Publishers Group West, which owns distributes such varied imprints as Darkhorse, Gallup, and Soft Skull Press, has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A full list of imprints is available on their website.
Twist endings, the bane of my reading experience. Ever since I read The Gift of the Magi as a child, I have hated the twist ending. It’s one of the reasons I could never get into the Twilight Zone, or enjoy so much 19th-century literature.
Of course, professional curmudgeon Nick Mamatas weighs in:
The problem with twist ending stories tends to be threefold: either the twist is too transparent (repetition of a 19th century story) too contrived (…and the haunted house was a giant tongue the whole time!) or simply too loud (They’ll never know how transparent this is if I shout!). Despite the three problems, there is generally one solution that would make these sorts of stories better: put the twist in the middle.
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If the twist is in the middle, we have a renewed chance to engage with the characters. So the monster in the woods was really a lost little boy. Then what? The “then what” is the interesting part.
The twist in the middle was frequently used in The X-Files, to great effect. If you ever get to watch the episode “War of the Coprophages,” you’ll actually witness multiple mid-plot twists.
From 101 Reasons to Stop Writing:
Every sex scene is gratuitous.
For every sexual sequence in a novel that imparts some insight into the characters, let alone the human condition, there are thousands which exist solely because the author got to page 180 and realised the main characters hadn’t fscked yet. Almost all of them could be edited down to “And then they did it,” without losing anything original.
I’m all for sex in novels, and on novels. I’m being prudent here, not prudish. If I wanted to get an erection on the bus ride to work, I’d bring my PSP and a 1 gig memory card loaded with eroticism of a more visual nature.
Even though his latest book is being heavily criticized, Thomas Pynchon still commands interest. From the London Telegraph:
“It seems a fitting conclusion to a game of hide-and-seek played by a man whose work is obsessed with the dangers of living in a world where rampant technological progress threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone. His novels imagine all sorts of strange scientific marvels that the world must learn to live with, but even Thomas Pynchon’s fertile brain couldn’t have predicted that one day he would be unmasked by something bearing the wonderfully weird title of YouTube.”
In elementary school, high school, and even a freshman college English course, I diagrammed sentences. It was a logical, almost mathematical approach to sentence structure and grammar, and it was one of the few useful exercises thrust upon unwitting students by the public school system. Unfortunately, the sentence diagram is going the way of cursive writing classes and phonics.
Lucky for us dinosaurs, there’s a new book out about the dying practice. Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences written by Kitty Burns Florey, explores the world of diagramming with a nostalgic eye. NPR reviews.