Recent movie releases such as The New and Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet seem to be a crack in the mantra of marketing pundits that the only worthy targets of mass media are teenagers and those who reach the ceiling age of forty-nine, not beyond.

Marigold Hotel, already...

It was inevitable that Amazon's laissez-faire book review system would come under fire for providing the opportunity to advocates of or against a particular book to game the system and either trash it or promote it.

Every ploy has been tried, pro and con, from the emerging author seeking...

The reported decline in e-reader sales is being misread as an indication that consumption of the e-book itself is in decline. This false conjecture has given authors and publishers hope that the printed book will return to the economic dominance it enjoyed before the technological innovation of the...

Will 21st century authors of fiction produce any classics?

Perhaps we must first consider how a classic becomes a classic. We apply numerous reasons for such a coronation citing artistic quality, universal relevancy, emotional integrity, critical acclaim by the author's contemporaries, literary influence, remarkable insight, imaginative style, effective use of...

Ever since I was a kid, I have always believed that books are stories. As a very young child, even before I was able to read on my own, my parents read to me from storybooks.

When I was a little older, I read stories on...

All in all, the recent election proved the validity and accuracy of most polls.

It proved something else. More than ever, we are an open book, an easy target, a bloodless check mark. Our individuality has been compromised. Technology has destroyed our privacy and revealed our preferences, desires, fantasies, biases...

The Warren Adler Short Story Contest, which started online in 2006 and continued until 2011, was an outgrowth of my three brief years running a short story contest for the Wyoming Arts Council when I lived in Jackson Hole.

As with all literary contests of this type, the idea was...

The fact is that Washington has always been a sex-crazed town. Sex is the one entitlement that no matter how many powerful men, and now women, get outed and put in the stocks to be hooted or reviled by their fellow adulterers in the media and the hallowed halls of...

It is often in the smaller details of observation that the truth lies. A good example of this is the aftermath of the presidential debates, not the main conflict.

After the debate, family members of the protagonists come together on the stage and greet each other in camaraderie, an image...

Allow me to make a hypothetical assumption that to many will border on fantasy.

Suppose all the polls which predict one of the tightest races in presidential electoral history are dead wrong and one or another candidate wins in a landslide, both popular and electoral?

It happened in 1936 when...

Okay, I admit it. I'm in the middle. There are some things I detest in the Republican idea of how to run things and there are some things I can't stand in the way the Democrats run things.

For example, as a poor boy born in Brooklyn as the...

For years people have been asking me how studios, producers, film executives and actors make their decisions on picking books to adapt to theatrical movies and television.

Like most things in life, there is never one answer. Above all, there is market precedent. Which films have made the most money?...

Stick out your tongue and you will get some idea of what has been happening in the book business. Ten thousand taste buds combined with various chemical reactions elsewhere in the body send taste signals to your brain.

With the tsunami of e-books where traditional and self-published writers are beefing...

The Master directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, an alleged loose interpretation of the early days of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology religious movement has been hailed by some reviewers with such overhyped praise that one might think that it is in a class with Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the...

In literature as in so-called "real" life, evil is, by far, the purview of the male gender; it is men who are the villains, evildoers, rascals and killers.

Women, by virtue of their historical status as nurturers, and for centuries dominated by men and considered mere breeders, have been...

Every author knows that producing a book requires an extreme act of concentration, discipline, organization and stamina. It is an achievement requiring enormous effort, time and isolation rarely matched by other forms of artistic creation.

Despite all the revolutionary changes that roil the publishing industry and are currently upending the...

I have been an habitual, consistent, and addicted reader of the print edition of the New York Times since I was a 13-year-old freshman at Brooklyn Technical High School. I have considered it essential to my education, to my understanding of world affairs, to my enduring belief in the concept...

Never before in a lifetime spent as a media hound and news junkie have I noted, with dismay, the amount of ink and digital bytes spent on documenting and numerically recording body counts.

At times, it seems as if the news has morphed into some kind of a computer game...

Like every author on the planet, I've spent endless hours mulling over creating titles for my work. One strives, of course, to be both memorable and honestly descriptive of the content.

There are also marketing aspects to be considered. The marquee value cannot be neglected since the book, especially fiction,...

In my review of Fifty Shades of Grey recently, I opined in passing that the issue of the female orgasm and its attainment by whatever means is big business. Reams of advertising have been expended in magazines in a thousand subtle ways, in double-entendre manifestations in the public...