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POPSJust what is 'annualism'? Many would argue that there is nothing wrong with a journalist putting themselves at the centre of the story. What binds all the "annualist" titles together is that while their "year-long ordeal" might be classified as a stunt, they have serious things to say about their subject matter and its importance to society. And there is a long and honourable history of "stunt" journalism. It goes all the way back to Nellie Bly, the pioneering American journalist. In 1887 she infiltrated an asylum by pretending to be mentally ill in order to investigate conditions there. Her expose, Ten Days in a Mad-House, outlined the grim conditions, rotten food, and beatings that constituted the life of patients. Ultimately, we are impressed by feats of endurance. For many readers, it adds authenticity to an act of criticism. For many of the authors of course, one "annualist" work is enough. "It would be really nice to do something that doesn't involve the words 'I', 'me' or 'my''.
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POPSThe Pushkin factor in romantic relationships
Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West.“Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.” James Collins, whose new novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading “The Magic Mountain” on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat’...
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POPSEveryone is a book of blood ...until he realizes that there are greater forces at work than he had ever thought. And there, I think, is a story with a perfect happy ending - he goes through hell and he comes through on the other side, utterly changed, utterly transformed.... At the end of 'In The Hills, The Cities', both protagonists die, but they gain meaning, extraordinary meaning. Perhaps not a meaning that one would want to celebrate... It's ambiguous. But when they see the beasts in the hills, some new vision is presented to them which hitherto they wouldn't even have been capable of imagining.... I very much like the ambiguity or the ambivalence of a moment which can be terrible and significant simultaneously, the way that many of the pivotal moments in our lives are very often rites of passage moments in which things are lost which can never be claimed again. Yet the territory ahead is, by virtue of the fact that it is new, also exciting and extraordinary." Clive Barker on the books of blood
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