This week! Books! Huge news dropped before Thanksgiving that ViacomCBS has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House’s Berteslmann. Assuming the deal survives antitrust scrutiny, it would essentially turn the Big 5 into one mega-publisher (whatever Penguin Random House + S&S ends up being called) and three major publishers (HarperCollins, Macmillan, and […]
book recommendations
A heartbreaking week in America (This week in books)
I’m not going to lie, it’s tough to post today and what’s happening is bigger than books. My heart is utterly breaking about what’s happening in this country. The police and vigilante mobs are murdering Black people in broad daylight and arresting journalists. 100,000+ COVID deaths and counting, by far the most in the world, […]
The greatness of characters with bad ideas (This week in books)
This week! Books! It’s been a week of very bad ideas, but Gizmodo has a great post on how bad character choices in fiction can lead to some great work. To wit: Jurassic Park! In Amazon news, in the UK supply shortages resulted in book buy buttons being removed. And the New York Times profiled […]
Tips if you’re struggling to write right now (This week in books)
This week! Books! It’s really difficult to concentrate these days and few people I know are as productive as usual. Anne R. Allen has a great post on why it’s so tough to write right now as we deal with our collective grief, and she has some tips on how to keep moving forward. In […]
Write what makes you excited (This week in books)
This week! Books! First up, thanks everyone for all the well wishes this past week, they meant a lot. I’m doing much better now and things should start picking up again around here. (And I’m still available to edit your work). Being sick these past few weeks has not been fun at all, but I’m […]
What was the best book published in the 2010s?
Somehow the decade is almost over and lots of people are looking back. LitHub recently published a whole compendium of book best-ofs for the 2010s, including best novel. While I read so many great books throughout the 2010s (A Very Large Expanse of Sea, Station Eleven, Dirty Wings, The Sky is Everywhere, The Hate U […]
