Conversationsauthor discovery / Best of 2021 / comfort reading / Covid / diversity / DNF / enemies to lovers / genre critique / grumpy vs sunshine / LGBTQIA+ / low-angst / statistics / tropes / year in review59 Comments
Janine: I’ve noticed that my reading habits change a little from year to year. Some years I read more or fewer books than usual. Some years I discover new favorite authors. At times a genre shifts in a direction that isn’t as likely to engage me while another becomes more ... more >
Letters of Opinionarchetypes / Beauty-and-the-Beast / Dracula / Fifty Shades of Grey / Frankenstein / genre critique / mythology / Transcendence / tropes / Twilight / vampires12 Comments
The idea for this essay started with a question: what is it about Twilight and its derivations, especially Fifty Shades of Grey and Transcendence, that allow these variations to represent “fresh” and “new” in the retelling? I’m not interested in whether these books are good or bad, nor am I ... more >
Publishing Newscategory romance / cookbook / Crawford Award / diversity / Fantasy / feminism / frequency hopping technology / genre history / Harlequin / Mills and Boon / publishing / spread spectrum / tropes6 Comments
How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance – Not always loving the coverage in Jezebel, I approached Kelly Faircloth’s historical post on Harlequin warily. However, by the third paragraph, I realized this wasn’t going to be the usual fluff coverage of category Romance; instead the piece provides a ... more >
Letters of Opinioncritical discourse / genre critique / reading / tropes / writing13 Comments
Last weekend delivered a hat trick of essays on critical reading, two on KJ Charles’s m/m novel Think of England, and one on Deborah Fletcher Mello’s The Sweetest Thing, in which Liz McCausland also addresses the intertwined issues of “good writing” and “good reading.” More specifically, she argues, I don’t ... more >
Letters of Opinionemotional justice / genre critique / grovel / love / tropes54 Comments
So I recently saw the movie version of Gone Girl, which had some provocative differences from the book, even though both were written by Gillian Flynn. Those differences, which include a reversal in sympathetic portrayals between the husband and wife, may have been a function of directorial or editorial vision. ... more >
Publishing Newsa/b testing / Austria / children's literature / class action lawsuit / disclosure / Facebook / feminism / guns / OkCupid / privacy / Romance novels / tropes18 Comments
More than 20,000 people are now suing Facebook in Europe over privacy – Austrian law student Max Schrems claims that he has gotten 20,000 people from 100 countries to join his lawsuit against Facebook for a variety of privacy violations. Schrems and his attorney will keep the class to 25,000 ... more >