A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken review – here’s how to really write your novel | Creative writing
Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world.... Read more »
“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.” Following a... Read more »
When Sophie Pinkham opens her fascinating book with the claim that “Russia has more trees than there are stars in our galaxy”, it might seem as though she is merely using a... Read more »
In the book-length essay Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk gives a potted history of fiction in which humans turn into plants. There is Daphne, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is so afraid she will... Read more »
In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and... Read more »
Over the nearly four centuries during which the transatlantic slave trade operated, 12.5 million Africans were trafficked by Europeans to the Americas. 1.8 million of them perished on the voyage under scarcely... Read more »
Lies offend our sense of justice: generally, we want to see the liar unmasked and punished. But when the deception brings no material gain, we might also be curious about what purpose... Read more »
The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the... Read more »
If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has... Read more »