Howard Mittelmark
I've been writing and editing for a long time. A while ago, I got together with Sandra Newman, and we put everything we had figured out reading and working on hundreds, possibly thousands, of published and unpublished novels, and put it all into How Not To Write A Novel. It's sort of an encyclopedia of mistakes every beginning writer makes. It's very funny. Really. You can read some excerpts at hownottowriteanovel.com. I can't guarantee you'll write a good novel if you read it, but it would be very hard not to write a better novel.
I used to review a lot: many, many books for Kirkus Reviews, and also for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. So I have all these reviews sitting around, and I thought I'd post some
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Hugh Laurie
British comedian Hugh Laurie, OBE, could have easily taken another career track rather than that of well-known performer. As a secondary and college student, he was also a world-class oarsman. He wasn't the only one in the family to have a passion for the sport, however. His father won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics as part of the British national team.
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The youngest of four children, Laurie went to Eton College, perhaps Britain's best-known preparatory school. During his time there, he became involved in rowing. He quickly became one of the nation's best, and in 1977, he became one half of the national junior champion coxed pair. In the world junior championships held in Finland that year, he and his teammate finished fourth in th -
Mark Twain
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. -
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes. Most are set in the Deep South.
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McCullers's work is often described as Southern Gothic and indicative of her Southern roots. Critics also describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and film. A stage adaptation of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl's feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51. -
Christopher Golden
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Road of Bones, Ararat, Snowblind, Of Saints and Shadows, and Red Hands. With Mike Mignola, he is the co-creator of the Outerverse comic book universe, including such series as Baltimore, Joe Golem: Occult Detective, and Lady Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies Seize the Night, Dark Cities, and The New Dead, among others, and he has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. Golden co-hosts the podcast Defenders Dialogue with horror author Brian Keene. In 2015 he founded the popular Merrimack Valley Halloween Book Festival. He was born and raised in
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Alexander McCall Smith
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie Series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and he was a law professor at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland. Visit him online at www.alexandermccallsmith.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
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Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow was born in 1949 in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating with honors from Yale College and Cambridge University with degrees in English Literature, he began a prolific career as a freelance journalist. Between 1973 and 1982, Chernow published over sixty articles in national publications, including numerous cover stories. In the mid-80s Chernow went to work at the Twentieth Century Fund, a prestigious New York think tank, where he served as director of financial policy studies and received what he described as “a crash course in economics and financial history.”
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Chernow’s journalistic talents combined with his experience studying financial policy culminated in the writing of his extraordinary first book, The House of Morgan: A -
Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna is an American novelist, born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts in 1970. Her parents, Carl Senna, an Afro-Mexican poet and author, and Fanny Howe, who is Irish-American writer, were also civil rights activists.
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She attended Stanford University and received an MFA from the University of California at Irvine. There, she received several creative writing awards.
Her debut novel, Caucasia (later republished as From Caucasia With Love), was well received and won several awards including the Book-Of-The-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.
Her second novel, Symptomatic, was also well received. Both books feature a biracial protagonist and offer a unique view on life from -
Ron Rash
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel, Serena, in addition to three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and four collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O.Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
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Hugh Laurie
British comedian Hugh Laurie, OBE, could have easily taken another career track rather than that of well-known performer. As a secondary and college student, he was also a world-class oarsman. He wasn't the only one in the family to have a passion for the sport, however. His father won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics as part of the British national team.
Buy books on Amazon
The youngest of four children, Laurie went to Eton College, perhaps Britain's best-known preparatory school. During his time there, he became involved in rowing. He quickly became one of the nation's best, and in 1977, he became one half of the national junior champion coxed pair. In the world junior championships held in Finland that year, he and his teammate finished fourth in th -
Blake Snyder
In his 20-year career as a screenwriter and producer, Blake Snyder has sold dozens of scripts, including co-writing Blank Check, which became a hit for Disney, and Nuclear Family for Steven Spielberg. His book, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, was published in May, 2005, and is now in its eleventh printing. It has prompted "standing room only" appearances by Blake in New York, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Barcelona. Apparently it is not quite the last book on screenwriting youll ever need, as the eagerly awaited sequel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told, was published in October, 2007 shooting to #1 in the Screenw
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Brandon Sanderson
I’m Brandon Sanderson, and I write stories of the fantastic: fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers.
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Defiant, the fourth and final volume of the series that started with Skyward in 2018, comes out in November 2023, capping an already book-filled year that will see the releases of all four Secret Projects: Tress of the Emerald Sea, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, and Secret Project Four (with its official title reveal coming October 2023). These four books were all initially offered to backers of the #1 Kickstarter campaign of all time.
November 2022 saw the release of The Lost Metal, the seventh volume in the Mistborn saga, and the final volume of the Mistborn Era Two featuring Wax -
Nigel Slater
Nigel Slater is a British food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for seventeen years and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was food writer for Marie Claire for five years. He also serves as art director for his books.
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Although best known for uncomplicated, comfort food recipes presented in early bestselling books such as The 30-Minute Cook and Real Cooking, as well as his engaging, memoir-like columns for The Observer, Slater became known to a wider audience with the publication of Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, a moving and award-winning autobiography focused on his love of food, his childhood, his family relationships (his mother -
Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson was born and died in Helsinki, Finland. As a Finnish citizen whose mother tongue was Swedish, she was part of the Swedish-speaking Finns minority. Thus, all her books were originally written in Swedish.
