A review of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon. Justin Norton on the fate of the epistolary novel. A review of The Historical Novel by Jerome de Groot. A review of What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 by Gordon Hutner. Eight years later, many novels have been written about September 11 — what can they tell us about that day? Laura Frost investigates. When lit blew into bits: The meganovel shrank, even as reading itself metastasized. From The Guardian's Book Blog, the ingredients for a blockbuster novel: Big, brash and frequently brutal, it is a genre unto itself; we all know the books we're supposed to be reading, but are they really the most important ones?; and if there's one genre you have to read before you die it's the travel book. Big-name stars with stories to tell don't always do their own heavy lifting; a look at the ghostwriters behind celebrity memoirs. After weeks of wall-to-wall press for Palin, Agassi, and Carrie Prejean, it’s clear our narcissistic culture is obsessed with memoirs; Ben Yagoda hopes the fad might be over. Phillip Lopate reviews Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda (and more and more and more). From Hemingway to war heroes, there's a romance in writers who put themselves in their own story. A look at how romance novels take the romance out of romance. Why don’t romance writers get more critical respect? An article on the New Gay Romance, written by and for straight women. A look at how Eighties-style bonkbusters are having a revival. American horror stories no longer manifest in the guise of vampires, ghosts and voodoo curses — the new fear is the dread of mental instability. In their scramble to find the next breakthrough, publishers are marketing awkward hybrids that are neither literary enough to last nor commercial enough to entertain.
