Tove Jansson: The Woman Who Built Moominvalley
She painted, she mocked Hitler in wartime Helsinki, and she drew a troll that conquered the world. The life of Tove Jansson, and which Moomin books to actually read.
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Madder than most? Eight writers who suffered from mental illness
Western civilization hasn’t kicked the nasty old habit of stigmatizing mental health in different ways. Except in the arts and literature, maybe. Creatives are allowed to be odd, at least in retrospect. A few words of warning: One needs to tread carefully around this subject to not enable a culture of self-fulfilling prophesies around eccentric…
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Stuck in Bat Country: The roller coaster career of Hunter S. Thompson
“Every deadline was a crisis … No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland … On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple and basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit…
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10 vintage books you should read if you love London
After tourists and Russian millionaires, nobody seems to love London as much as authors. Over the last few centuries some of the greatest literary masterpieces have been set in the British capital from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to well, all of Charles Dickens’ novels. In recent years the trend has continued with the likes of Monica…
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10 everyday words we got from science fiction writers
American sci-fi writer, Theodore Sturgeon famously said, “Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” He believed that was “because ninety percent of everything is crud”, but many literary purists think sci-fi’s exotic worlds, flamboyant characters and incredibly imaginative plots make it throwaway. Yet, if they delved a bit deeper, they’d find a profound genre…
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Femtastic Lit: History’s 10 greatest sci-fi novels written by women
Despite the fact that women have helped shape science fiction from the beginning, female-penned novels are often mysteriously absent from the “Best-of” lists. There are many people that believe that women don’t (or even worse, can’t) write science fiction–which simply isn’t true. With this list, we celebrate some of the most influential and noteworthy sci-fi…
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The 13 greatest opening lines from novels of the 1960s
Publishers sometimes say that getting someone to pick up a novel is half the battle won. But once that book is held in the palm of a potential reader’s hand, it’s up to the first line to grab their attention and never let it go. Arguably, (other than maybe the closing line), there’s no sentence…
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Small tales: The rise and fall of the short story
Ah, the short story: the icing on our literary cake! We love short fiction – we read it and write it, we buy it in bulk and try to entice everybody else to get on board the short story train. Think about it: a fraction of the length of a novel but with all the…
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Aldous Huxley v George Orwell: Which British writer is the most influential?
Two writers enter, one writer leaves! Well, not literally – especially in this case, given our aversion to exhumation and necromancy. We’re less interested in post-mortem fisticuffs and more concerned with some high falutin’ comparing and contrasting. So, stick around while we pit two of the twentieth century’s most renowned dystopian novelists, George Orwell and…
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Bygone books: 10 novels that’ll help you relive the 60s
The Beatles and the Stones, Woodstock, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK , Martin Luther King, the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the construction of the Berlin Wall, The Feminine Mystique, the Stonewall Riots, the moon landings, the very first computer games and Rosemary’s Baby: we could keep going. The nineteen-sixties were anything but forgettable, and we…
