I List Therefore I Am: Letting Go of Reading Goal Anxiety
What if tallying up books at the end of the year was less about numbers?
Read MoreTajja Isen
Bluesky Promised Writers Freedom. Now It’s Feeling a Lot Like Work
With every new platform comes the expectation to punch in as a professional, curated version of ourselves
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Memoirs Are Almost Impossible to Sell
Publishers are turning away from personal stories. Have readers stopped caring about each other’s lives?
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What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?
Writers and readers alike love to argue about the quotations in the opening pages of their favourite books
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Self-Diagnosis Is Making Memoir Too Predictable
The joy of reading memoir is to watch another mind puzzle through its inner mechanics. If the outcome is already decided, why bother?
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The Hidden Racism of Book Cover Design
The publishing industry’s troubling reliance on visual stereotypes
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Alice Munro Was Bigger than Canada
Here artists are celebrated by virtue of their nationality. Munro showed me I could escape those tropes
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How Do You Even Sell a Book Anymore?
As sales slump, the labour of trying to bottle hype is largely left to writers
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The Case for Never Reading the Book Jacket
I don’t want to be told what’s going to happen and I definitely don’t want to be told what the book is “about”
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Do We Really Need a Taylor Swift Reporter?
Outlets like USA Today are hiring beat reporters to write exclusively about Swift and Beyoncé. But investing in this kind of journalism distracts from stories people actually need
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