Features
5412 features in Affairs of the Art, Alice in Wordland, Art and Architecture, Biography & Memoir, Book Industry News, CapitaLetters, Classics, Considering the Classics, Contemporary/Literary, Cooking and Food, Decisions & Revisions, Fingism, Finglish, GBF13, Historical, History, Independent Voice, Literally Kind, Long Story Short, Mystery/Thriller/Detective, Nerd Volta, Podcasts, Poetry, Popular Culture, Prose as Profession, Ralphie’s Bookmobile, Science, Science Fiction, Snapshots, Text in the City, That’s What SHE Said: Lit Women Who Rock, The Company We Keep, The Write Stuff, Washington Writers Conference, Washington, D.C., Words For Thought, Write Now, Write Side Up, Young Adult, Alter States, Lupita Reads, Next Book, Girl Writing, A Column of Her Own, Small Talk, Creative Considerations, The Critical Reader, Spotlight Event, Book Club Hub, Rediscovered Treasures, Author Q&A, Beyond The Book, Book Blog, Book List, Book News, Essay, Independent Voice, Local, Podcast, Poetry Review, Video, Romance Roundup, Washington, DC, The One That Got Away, Cross-Examining History, Worth a Revisit, Children’s Books, And the Banned Played On
As part of The Independent’s honoring of Memorial Day, Tom Glenn writes about books on war.
If memoir is the genre of truth, how could it possibly be acceptable to lie? Wasn’t James Frey fried because he lied? And yet, I venture to say that it is indeed OK to lie in memoir.
Memoir is the genre du jour, the one people talk about, get upset about, or want to write themselves. Memoir is such a buzz word that it gets slapped on personal stories, whether applicable or not.
Leslie Maitland’s Crossing the Borders of Time is a story that is too good to be true: a saga of escape and survival and of star-crossed lovers, separated by the Holocaust and family intervention.
Biographer James McGrath Morris chooses the year's best biographies.
Andrew Marble, who reviewed All In for the Independent and is himself a military biographer, investigates how the affair between General Petraeus and Paula Broadwell may have affected the book.
When I mention that I teach memoir writing, I often get the reaction, “You must hear a lot of heavy stuff.” I do, and I feel I live a wider life because of it. But writing memoir is not about the heavy stuff. It’s about what the writer makes of the experience, and about shaping that experience into an engaging story....
In a country where cremation is mandatory, the narrator’s grandmother insists on a traditional burial and persuades his father to build a coffin, in this memoir of an ordinary Chinese family during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
