Mark Charan Newton

A few months ago I wrote a post about the fetish that bloggers have for frontlist titles – those books about to be released, the hot new things. I’m increasingly discovering that there is something resembling a backlist movement. This is what the internet should be used for – not to prop up the titles [...]

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According to the New York Times, at least. Social mores surrounding the act of reading alone in public may be changing along with increased popularity. Suddenly, the lone, unapproachable reader at the corner table seems less alone. Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already [...]

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From the Wall Street Journal: With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you. I’m not giving Rupert Murdoch any more money, so I’m not paying to see [...]

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Alden Bell is a Tor UK stablemate, and the author of the incredible book, The Reapers Are The Angels. Using whatever power this blog has for good, I thought it would be great to have a back and forth chat. He’s a great guy, and this was fun to do – we had a wide-ranging [...]

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I’m sure this is a variant of a theme that has repeated itself for years, though I wonder if this time it has some chops: Professor Sharon Lamb, from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, accuses the new generation of superheroes, exemplified by Robert Downey Junior’s playboy millionnaire Iron Man, of being bad role models [...]

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Ian Rankin suffers when he looks at his early work: Looking back on the pretentious scribblings of youth is embarrassing for anyone, so pity poor Ian Rankin, whose musings from his early 20s are immortalised for all time in his debut novel The Flood. The bestselling Scottish novelist told the new issue of The Word [...]

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I’ve been blogging here for three years, it seems, and the traffic has been much higher over the past couple months than ever before, and staggeringly so compared to the first two years. So I thought I’d highlight some of the more popular pages – in no particular order – for any newcomers: Why SF [...]

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Excellent article in the New Statesman, on the recent suggestion that Christina Hendricks “who plays sassy secretary Joan Harris in television drama Mad Men, has been identified as the woman with a body others should healthily aspire to.” Wrong choice, right idea… It is likely that Featherstone’s decision to tout Hendricks as a body-image role [...]

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A rare interview with a grand master of American literature, Don DeLillo: DeLillo now lives in Westchester County in New York State with his wife, Barbara, a landscape designer, but he has not completely left his childhood neighbourhood, a place he insists still “looks the same, though the people are different”: an influx of new [...]

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I’m not going to add to the numerous posts that can be found throughout the Internet. I’m not going to review Inception; suffice to say I enjoyed it; I enjoyed the emotionally flat tone, and enjoyed the how-the-fuck-did-they-film-the-hotel-corridor-scene assault on the mind (I don’t want to know the answer to the latter, thanks). And I [...]

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The Guardian blog on giving pink sparkly pony-tailed book covers to girls: Earlier this year Meg Rosoff expressed a desire to let loose with an illegal firearm, goaded by the “aggressive pinkness” of the upcoming Queen of Teen award. My immediate reaction was to applaud her vehemently. The Q of T website has all the [...]

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There are some interesting discussions to be found at the blogs of Tobias Buckell and Jay Lake, where they discuss the lack of mid-career advice online. The audience changes. For one, the aspiring authors, whether they realize it or mean to do it, start pushing back. If you start thinking out loud about problems they [...]

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