I’ve been a Rebecca Makkai fan for a while. Her first two novels, The Borrower (Viking, 2011) and The Hundred Year House (Viking, 2014) had me. Then she read an early draft of my forthcoming novel, A Bend in the…
This fall, PBS is running a program called “The Great American Read.” Earlier this year, they asked 7,000 readers to name their favorite works of fiction. The alphabetical list of 100 (not ranked) was then culled by a panel of…
Julia Fine’s debut novel What Should Be Wild, (Harper, 2018) is a modern gothic fairy tale, animated with toppled tropes and dark, unexpected secrets. The novel follows Maisie, a young girl cursed with the power to give and take life…
Jenna Blum, a 20+ – year Grub Street teacher and New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us (Harcourt, 2002) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010), has just published her third novel, The Lost Family (Harper, 2018). Already it…
Note: Except for posts from occasional guest bloggers, Dead Darlings posts are written by graduates of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program in Boston. To find out more about the program, click here. This advice is poorly timed because the “new”…
Do you remember that John Cusack movie from the 80s Better Off Dead? It was a humorous take on a traumatic time in a teen boy’s life. His girl dumped him for the popular boy, and he was left rudderless…