Bryan Gruley ask if crime writers are as twisted as their characters?  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Any reader or writer who has met Lou Berney will tell you he’s one of the nicest crime-fiction authors around. Last time I saw him, the Edgar Award winner and bestselling author of November Road was volunteering at the registration desk at the Bouchercon mystery-thriller conference, wearing his usual plaid flannel shirt, deploying his usual self-deprecating humor. Berney is such an unfailingly likable guy that it kind of pisses you off.

He’s also the creator of Paul Barone, the soulless mafia assassin in November Road who thrusts an ice pick into an adversary’s ear and dispatches an innocent teenager with two clinical bullets to the back. Which can make one wonder who’s really more deviant: real-life Berney or fictional Barone? Or, to spread the skepticism around a bit, are we (authors) secretly as twisted as the twisted characters we conjure? Based on my conversations with some of the best writers in the business, the short answer is:

Yes, but …

Listen to my fellow Chicago author Tracy Clark on a made-up character she calls Murray. “Murray buys shoes, owns a cat,” she says. “He eats and sleeps, has wants, desires. He has also killed six people and has a secret room in his place filled with shiny tools of torture. I gave him all that stuff. Weird thing is, Murray doesn’t know he’s bent. From where Murray’s standing, it’s the rest of the world that’s kinked up. And I get inside Murray’s head and write him just that way. Or is that my head? How else could little old well-adjusted me breathe life into an in-your-face, don’t-give-a-fig-who-lives-or-dies psychopath?”

Danielle Girard says readers have long asked her how such a “sweet and innocent” person can write, for instance, from the point-of-view of a pedophile, as she did in Chasing Darkness. She suspects this capacity arises from a “worse-case scenario mindset” in her youth. “My childhood superpower seemed to be finding the hidden threats in any situation—the bathrobe hanging on the back of the door which transformed into a hooded man with a knife in my dark bedroom.”

Read full post on CrimeReads

Kindle Paperwhite – Now Waterproof with 2x the Storage – Includes Special Offers

$84.99 with FREE One-Day Shipping

Buy now

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that American playwright Arthur Miller adapted Pride and Prejudice in 1945, according to Janine Barchas from Los Angeles Review of Books… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

In the Theatre Guild Archive of the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas survives a script, marked “as broadcast,” of Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Jane Austen for radio. Miller’s radio play, with Joan Fontaine as Elizabeth Bennet, aired on Thanksgiving eve, 18 November 1945. That celebratory Sunday was the first American Thanksgiving held in the wake of World War II, warranting special programming. In New York, Miller’s version of Austen could be heard at 10 p.m. on ABC station WJZ. The show made the list of “Today’s Leading Events” in The New York Times and was the Theater Guild’s most highly rated program that quarter, capturing a 19.4 percent share of the national radio audience. Today, Miller’s role as popular adapter of Austen has been all but forgotten.

The Janeite mind reels at the mere idea of young Arthur Miller being tasked to condense Pride and Prejudice to an hour-long format for radio. How could this American playwright, then honing his special brand of tragic realism that would challenge post-war complacency and eventually tilt at the windmills of McCarthyism, possibly give voice to Austen’s light, bright, and sparkling novel? The would-be king of American grit taking a crack at that quiet paragon of Britishness? Surely not. I dismissed the idea as ludicrous when a curator, knowing of my research interest in Jane Austen, casually mentioned the script’s existence. With zero pretentions at scholarly objectivity, I ventured into the archives to read the inevitable travesty for myself.

To my great surprise, I chuckled all the way through the script, disturbing other readers in the sanctum sanctorum of the Harry Ransom Center reading room with my unladylike snorts. That evening I downloaded a recording of the program from a site for dedicated radio buffs and listened to the performance as it had aired in 1945 (only the inserts from sponsors, preserved in the typescript, were absent from the recording). Although the clipped mid-Atlantic accents of the actors and the rapid-fire pace of their dialogue sounded artificial in the mouths of characters whom I knew from Austen’s pages, I was rapt. This deviant script dared to differ from Austen’s established adaptations. Unapologetically American, the language was irreverent and surprisingly modern.

Read full post on Los Angeles Review of Books

She was one of America’s most successful 19th-century writers and largely forgotten, until now according to Mikaela Lefrak of dcist.com… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth was one of the most successful American writers—male or female—of the mid-19th century, outselling contemporaries like Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was a mainstay of Washington’s early literary scene: She hosted Friday night salons at her Georgetown cottage, attended Lincoln’s second inaugural ball, and is even credited with encouraging Harriet Beecher Stowe to write the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Much of Southworth’s work was published in magazines, including her most famous work, The Hidden Hand. In that 1859 serialized novel, the protagonist Capitola Black outruns murderers, captures an outlaw, participates in a duel and marches her way through a myriad of other adventures. The story was widely translated and reprinted abroad. Southworth was also staunchly anti-slavery and feminist, in her own way. Many of her stories featured women having adventures that Southworth’s readers were often unable to experience firsthand.

Southworth was born and raised in Northeast D.C. In her early 20s, she married an inventor and moved with him to Wisconsin. She ended up back in D.C. three years later with two young children and no husband, desperate to make a living.

She began teaching at a D.C. public school at 13th and C Streets Southwest but grew frustrated with the low pay and the salary disparity between male and female teachers. She then started submitting stories to magazines and newspapers and found success.

Literature professor Ann Beebe wrote about Southworth in 2015 for the Historical Society of Washington D.C. She noted that Southworth’s exclusive contract with the “New York Ledger,” a weekly paper published in Manhattan, “would mature into one of the century’s most lucrative publishing arrangements.”

