Author name: Booksquare

We attended two distinctly different dinner parties this past weekend yet faced the same problem. At each party, one guest (Party A, 11-yeard old girl; Party B, 40-something man) wanted to Talk About A Book, or, rather, The Book. This was impossible — we were safely contained under a cone of silence — because, well, it’s a really long book, and, let’s be frank, people simply aren’t prepared for this type of dinner party conversation. It is hard enough to find commonality with movies and television. Just the fact that this happened warmed our black little heart and gave us

We have a friend, who, when encountering yet another ridiculous moment in life, says, “You can’t make this stuff up.” It is true that nobody would believe things that happen when some humans get together. Thus is the beauty of John Irving’s work — he comes very close to the stuff of real life. It may be dredged from his imagination, but if you think it can’t happen next door, you need to work on your eavesdropping skills. This is why we’ve been intrigued by the reviews of his newest book, Until I Find You — the one he switched

In an essay at Powell’s, our friend Martha O’Connor talks about her journey from wide-eyed innocent to stark raving mad author, with a slightly pink side trip thrown in for good measure. Her journey, like so many, truly began when she realized her first mistake: Now I’m quick to admit that my first book, which I wrote at age fifteen, was horrible. It was the most pathetic fantasy novel ever written, and could have been used as the textbook for a How Not to Write a Novel class. It was filled with pages of unnecessary description and exposition, clunky dialogue,

Last week, someone suggested that women’s fiction doesn’t get reviewed because it’s about characters (or perhaps character studies), while men’s fiction is about ideas. While we don’t want to get into a discussion on the importance of characters in fiction (we take the position that they are a key element), we also don’t want to get into an discussion about what constitutes an “idea”. We’ve had enough bad ones to know the pitfalls there. There has also been discussion about the domestic nature of women’s fiction. Again, without specific definitions, it’s hard to say for sure why this is such