Margaret Atwood

Are Novels Better With Large Casts or Small Casts?

Dave Astor | Posted 05.02.2012

Read More: J.K. Rowling, Edith Wharton, Donald Westlake, Barbara Kingsolver, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novels, Literary Characters, J.R.R. Tolkien, Margaret Atwood, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Charlotte Bronte, Books News

For a book with "Solitude" in its title, it sure has lots of characters! After recently reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I've been thinking about whether novels are better with large casts or small casts.

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Like 'Girls'? You'll Love These Books

The Hairpin | Posted 04.27.2012

Read More: Girls, Marilyn French, Girls Hbo, Books, Judd Apatow, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Rickie Solinger, Jeanette Winterson, Mary Mccarthy, Reading, Lena Dunham, Women News

Let's just say there are a lot of articles about Girls. And, if you're like me, it's been making you think a lot about women, and friends, and the cit...

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How I Ended Up in the Self-Publishing Hall of Fame

John Blumenthal | Posted 04.13.2012

Read More: Yahoo, Thomas Paine, BookReporter.Com, Kindle, Self-Publishing Hall of Fame, Createspace, Self-Publishing, Margaret Atwood, Amazon, Pw, Books News

In 1999, I decided to self-publish a novel. I'd sold books to mainstream houses in the past, but no one wanted this one. But I believed in it. My agent believed in it. My wife believed in it. The dog was neutral.

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Many Famous Authors Started With 'Novel 101'

Dave Astor | Posted 05.20.2012

Read More: J.K. Rowling, Paul Bowles, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Drabble, Charles Dickens, Margaret Atwood, Herman Melville, Carson McCullers, Novels, Emile Zola, J.R.R. Tolkien, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, Debut Novels, Cormac McCarthy, Books News

Creating a novel is tough. Until you get the hang of it, it can be hard to do the Proustian thing.

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10 Reading-Related Resolutions for 2012

Dave Astor | Posted 02.20.2012

Read More: Tea Party, New Year's Resolutions, Classic Novels, Presidential Campaign, Independent Bookstores, Mitt Romney, Margaret Atwood, Republicans, Harry Potter, Newt Gingrich, Barack Obama, Books, Reading, Books News

As New Year's Day nears, it's time for some book-related resolutions!

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Favorite Books On Our Radar

Posted 01.02.2012

Read More: Queen, Pantone, Video, Niall Ferguson, Books, Sherlock Holmes, Margaret Atwood, Steve Inskeep, Pulphead, On Our Radar, Books News

We get so many books in the mail, you wouldn't believe. I know, your heart bleeds for us. Most of them, to be brutal yet honest, merit little more tha...

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Inside This Place Not of It

Meg Waite Clayton | Posted 01.07.2012

Read More: Inside This Place Not of It, Voice of Witness, Robin Levi, McSweeney's, Margaret Atwood, Books, Nonfiction, Ayelet Waldman, Dave Eggers, Lola Vollen, Books News

Author Dave Eggers and physician/human rights scholar Lola Vollen have founded a nonprofit division of McSweeney's Books called Voice of Witness, meant to empower those most closely affected by contemporary social injustice.

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Confessions of an E-Book Virgin

Dave Astor | Posted 12.21.2011

Read More: Libraries, E-Books, Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, Jules Verne, Bookstores, Facebook, Khaled Hosseini, Louisa May Alcott, Television, Independent Bookstores, Radio, Youtube, E-Readers, h.g. Wells, Digital Devices, Science Fiction, Books News

Some people continued to ride a horse-and-buggy after many other people switched to cars. Maybe I'm one of those late-adopter types. But at least for now, I'm sticking with print books.

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What Is The Booker Prize, And Why Should You Care?

Posted 12.16.2011

Read More: The Literature Prize, Yann Martel, The Booker Prize, Video, Thomas Keneally, Margaret Atwood, Man Booker Prize, The Man Booker Prize, Life of Pi, Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize, Books News

On Tuesday, the latest winner of The Man Booker Prize will be announced. It's one of the most important literary prizes in the English language - but ...

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The Most Novels You've Read By an Author

Dave Astor | Posted 11.14.2011

My list includes the authors' names, the number of novels I've read by each of them, and my three favorite novels (in rank order) by each of them. If you have different favorites by those authors, I'd like to hear about that.

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In Praise of the Novella

Dave Astor | Posted 11.01.2011

Read More: The Odyssey, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Novellas, The Time Machine, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Margaret Atwood, Billy Budd, Herman Melville, h.g. Wells, The Penelopiad, Carson McCullers, Ethan Frome, Books News

A novella can be read in only a few hours, yet the best ones pack almost the same punch as much longer works of fiction.

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Fifteen of This Millennium's Top Novels

Dave Astor | Posted 10.29.2011

These aren't necessarily the best novels of the past 11 years, because there are acclaimed books I've yet to read.

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Margaret Atwood Talks About Fun And Religion

Posted 10.25.2011

Read More: Author Interview, Religion, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Atwood Interview, The Year of the Flood, A Handmaid's Tale, Author, Writing, Books News

From Narrative Magazine: Canadian author Margaret Atwood has published more than fifty works of fiction and criticism, including her well-known dystop...

