For the most part, writing seems like a pretty safe job—sitting behind a keyboard and tapping away certainly doesn’t seem too dangerous. Of course, sometimes journalists find themselves in combat zones, but by and large, novelists and other purveyors of fiction don’t need to worry too much about whether their life insurance is up to […]
You can’t read music. Okay, maybe you can read music, in the sense that you can look at sheet music or a score and your use your brain to translate that into what the song would sound like if played on instruments. But you can’t read music—as in, you can’t write about a band and […]
The first time you read Haruki Murakami, it can be a disorienting experience. One minute, a character is just sitting there, drinking tea or doing some other mundane activity that routinely happens in the real world. The next minute, that same character is vaulted onto another plane: a shimmering, psychic underworld in which daylight fades […]
You can tell there’s something a little seamy, lurid even, about Alissa Nutting’s debut novel, Tampa, just from the cover. Not so much online, where the stark black & white image only vaguely evokes a chalkboard and the book’s high school setting. Pick up the physical object and you discover that the dust jacket is lined […]
Twitter is useful for a lot of things: finding cute kitten photos, reading breaking news, finding cute puppy photos, seeing what movies Emma Watson will not be starring in, finding cute hedgehog photos, stalking James Franco—you get the point. But for book lovers, Twitter is also a great place to follow the random hopes, dreams, […]
