James Bond fans have reason to rejoice: the Fleming estate has authorized a new James Bond novel, slated for publication September 8, 2015. Set just two weeks after the conclusion of Goldfinger, the book brings back legendary character Pussy Galore. Moreover, the novel includes unpublished writing by Ian Fleming himself.
Garnering more critical acclaim than many contemporary writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has already had one of her novels adapted to film with an all-star cast, and another is in the works. Are book-to-film adaptations all that we hope for when we love a novel? For instance, when we encounter a compelling text, is the power of the book enlivened or diminished on the silver screen? In recent years, a number of works of postcolonial fiction have been adapted for the cinema, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. In general, they haven’t done too well with critics or audiences. Can we expect something different from Adichie’s works when they hit theatres?
"If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!"
- William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray, best known for novels like Vanity Fair and Catherine, did not make a prudent marriage. He seriously considered marrying for money, but when he met Isabella Shawe, he married for love. Although theirs can’t be considered a marriage that was full of happiness and good times, it certainly spurred him to prolific writing. For most of his career he had to "write for his life," as he called it, not only to support his family, but also to pay for the treatments and care required for his wife who fell into so deep a depression, she was often catatonic.
Ancient manuscripts are delicate things. They can be burned, eaten by insects, or destroyed by water. Once lost, their content is lost forever. Their irreplaceability is what makes them valuable. The manuscripts of Timbuktu in the West African nation of Mali were recently saved from total destruction by a quick-thinking librarian and a vast network of volunteers ready to sacrifice everything to save their history.
Over the last several months, speculation ran high about Harper Lee’s second novel, Go Set a Watchman. Then, following the release of the book on July 14th, negative reviews flooded the news. Not only have critics claimed the novel is “a mess,” many have been shocked by Atticus' transformation from hero to racist. Beyond the literary merits of the book, strange circumstances surround its publication. So the question arises: should one read the so-called sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird?
Richard Russo believes in books — the people who write them, the people who publish them, and the people who get them into the hands of readers. As one of three Vice Presidents of the Author's Guild, along with Judy Blume and James Shapiro, he has put on the mantle of defender of what he calls, “the writing life.” As such, he says he wants to see all areas of the literary "ecosystem" flourish. To maintain the health of this ecosystem, he has taken an active role in promoting young writers, supporting libraries, and advocating for the diversity of the publishing industry.
Historical fiction, of which biographical fiction is a subset, can in many ways be considered one of the earliest literary trends.Writing about history, sometimes real and sometimes imagined, connects Homer’s Iliad (c750 BC) to Shakespeare’s history plays to Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977). In the case of the earliest English language novels, it was popular to market even fantastical novels as being the stuff of historical or biographical truth.Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for instance, were presented to contemporary readers in the style of biography, journalism, and recovered documents.In this way, it is easy to take a blasé attitude toward biographical fiction. To do so, however, would be to tragically overlook the literary contributions of Irving Stone.
In 1979, South African writer Nadine Gordimer gave an interview* with The Paris Review where she discussed at some length the importance of politics and political activism in her work. “But the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people,” Gordimer said. Gordimer is a prime example of a literary activist. Here, we explore her work as well as that of a number of other important writer-activists.
It has often been said that the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson are best experienced as a series of profound quotes strung together.While that may be the case, Henry David Thoreau, one of Emerson’s fellow seminal transcendentalists and the author of Walden (1854) and Cape Cod (1865), has an oeuvre that is equally laden with excellent quotations. “The mass of men,” he says in Walden, his classic rumination on solitude, self-reliance, and nature, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”Sometimes the cure for that desperation, Thoreau’s writing seems to suggest, is an expertly deployed quote.
Who is a diary written for? Is it for the writer’s sake, so she may one day recall her past? Perhaps it’s for close friends and family to inherit. Maybe it’s for some distant reader, an audience miles and years away. Or maybe it’s for no one at all — an act of self-expression to be merely “drunk by the ghosts,” as Kafka says. It often feels that way. If you’ve ever kept a diary or journal yourself, you might cringe at the very idea of re-reading it, let alone granting access to others. And we know there are few breaches of confidence so severe as stealing a peek at someone else’s personal entries. It sometimes feels as if diaries are best written and not read. And if that’s the case, what good are they, anyway?
