Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – review
This dark, disturbing story of a wife's sudden disappearance is a contender for thriller of the yearOliver and Barbara, the toxic married couple from The Wars of the Roses, have nothing on Nick and Amy Dunne, the co-narrators of Gillian Flynn's dazzlin...
Conference call
A St Andrews conference on the Harry Potter series as literary texts has not met with universal approval in the academic worldAcademics gathered in Scotland on Friday to discuss hot literary topics including the racial politics of goblins, the canonisa...
Jane Lovering wins romantic novel of the year with first book
Please Don't Stop The Music, offering an 'unexpected hero from a fresh new voice', pips The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie ThomasAn indie rock star and a woman with a dark past form the unlikely couple at the heart of Jane Lovering's Please Don't Stop the Musi...
Before Watchmen: DC Comics publisher defends prequels
Dan DiDio says Watchmen prequels are a 'love letter' to Alan Moore's creation, as graphic novel's co-creator continues to censure the projectWith just a few weeks to go before the first instalment of DC Comics' controversial Watchmen prequels hits the ...
Amazon consumer book reviews as reliable as media experts
Study shows Amazon reviewers more likely to look favourably on debut authors, while professionals prefer prizewinnersAmazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book's quality as those of professional newspapers, according to a s...
True Blood author can suck no more out of vampire series
Charlaine Harris has announced that the final novel in her Southern Vampire Mysteries series will be published next yearMourning has broken out among fans of the telepathic Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse after author Charlaine Harris announced th...
Aharon Appelfeld scoops Independent foreign fiction prize
Israeli author's dark tale of a Jewish boy taken in by a prostitute during the second world war 'glows on the page', said judgesInspired by his experiences during the Holocaust, a novel by the 80-year-old Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld has won the Ind...
Gabriel García Márquez falls victim to Twitter death hoax
A Twitter account claiming to belong to Italian author Umberto Eco reported the death of Márquez, who is said to be visiting family in AmericaRumours of the death of the great Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez have been, in the immortal word...
Pay us for library ebook loans, say authors
Many writers rely on income from library loans, says the Society of Authors, in calling for digital books to be included in PLR schemeAuthors are calling on the government to remunerate them when their ebooks are lent from libraries, calling it "patent...
Influence of classic literature on writers declining, study claims
Modern authors are stylistically influenced by their contemporaries rather than writers from the 18th and 19th centuries, according to word-frequency study of classic literatureHarold Bloom famously dubbed it the "anxiety of influence" (paywall): the e...
Locating the books with the strongest sense of place
The Ondaatje prize shortlist includes novels from Rahul Bhattacharya and Teju Cole, but which are your favourite books which evoke 'the spirit of a place'?The shortlist for perhaps my favourite of the literary awards has just been announced: the Ondaat...
Salman Rushdie joins New York library protest
Authors including Art Spiegelman and Mario Vargas Llosa send letter to Fifth Avenue library planning $300m restructuringMajor literary names including Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman and Mario Vargas Llosa are protesting the planned $300m restructuring ...
