What really goes into making a BEA buzz book? Authorial obsessions, personal histories, medical redemption, the art and deliberate artifice of voice.
Pirate Version of George Bush Memoir Causes Dispute in China
A Chinese pirated version of George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, sparked controversy about its authenticity what is lost in the Chinese translation.
Cool Idea: Five-year “Anniversary” of Memoir Prompts Book Party
By Rachel Aydt Last Friday night, at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the book GirlBomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, by Janice Erlbaum, was being celebrated on its 5th Anniversary by roughly fifty people who appeared to have been deeply touched in different ways by the memoir. At its root, Girlbomb (published by Villard in 2006) is a story …
Memoirs: The Yin to Twitter’s Yang
Franz Wisner, author and founder of Story-Driven Ink—a new online writing workshop—on why he’s bullish on the future of the memoir. Editorial by Franz Wisner I just returned from a funeral, one in a long string. This one mirrored the others — a bunch of somber-faced mourners, huddled in a room, cradling fermented beverages, mourning the death of our beloved. Oh, memoirs. …
Wen Huang’s “Coffin Keeper” in the Paris Review
By Edward Nawotka Our good friend and frequent contributor Wenguang Huang has published excerpt of his forthcoming memoir in the new issue of The Paris Review, alongside interviews with novelist David Mitchell, cartoonist R. Crumb, and fiction from Katherine Dunn, Colum McCann, and Ann Beattie. The piece, entitled “Coffin Keeper,” begins: “When I was nine, I shared my bedroom with …
Are Fairy Tale Endings Inspirational or Merely Anti-Climactic?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story author Franz Wisner writes about how his first book about being left at the altar, Honeymoon with My Brother, unexpectedly led him into a new romance — one that eventually led to marriage. (Not before he was able to write his latest book, How the World Makes Love.) A similar thing happened to Eat, …
My Publisher, My Wing Man
By Franz Wisner Why stop at piddly promotions or insufficient inventory when you can blame your publisher for every setback in life? A cavity? The scoundrels diverted me from quality floss time. Bounced check? Sorry, Mr. Banker. I used publisher math. With my latest book, How the World Makes Love, I had a change of heart. My publisher gave me an assist …
Mendelsohn’s Memoir Melee
By Erin L. Cox Much like many other New Yorker subscribers, I am one week behind in my reading. Hence, I’ve just come across Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece, “But Enough About Me”, about the popularity of memoirs (though does not mention a memoir of the same name by a writer friend of mine, Jancee Dunn). In the piece, he discusses in …
Bonus Material: How to Sell S** in Afrikaans
By Edward Nawotka Despite numerous literary luminaries at this past weekend’s Cape Town Book Fair, it’s still the dirty stuff that sells. It seems that the most headline grabbing event of the Fair has been the launch of former stripper and now single-mother Karin Eloff’s Afrikaans-language memoir Stiletto. “I started hating men,” writes Eloff, “All men. Men, I decided, had …
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