The Sexes is a small collection of Dorothy Parker’s short stories about relationships, and is published as part of Penguin’s mini modern classics series. The first story, the Sexes, is a masterclass in dialogue: taught, lucid, and oozing with an…
With the world’s attention span being decimated by information overload and the instant gratification culture, there’s no doubt that short fiction is on the rise. For readers that still find short stories wordy, or that think flash fiction lacks enough…
As a lover of beauty, books, and nudity, the concept of Naked Girls Reading is an alluring one: beautiful girls read a thematic mixture of prose and poetry to an audience, while seated naked on a small stage. So on…
Waking at 4:40 am, the journey from Surrey to Wales is a blur. A noisey rush along empty motorways, some hair-raising buffeting on the Severn bridge, and then a drawn out, madcap dash down a warren of country roads to…
In very much the same vein as NaNoWriMo, the UK Arts Councils’ The Next Big Author competition challenges authors to write the opening chapters of a novel during the month of May. However, unlike NaNoWriMo, which promotes scribbling a first draft…
As a childhood fan of genre fiction—from Science Fiction and Fantasy, through to spy thrillers, murder mysteries, and a dash of horror for good measure—the discovery of non-genre fiction came late to me as I fell out of my teenage…
A review of Authonomy.com, HarperCollins’ website for writers, readers and publishers.
While it’s often mooted that an author’s first novel serves as an autobiographical catharsis for the author, there is little, if any, consensus about the relationship between an author and their last novel.
Is the Campaign for Real Books Literature’s ode to Luddism?
The modern and tragic decline of comedy.