A fixture of the literary world since 1950, the National Book award honors the strongest writing in America. Qualifications necessary to win the award are simple: the book has to have been published no earlier than December 1st of the previous year, and the author must be a U.S. citizen by any possible means. Then there’s the most important rule of all—it has to be the best. Judges have now announced this year’s five winners across five categories. Fiction: The Friend Sigrid Nunez has always been a literary heavy-hitter. A winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award, Berlin Prize Fellowship, and …
It’s a pretty typical belief that technology stands in the way of our collective ability to read a book or maintain a five-minute attention span (insert edgy comic art of headphones strangling teens here). In fact, technology has lead to groundbreaking developments in publishing. Here’s another one—the world’s top bestselling author, James Patterson, has released a jaw-dropping thriller for Facebook Messenger months ahead of its print release. Image Via Theverge.com James Patterson’s latest, The Chef, is an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride following a respected officer fighting serious criminal allegations. Set amidst the revelry and decadence of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras …
Renowned alternative musician and Muse frontman Matt Bellamy plotted to mess with his bandmates. When he discovered that bassist Chris Wolstenhome and drummer Dominic Howard despised the Harry Potter franchise, he got a magical idea—to hide a sneaky HP reference in the latest album, Simulation Theory. The best part? Bellamy says that “hardly anyone has noticed.” Gif Via Giphy.com On the track ‘Propaganda,’ Bellamy sneaks in the reference: “you ate my soul like a death eater.” Any fan will catch the clear nod to Voldemort’s followers, the Death Eaters, who serve the Dark Lord in his quest to ‘purify’ the wizarding …
Sometimes publishers reject books for legitimate reasons, like if a book contains immature prose or an uninteresting concept, or if it bears too much similarity to a book the publisher has recently released. But other times, publishers reject books for simply ridiculous reasons, i.e. maybe The Great Gatsby would be better without Gatsby in it. These five authors were met with outrageous rejections… sometimes with outrageous results. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Editors famously pitched a pretty serious revision: “you’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.” We’re lucky that F. Scott Fitzgerald decided …
In an enlightening new interview, fantasy superstar George R. R. Martin opened up about his first efforts to write the epic saga—and his current efforts to wrap up his seven-years-in-the-making The Winds of Winter draft. Image Via Thisisinsider.com The first chapter of A Game of Thrones came to Martin in 1991, meaning that the unfinished saga has already had a total lifespan of nearly three decades. It gets crazier: the total word count of the series clocks in at 1,736,054 words before you count the current manuscript. At nearly 2 million words, it’s substantially longer than the ‘Harry Potter’ series, which seems comparatively to-the-point at a mere …
