NOVEL, n. A short story padded.
The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.
In fact, one of the descriptions of the character in the book is that 'IT' was not very good at replicating human emotions. And that's something that is overlooked in general.
A novel is a book with a lot of pages.
'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.
I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.
The three books I've written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.
I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.
I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.
The first function of a book review should be, I believe, to give some idea of the contents and character of the book.
Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
I don't like my books being defined by their "about"-ness. So now the subtitle has just become a kind of strap-line on the cover.
I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.
Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question “Why should I buy this book?
My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.
I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.
It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed,' although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.