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Reading Harry Potter and Other Multi-Volume Works in One Big Gulp

Dave Astor | Posted 09.14.2011

Read More: J.K. Rowling, Jack Finney, Quidditch, Darryl Brock, John Steinbeck, L.M. Montgomery, Sequels, Alexandre Dumas, J.R.R. Tolkien, Margaret Atwood, Harry Potter, Cormac McCarthy, Books News

For me, reading a book series after all the installments have been written is as satisfying as watching a great Quidditch match. Well, almost.

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Many a City Is 'Title Town'

Dave Astor | Posted 09.06.2011

Read More: Barbara Kingsolver, Ford Madox Ford, Toronto, John Steinbeck, Chicago, National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Boston, Edward Bellamy, Detroit Lions, Upton Sinclair, Margaret Atwood, Canada, Jules Verne, Detroit Institute of Arts, Amy Tan, Quebec City, Frida Kahlo, E.L. Doctorow, Phoenix, Terry McMillan, Diego Rivera, San Francisco, James Hilton, Ford Field, Willa Cather, Books News, Detroit, Books News

Do you read so much fiction that visiting a city almost always reminds you of certain novels?

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Literary Divas You Can’t Help But Love

flavorwire.com | Posted 08.22.2011

Read More: Literature, Joyce Carol Oates, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Terry McMillan, Literary Divas, Amy Chua, Margaret Atwood, Bernard Henri Levy, Salman Rushdie, Joan Acocella, Books News

There are divas and there are their lesser-known male counterparts, divos; the thing that unites them is their willingness to make demands and to do w...

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Feminine Tosh

Meg Waite Clayton | Posted 08.13.2011

Read More: Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tosh, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Alias Grace. Toni Morrison, Great American Novel, Middlemarch, Feminine Tosh, George Eliot, Women and the Great American Novel, Printer's Row Book Festival, Women News

At Printer's Row Book Festival in Chicago last weekend, a big topic of conversation was a remark by a prominent male writer that no woman writer was his equal. He used the term "feminine tosh."Tosh" swiftly became the buzz word of the weekend.

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Less Famous Literary Masterpieces

Dave Astor | Posted 08.10.2011

There are plenty of cases where an author's masterpiece deserves the top billing it gets in the author's canon. But then there are the cases where a writer's most famous book is not the writer's best book.

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Diana Athill's Response To The VS Naipaul Attack

guardian.co.uk | Alison Flood | Posted 08.03.2011

Read More: Royal Geographic Society, Jean Rhys, Jane Austen, Paul Theroux, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Diana Athill, John Updike, Vs Naipaul, Philip Roth, Books News

Former publisher rubbished by Naipaul for writing 'feminine tosh' says she is not taking his criticism seriously. ...

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An Appreciation of Margaret Atwood

Dave Astor | Posted 08.02.2011

Read More: Women's Rights, Barbara Kingsolver, The Environment, Canada, Margaret Atwood, Walter Scott, Speculative Fiction, The Handmaid's Tale, Books News

Atwood is socially conscious without being preachy. This is certainly the case in three dystopian novels that say a lot about things like women's rights and the despoiling of the environment but do that via the books' interesting characters and plots.

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Science Fiction, But Not As You Know It

Telegraph | Morwenna Ferrier | Posted 07.25.2011

Read More: Gwyneth Jones, HG Wells, Margaret Atwood, Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It, Science Fiction, British Library, George Orwell, Books News

The literary genre of science fiction isn't terribly accessible. Widely seen as an extension of man's anxiety over the future, sci-fi is usually affil...

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10 Novels That Will Disturb Even The Coldest Of Hearts

flavorwire.com | Posted 07.18.2011

Read More: George R.R. Martin, Invisible Man, Henry Miller, Blindness, Blood Meridian, Bret Easton Ellis, Margaret Atwood, Ralph Ellison, American Psycho, Flannery O'Connor, J.M. Coetzee, Tropic Pof Cancer, Disgrace, Cormac McCarthy, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Handmaid's Tale, Disturbing Novels, Books News

Jezebel-writer Anna North’s debut novel, America Pacifica, is out today. The story centers around an impoverished teenage girl who is struggling to ...

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The Most Famous Retold Stories In Literature

flavorwire.com | Posted 06.26.2011

Read More: Foreign Bodies, Ali Smith, Michael Cunningham, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, John Gardner, The Robber's Bride, David Wroblewski, Margaret Atwood, The Great Night, Victoria Patterson, Grendel, The Hours, Girl Meets Boy, Chris Adrian, c.s. Lewis, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley, Books News

Besides being an accomplished pediatrician, Chris Adrian was named one of the New Yorker‘s “20 Under 40″ fiction writers last summer, and is als...

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Books I've Loved and Lost

Allison Hill | Posted 05.25.2011

Read More: E-Books, Future of the Book, Vroman's Bookstore, Reading, Book Soup, Books, Kurt Vonnegut, Pat Conroy, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King, Anne Lamott, The Good Thief, The Handmaid's Tale, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Books News

Will printed books cease to exist? I honestly don't know the answer. But I know that I miss the books I've lost along the way, the physical books with their notes, underlinings and associations.

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