Culture
Shakespeare’s First Folio has been Stolen Many, Many Times
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Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the contents. Inside was one of the most famous, most valuable books in existence: the library’s near-perfect edition of one of Shakespeare’s First Folios. This theft is…
What To Read While You’re Waiting for the Next Season of Yellowjackets
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How do you know someone just finished binging both seasons of Yellowjackets? A. They roam around in a daze grabbing random people and asking, “Who is pit girl? Who is pit girl?” I know I’m not the only one obsessed with the Showtime series about a New Jersey high school soccer team, the unspeakable things…
Elizabeth Hand on Playwriting, Haunted Houses, and Shirley Jackson
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books. Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the first continuation of The Haunting of Hill House that has been sanctioned by the Shirley Jackson estate. I’m so interested in how you came to this…
Love Behind Bars: On the Complicated World of Incarcerated Romance
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Of all the correspondents I’ve had in my life, Sam Israel has been among the most consistent. Sam was serving a twenty-two-year sentence in federal prison for fraud when we met. He’d been running a Ponzi scheme out of a hedge fund that began with him stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and…
Rhys Bowen on Using Real Experiences As Inspiration
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My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I started this series in 2006 I couldn’t have imagined that it would still be going strong and have readers around the world in 9 languages to…
Psychology Is Important For Motivation, But Your Characters Need More Than Diagnoses
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I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far off. But for all the joy they bring to the classroom, my students often want to write about characters who have bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression,…
Fighting Toxic Masculinity Through Young Adult Fiction
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When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? Example: at my camp, the *cool kids* would rank the…
From Sports Reporter to Crime Writer
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Ask me why I created a female sports reporter protagonist and the answer is easy. That’s my background. I intimately know the character’s experiences—the smell of the locker rooms, the chit chat with a camera operator and the adrenaline rush of a newsroom. Ask me why I decided to write a thriller—well, that question stumped…