Abigail Nussbaum on Mieville's Un Lun Dun, and other things: "There must be something that children's books do and adult books don't for so many adult readers to gravitate to the former (perhaps the answer is as simple as there being so few adult novels with adolescent protagonists--of the top of my head I can only come up with Donna Tartt's The Little Friend). With that question in mind, it's interesting to examine the ways in which authors of adult fiction tailor their themes and narrative voices in their attempts to appeal to a juvenile audience."
(And Ms. Nussbaum also links to a rather timely article by A.S. Byatt, published originally in the NYT in 2003, entitled "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult.")
Dan Green on Tom McCarthy's Remainder: "On the other hand, it is hard not to summon up some sympathy for this character, since we, too, if befallen by our own "accident," would likely find ourselves confronting a similarly alien world and might respond to it, almost certainly would respond to it, in the best way our addled brains could contrive. Our mental machinery would be exposed as similarly fragile. We would become our own remainder."
Niall Harrison on a Readercon panel entitled "Reviewing in the Blogosphere": "I think freedom is the first thing most people would point to as an advantage of online publication. There is, admittedly, a risk of writing long because you can, rather than because you need to, but it’s a tradeoff worth having. The point about audience is more interesting. Having an audience in mind makes it easier to write — I assume people reading this, for instance, have a certain level of familiarity with the sf field, which is why I said that John Clute should need no introduction; if I assumed my audience was the entire internet, John Clute would almost certainly need an introduction. But this is, perhaps, one way in which online writing is different to print publication: it is possible to write just from a need to say something, and let the audience find you."
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