of actual historical analysis to their properties as opposed to lovely myths: Country houses are easily mythologised as Britain’s soul, places in which tradition and inheritance stand firm against the ( Read more... )

I know I first clicked on this because someone tweeted a line or two that sounded like ponceyness to the max begging for a codslapping, but when I actually read it, there was certainly something I would consider as deviation into sense, or at least what I could only acclaim as a recognition of It's All More Complicated:
Retail Therapy: An excerpt ( Read more... )

How far we have come from the days when novel reading was A VICE up there with drinking tea and Ye Heinous Sinne of Onan.
It’s official! According to science, reading fiction makes you nicer. Dodell-Feder and Tamir noted that the nature of the link between fiction and social awareness is still not fully clear; they recommended that future research ( Read more... )

What I read
Well, I did actually get to the end of Diana of the Crossways (there may have been a certain amount of skimming, OMG, George M, you were neither George Eliot nor Oscar Wilde, your deep thinkies were not all that and spare me your notion of glitteringly witty dialogue). Came away thinking he thought in a rather Henry Jamesian way that ( Read more... )

I see this actually dates back some years, but my flabber is still ghasted: It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love: "Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."
('Literary girls': shudder.)
Ummm: over a long and misspent life - misspent, I may add, reading ALOT, we have ( Read more... )

What I read
Courtney Milan, This Wicked Gift (finished), Proof by Seduction (2009), Trial by Desire (2010) and that pretty much wound down the binge.
Re-read of Stella Gibbons, A Pink Front Door (1959) - not one of her absolutely top ones, but pretty good. People circulating around a codslapworthy young married woman who is not only one of those ( Read more... )

Well, at least Richard Dawkins didn't think Metamorphosis was actually a work on entomology? - or maybe he did, and somebody said, 'No, Richard, it's fiction' and he was trying to work out how that worked? I picture him as one of those children in Victorian stories taught on the Grandgrindian method, or coming further up to date, along the lines ( Read more... )