A is for anxiety!
“UK children pick ‘anxiety’ as their word of 2021”—blares a headline in The Guardian. Of course they did, we mutter morosely. Have you seen Euphoria? The kids aren’t alright. But… Read more »
Athena Bryan
Athena Bryan is an editor at Melville House.
TikTok proves it can put books on best-seller lists
A recent New York Times piece opens with author E. Lockhart seeing her 2014 book We Were Liars hitting the best-seller list over the summer of 2020. Baffled but pleased,… Read more »
Novelists struggle with lack of inspiration in lockdown
Your special correspondent for the inability to read, write, or otherwise function during the pandemic is back. This time, it’s the writers of novels who are citing all sorts of… Read more »
Roald Dahl’s descendants apologize for his anti-Semitism
Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite. We know this because he told The Independent, “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic” in 1990. So, what you might call an… Read more »
British artists demand to roam free
Artists in merry old England want more access to their countryside. And to do so, they used the tried-and-true, never-fails method of penning an open letter to the prime minister.… Read more »
A list of the most popular books set in each country is full of revelations
NetCredit, an online loan marketplace that provides unsecured personal loans, audited the most popular books set in various countries using data from GoodReads. (Wait, what?) I’m supposed to write two… Read more »
Raymond Chandler once tried his hands at jokes…
Raymond Chandler, author of hardboiled detective classics The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye among many others, isn’t exactly known for his silly side. But apparently, he once wrote a… Read more »
Ten years of covering Banned Books Week, a fresh and exciting blog retrospective
Every year, as the leaves turn goldenrod and the kiddos go back to school, the American Library Association rolls out a list of the books most challenged by libraries and… Read more »
What are the other options for those who think GoodReads “sucks” and is “just shy of unbearable”?
Harsh! But Sarah Manavis at The New Statesman is asking the important question for those readers out there who feel that the platform “has become a monster,” “a purgatory” or… Read more »
No, we will not “excuse your dust,” Dorothy Parker. We’ll make a very big deal out of it, thank you very much.
Dorothy Parker left no instructions for her remains, barring the following utterance: “Excuse my dust.” So, in the face of the gnomic wisdom of a dead writer, the people did… Read more »