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Although known first and foremost as an author, Tove Jansson considered her careers as author and painter to be of equal importance.
Tove Jansson wrote and illustrated her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), during World War II. She said later that the war had depressed her, and she had wanted to write something naive and innocent. Besides the Moomin novels and short stories, Tove Jansson also wrote and illustrated four original and highly popular picture books.
Jansson's Moomin books have been translated in -
Emil M. Cioran
Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.
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A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair). -
Donald Maass
Donald Maass is the author of more than 16 novels. He now works as a literary agent, representing dozens of novelists in the SF, fantasy, crime, mystery, romance and thriller categories. He speaks at writer's conferences throughout the country and lives in New York City.
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Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author thirty-five or so books. He really likes werewolves and slashers. Favorite novels change daily, but Valis and Love Medicine and Lonesome Dove and It and The Things They Carried are all usually up there somewhere. Stephen lives in Boulder, Colorado. It's a big change from the West Texas he grew up in.
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Marcus du Sautoy
Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy, OBE is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
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Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen -
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
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Blake Crouch
Blake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the forthcoming novel, Dark Matter, for which he is writing the screenplay for Sony Pictures. His international-bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted into a television series for FOX, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, that was Summer 2015’s #1 show. With Chad Hodge, Crouch also created Good Behavior, the TNT television show starring Michelle Dockery based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He has written more than a dozen novels that have been translated into over thirty languages and his short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Crouch lives in Colorado with his family.
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John Gardner
John Champlin Gardner was a well-known and controversial American novelist and university professor, best known for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth.
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Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer, and his mother taught English at a local school. Both parents were fond of Shakespeare and often recited literature together. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April of 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks. The incident informed much of Gardn -
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon.
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She was known for her treatment of gender (The Left Hand of Darkness, The Matter of Seggri), political systems (The Telling, The Dispossessed) and difference/otherness in any other form. Her interest in non-Western philosophies was reflected in works such as "Solitude" and The Telling but even more interesting are her imagined societies, often mi -
Jessica Brody
Jessica Brody is the author of more than 20 novels for teens, tweens, and adults including The Geography of Lost Things, The Chaos of Standing Still, Amelia Gray is Almost Okay, A Week of Mondays, 52 Reasons to Hate My Father, the Unremembered trilogy, and the System Divine trilogy which is a sci-fi reimagining of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, co-written with Joanne Rendell. She’s also the author of the #1 bestselling novel-writing guides, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel as well as several books based on popular Disney franchises like Descendants and LEGO Disney Princess. Jessica’s books have been translated and published in over 20 languages and several have been optioned for film and television. S
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Gwen Hayes
Gwen Hayes (that’s me) lives in the Pacific Northwest with her real life hero and a pack of wild beasts (two of whom she gave birth to).
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She is a reader, writer, and lover of pop culture (which, other than yogurt, is the only culture she gets).
Gwen also edits kissing books. -
Anton Chekhov
Dramas, such as The Seagull (1896, revised 1898), and including "A Dreary Story" (1889) of Russian writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, also Chekov, concern the inability of humans to communicate.
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Born ( Антон Павлович Чехов ) in the small southern seaport of Taganrog, the son of a grocer. His grandfather, a serf, bought his own freedom and that of his three sons in 1841. He also taught to read. A cloth merchant fathered Yevgenia Morozova, his mother.
"When I think back on my childhood," Chekhov recalled, "it all seems quite gloomy to me." Tyranny of his father, religious fanaticism, and long nights in the store, open from five in the morning till midnight, shadowed his early years. He attended a school for Greek boys in Taganrog from 1867 -
Fredrik Backman
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks), My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, as well as two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime. Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, his first work of non-fiction, will be released in the US in May 2019. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @backmansk.
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Shannon Bowring
Shannon Bowring’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Best Small Fictions, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She is the recipient of the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Flash Fiction and was selected by Deesha Philyaw as a finalist for the Fractured Lit Anthology II Contest. Shannon has been recognized on such short- and long-lists as the Maine Literary Awards, the Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition and the New Millennium Writing Awards. Her debut novel, The Road to Dalton, received a Kirkus Starred Review and was included in the June 2023 Indie Next List. Shannon’s sequel to Dalton, WHERE THE FOREST MEETS THE RIVER, is forthcoming from Europa Editions.
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Raised in Northern Maine, Shanno -
Diana Raab
Diana Raab, PhD is a memoirist, poet, essayist, thought-leader, and speaker. She presents workshops in writing for healing and transformation. She has a PhD in Psychology with a concentration in Transpersonal Psychology with a research focus on the healing and transformative powers of memoir writing. Her educational background also includes health administration, nursing, and creative writing.
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She teaches two courses on “DailyOM: Write. Heal. Transform: A Magical Memoir Writing Course“ and “Therapeutic Writing.”
She’s an award-winning author of 13 books, and her articles and poems have been published and anthologized worldwide. She’s also the editor of two anthologies, "Writers on the Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency," an