Southworth’s work remained popular after her death in 1899, but, as often happens with the work of women, it faded into obscurity as works by her male contemporaries made their way into the country’s literary canon. Zuravleff, Callaghan, and Fishburn allowed that part of the reason might be because of critics’ disdain for Southworth’s overblown language and highly improbable plot twists.

Until about a year ago, Southworth’s headstone was off its base and in disrepair. Oak Hill’s superintendent, Dave Jackson, had it cleaned and reinstalled after receiving an email from a Georgetown librarian about the author’s upcoming 200th birthday.

Read full post on dcist.com

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Holocaust memorial museum has said that John Boyne’s children’s novel The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches the history of the Holocaust”, after the author criticized the spate of recent novels set in the concentration camp, according to Alison Flood from The Guardian… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The museum made the comment after John Boyne criticized the current ubiquity of novels with names such as The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Saboteur of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Brothers of Auschwitz. Boyne had tweeted: “I can’t help but feel that by constantly using the same three words, & then inserting a noun, publishers & writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration.”

The research center at the former Nazi death camp in Poland responded by saying that “we understand those concerns, and we already addressed inaccuracies in some books published”: the organization has laid out at length the issues it has with Heather Morris’s bestselling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which it has said “contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements”.

But the memorial went on to link to an essay warning readers away from Boyne’s story of a German boy who befriends a Jewish boy on the other side of the Auschwitz fence.

The critical essay, which is from the Holocaust exhibition and learning centre, says that many people who have read the book or watched the film adaptation of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas believe that it is a true story – despite its subtitle, “A Fable”. It stresses that “it is important to understand that the book is a work of fiction” and “the events portrayed could never have happened”. It goes on to lay out “some of the book’s historical inaccuracies and stereotypical portrayals of major characters that help to perpetuate dangerous myths about the Holocaust”.

Read full post on The Guardian

As a controversy over bias and a lack of transparency at the Romance Writers of America continues to roil the country’s foremost writers association for romance writers, the RWA has announced that it will postpone the 2020 RITA Contest until next year, according to John Maher from Publishers Weekly. The RITA Award is the U.S.’s top prize for romance fiction… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Due to recent events in RWA, many in the romance community have lost faith in RWA’s ability to administer the 2020 RITA contest fairly, causing numerous judges and entrants to cancel their participation,” the RWA said in a release. “The contest will not reflect the breadth and diversity of 2019 romance novels/novellas and thus will not be able to fulfill its purpose of recognizing excellence in the genre. For this reason, the Board has voted to cancel the contest for the current year. The plan is for next year’s contest to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances.”

The news comes on the heels of an announcement that a recall petition has been filed by members of the RWA seeking the removal of new RWA president Damon Suede, who has served in that position since last month, when its former president, Carolyn Jewel, resigned. Suede has yet to address the calls for his resignation.

Suede is at the center of a rapidly-expanding controversy concerning his role in the sanctioning of author Courtney Milan as the result of a formal ethics complaint, resulting in the suspension of her membership and a lifetime ban from holding a leadership position with the organization. Milan was previously chairperson of the RWA’s ethics committee.

Milan’s removal has torn the RWA apart. Many of the group’s rank and file have accused its board of racism, homophobia, and lack of transparency and tweeted their support for Milan, and bestselling author Nora Roberts has written of her support for Milan as well. In the wake of the uproar, a total of ten of the organization’s board members have resigned, including Jewel, but the RWA continues to appoint members to replace them.

Read full post on Publishers Weekly

So much for “happily ever after.” According to Lauren Sarner of the New York Post, it all started when an organization called Romance Writers of America (RWA) suspended former board member Courtney Milan, a best-selling novelist… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The reason?

Courtney Milan, who is of Chinese-American descent, had Tweeted concerns about a “f - - king racist mess” in the industry, sparking fellow romance novelists Kathryn Lynn Davis and Suzan Tisdale to file formal complaints with the RWA.

Instead of engaging with her comments, the organization punished her for violating its code of ethics with her “negativity,” according to the Wrap.

RWA’s suspension of Milan sparked an outcry on social media, from authors of all stripes.

The hashtag #IStandWithCourney trended, showing support for Milan. NPR critic and author Linda Holmes tweeted, “Welp, if Romancelandia is going to split in two, I’m going to be on the Courtney Milan side,” garnering over 1,000 likes.

Sci-fi author John Scalzi made fun of RWA’s approach of dropping this news on Twitter before the holidays and closing up shop rather than dealing with the fallout.

“So, RWA (apparently rather dubiously) suspended a popular former board member with a large social media presence and then . . . took two days off to let that member and her supporters craft the media narrative it will then have to respond to when it gets back?” he tweeted, along with a shrug emoji.

Priscilla Oliveras, a Latinx author in the genre, told The Post, “I and a number of other members of color resigned from the RWA Board this morning in protest of Courtney’s suspension and our lack of trust in RWA’s leadership.”

Author Alyssa Day also announced her resignation from the organization. “I resigned from RWA,” she tweeted on Christmas Eve. “Allowing racists to weaponize RWA’s Code of Ethics against someone calling out that racism goes against everything a code of ethics stands for, and this result is appallingly and profoundly wrongheaded. I’m done.”

Many authors mocked RWA for thinking they could get away with dropping this news during Christmas and having nobody notice.

Read full post on The New York Post