Bookninja

Largest romance book collection in the world? You had me at largest. (Let’s all be adults here and not mention the word “nuts” below.) (via Library Journal)

The collection contains romance novels of nearly every genre and from nearly every publisher, but also has a more unique aspect. “It’s the soup and nuts,” Ammidown said. “What I like to call process, product and response.” The collection has a variety of writers’ original manuscripts, their handwritten notes, reviews and fan reactions. Researchers can observe a writer’s whole process through this romance fiction collection.

Gather round, children, while Poppy tells you a tale of yesteryear. When I was worming my way out of Bookninja back in the day, I felt like there was at least one “someone plagiarized someone” story every week. I’m guessing not much has changed?

When I was younger and read fantasy voraciously, I often judged a book not by the cover, but by the map that came in the front (or back). I still love looking at this sort of stuff, especially the parts that don’t get touched in the books’ main narratives.. Like, what the frig is going on in the Sea of Rhûn area? None of Tolkien’s main works go there. Neato. Using all my other knowledge of the world of Middle Earth, I can sort of piece together what MIGHT be out there. It’s like a plane of possibilities, with the “realities” of the novel being only one dotted line across the map. Anyway, Lev Grossman is looking at the genre within a genre here.

 maps aren’t just window dressing, they’re fundamentally a part of fantasy as a genre. Before it’s about anything else, fantasy is about landscape: green fields, green hills, a place to which the characters and the reader feel connected in a way that’s no longer possible in our alienated postindustrial age. Fantasy is about longing, about the yearning to be not here but elsewhere. Maps are about the same thing. A map is not an idle exercise: It’s a plan to go somewhere.

The colleges are increasingly playing in the big leagues when it comes to behaving like proper writing programs. It seems like there are many more of these positions than there were when I was younger (and actually free enough of other obligations to take one), so things can’t be all bad. I was recently the WiR at Memorial University and it was a rewarding experience. Sadly, or happily, I am tied by family obligations to this city and can’t really go further afield to meet new writers. Thankfully they grow like mushrooms here.

The Montreal Review of Books does an omnibus on some recent Canadian poetry collections for those of you who might be casting about for new things to read. For the record, Domenica Martinello’s All Day I Dream About Sirens is at the top of my list of amazing things I’ve read recently. Get it.

I think Michael Crummey’s last book, Sweetland, was probably his best. It was a genius reversal on the tropes of the very popular Galore. Where Galore started in the past with magic realism and evolved over the time of the novel to a more and more modern sensibility, Sweetland did the opposite. Where Galore followed an entire community of families, Sweetland followed one guy. I can only imagine how difficult it is to write a book with one character mostly alone and still make it riveting like that. Anyway, the book was unfairly (to my mind) overlooked. I haven’t read The Innocents yet, but I’m glad it’s getting this level of attention: Giller Shortlist, Writers Trust Shortlist, Governor General’s Award Shortlist. Sort of the Triple Crown of Canlit. Also of note is the poetry shortlist which has some exciting names in there, including Gwen Benaway and Julie Bruck.

Everything is behind a paywall now, but from the title of this post, I assume this is about a hot dog that can see perfectly without glasses. If you have a password for the Quill paywall, you might want to read the article.

I’m not sure where to go, after that headline. Turns out only BAD sci-fi makes you stupid. But, in fairness, this is what I love about science as compared to religion: the ability, and even desire, to prove oneself wrong. That said, the first try was really dum dum experiment.

“It turns out our first study didn’t reveal much about sci-fi generally but about what we would now have to call ‘non-literary sci-fi’. The text we used for our new study is instead ‘literary sci-fi’, and it didn’t trigger poor reading at all. Not even when it was introduced with a paragraph describing the story as non-literary. Readers basically ignored that intro and engaged actively with the text itself anyway,” he said. “I assume there were plenty of readers in the sample groups who don’t like sci-fi, but it didn’t matter because they still responded to the literary qualities of the story. Their comprehension didn’t drop this time.”

SMRT-guy Steven Beattie, champion of the short story, examines Muriel Spark.

Never a writer given to verbosity, Spark found in the short story a vehicle to strip her language to its bones, ruthlessly excising anything extraneous and focusing in on her subjects with an intensity that is almost chilling. The word is appropriate: there is an icy quality to Spark’s writing that derives in large part from her unsparing, unsentimental approach to character and situation. If you are looking for consolation as a reader, you would be well advised to look elsewhere.

What makes a good character name? A bad one? Well, in fantasy novels, it is my understanding with elves with apostrophes in their name are more important than the ones with fewer. But that’s the limit of my understanding. So this Millions essay examining how Edith Wharton nails it is good reading for me.

An ideal name, to me, conveys as much as possible about the character, while landing on this side of formulaic or self-consciousness. It sounds plausible and real, but somehow resonates at a frequency that, at every appearance of the name, alerts the reader to important things about the character that it may take the entire novel to fully reveal. There are many examples of this, but the novel I’ll examine here, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, offers a masterclass in the art of character naming.