Tag: Featured
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Gentrified Comic Books, Podcast Stories, and more…
Romantic fiction awards cancelled after racism row prompts mass boycott (The Guardian) The US’s most prestigious awards for romance writing, the Ritas, have been cancelled after a host of judges and entrants pulled out over an ongoing racism row involving the industry’s largest trade group, the Romance Writers of America. Twisted timelines of a double dystopia…
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Authors’ websites, horror fiction, and more…
A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Science Fiction (BookRiot) Chinese science fiction is a diverse, undeniably unique type of sci-fi. And it contributes to the worldliness of the genre as a whole, one whose strengths rest in societal critique and philosophy. How can we only have societal critiques from the West? We need global perspectives to…
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Reclaiming My Time: I’m breaking up with Facebook for good.
Most authors I’ve talked to at Waking Writer admit that distraction is one of their biggest obstacles to actually…you know…writing. I’m willing to acknowledge that Facebook has been one of the main sources of distraction for me. I’ve been on Facebook since 2005. Yes, nearly 15 years. It’s my longest relationship with any non-human thing:…
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Nita J. Kulkarni, author of The Hawa Mahal Murders
When and why did you begin writing? I started writing when I was ten years old, with a diary. I wrote a diary for about 15 years and this wasn’t a chronology of events. I wrote about my thoughts and feelings, poems and character sketches of people I knew. I also wrote short stories, novellas,…
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Tim Starnes, author of Agony: Suffering Yesterday, Entertaining Today
What is the biggest thing that people THINK they know about nonfiction that isn’t so? The walking public believes, or at least I think so, that nonfiction has to be boring – and sadly, it usually is, but the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. There are too many people out there who…
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The Rise of Nigerian Literature, and more…
Indigenous Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors You Should Be Checking For (Black Girl Nerds) Louise Erdrich is a prolific American Ojibwe author who has published or contributed to over 30 books in various genres. Erdrich has written poetry, non-fiction, children’s literature, and contemporary fiction. Amidst her varied bibliography are several genre novels. Her most recent work…
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Crime Fiction, AI Writing Novels, Celebrity Book Clubs, and more…
Computers are learning to write, but could they ever produce a literary masterpiece? (ABC News) However, the idea that a novel could ever be written by a machine may still strike some as absurd, given the complexity involved. Language has long been regarded by some AI researchers as a “final frontier”. To readers who value…
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Witches in Fiction, Imagining Palestine through Fiction, and more…
From Baba Yaga to Hermione Granger: why we’re spellbound by ‘witcherature’ (The Guardian) Since Trump’s election, which inspired mass spell-casting by thousands of “resistance witches” (the selection of judge Brett Kavanaugh for the supreme court also led to a mass “hex-in”), there has been a slew of novels, poetry collections and anthologies with witchcraft as their theme.…
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Toni Morrison on the Necessity of Literature, and more…
In defence of ‘chick-lit’ (The Daily Star) These books (the good ones at least) offer more than just fluffy escape. In the absence of a challenging form and language, such stories offer enough comfort and optimism that the reader is able to absorb some strength from their characters. Camus’ Mersault may evoke a thought or…
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Graphic Novel Satirizes Chicago Gentrification, and more…
The Novel That Accidentally Predicted the College-Admissions Scandal (Vanity Fair) The Gifted School is a novel set in Donald Trump’s America but not about Trump’s America—or at least not directly. It’s a novel about privilege, economic inequality, racial disparity, but also about ambition, friendship, and family, about the twinned challenges of parenting and growing up in a pressure-cooker environment…
