Candice Wuehle’s Book Notes Music Playlist for Her Novel Ultranatural
Candice Wuehle joined Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes series, pairing her novel Ultranatural with a curated music playlist that spans classic rock to early‑2000s pop. The playlist—featuring Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Britney Spears and others—mirrors the book’s exploration of labor, fame, and the cost of capitalist success. Wuehle explains how each song underscores the protagonist’s journey from Appalachian roots to a mononymous pop star. The feature highlights the growing trend of authors using multimedia tie‑ins to deepen narrative impact and reach new audiences.
Thoughts About Making a Career as a Writer
Henrik Karlsson applies a hacker mindset to the writing profession, dissecting the career into three core flows: text creation, funding, and social feedback. He argues that conventional publishing rarely offers sufficient income or creative freedom, whereas a part‑time job or...
A One-Page Framework to Analyse Any Stock
Vishal’s new book *The Long Game* launches, compiling insights from 30 seasoned investors on staying the course through market cycles. Alongside the book, he offers a one‑page, 15‑question stock‑analysis template designed to cut through information overload. A walkthrough video applies...
Monsters in the Archives – My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks
Caroline Bicks, the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair at the University of Maine, was granted unprecedented access to Stephen King’s private, climate‑controlled archive in 2021. Her year‑long immersion produced *Monsters in the Archives*, a hybrid work that blends scholarly close reading of...
About A Tree
Author Jami Attenberg promotes her May 9 "Why We Write" workshop and the upcoming "1000 Words of Summer" writing series (May 30‑June 12) with in‑person events in Atlanta, Asheville, and Spartanburg. In a reflective essay she recounts contemplating the removal of an olive...
The Sunday Stories
Carole Radziwill’s Substack series “The Sunday Stories” continues her unfinished memoir project “The Staircase,” a fragmented journal that grapples with grief after the 2001 loss of her husband and the deaths of high‑profile friends. In Part Two she recounts a...
Book 36: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (100 Great Books)
The Network Capital blog recaps a recent Skoll World Forum gathering and pivots to a literary deep‑dive on Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Set in 1840s Russia, the novel exposes how state‑run censuses kept deceased serfs on the books, creating a...
"The First Full Thought of Her Life"
George Saunders posted "The First Full Thought of Her Life" on his Substack, featuring a detailed Q&A with reader Deb. The piece highlights the depth of the conversation, with Saunders praising the community’s comments for their precision, generosity, rigor, and...
The Best-Written Recent Release
Auraist’s weekly roundup spotlighted John Grindrod’s novel *Tales of the Suburbs* as the best‑written recent release, praising its exploration of suburban transformation and identity. The post also listed a diverse nonfiction shortlist, featuring titles from Ibram X. Kendi, Rebecca Solnit and...
26/4 ARCHIVE & ANALYSIS: 3 AGAINST MYSTERY AND THE BUSINESS OF THE BLACK KNOT Chapter 7
{"summary":"The seventh chapter of \"3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot\" follows Mikey’s return after a night of hallucinogenic mushrooms and a terrifying encounter with a Hangman figure, propelling the teenage ghost‑hunters deeper into a mysterious, uncertain...
Q&A with Lowry Pressly Today!
Jared Henderson announced a live Zoom Q&A with Lowry Pressly, author of the forthcoming book *The Right to Oblivion*. The session is scheduled for April 26, 2026 at 2 PM Central Time and will be recorded for later posting. Pressly is expected to...
The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin
In a recent piece for Poetry by Heart, IV, Henry Oliver revisits Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings” through a memorized recitation. Oliver notes that the performance reveals how Larkin crafts a pastoral atmosphere not just with imagery but with precise...
Does Melania’s Book Be Best?
Melania Trump’s newly released memoir, *MELANIA*, was highlighted during a surprise White House appearance that referenced her personal story of meeting Donald Trump. A blog post reviews the book and offers a quiz to gauge readers’ familiarity with its content....
Why Did China Make the Loser the Hero?
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, China’s 800,000‑word classic, frames history as a moral contest rather than a triumph of the strongest. While Cao Cao commands armies and political power, the novel elevates Liu Bei, a modest sandal‑maker with imperial lineage, as...
Two Thoughts (19 - 25 April)
Danielle Crittenden’s memoir *Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable* was excerpted this week in The Atlantic, highlighting a raw portrayal of maternal loss. Infinite Books will publish the full book on May 5, 2026, with pre‑order links on its...
Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: April 26, 2026
Two Sylvias Press released its weekly Muse newsletter on April 26, 2026, but the article is gated behind a subscription paywall, offering only a brief teaser and a header image. The post invites readers to continue for free via a...
Altitude
Rahim Hirji’s newsletter promotes his upcoming book *SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI*, releasing July 3 2026, and introduces the concept of “altitude” – the mental height at which leaders operate. He illustrates altitude with everyday kitchen anecdotes,...
New Audiobook Release Alert!
AR Shaw announced the release of a new audiobook, "On My Way Book 2: One Bad Week," on April 26, 2026. The post includes a direct link to listen to a sample of the title. The audiobook is hosted on Shaw’s...
All Her Lives, Nine Stories (2025), by Ingrid Horrocks
Ingrid Horrocks’s short‑story collection *All Her Lives* weaves together nine narratives that echo the feminist legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Spanning from a WWI nurse on Anzac Day to a present‑day mother confronting her son’s climate activism, the book explores duty,...
Three on a Theme: Works of (Auto)biography by Susie Boyt, Sarah Laing and Jenn Shapland
The article reviews three memoir‑biography hybrids—Susie Boyt’s *My Judy Garland Life*, Sarah Laing’s *Mansfield and Me*, and Jenn Shapland’s *My Autobiography of Carson McCullers*. Each author uses an iconic woman—Garland, Mansfield, McCullers—as a lens to examine personal trauma, sexuality, and creative identity....
The Nomad Myth, Finally Taken Seriously (and Slightly Dismantled)
Felix Marquardt’s *The New Nomads* reframes migration as humanity’s default condition rather than a crisis or lifestyle trend. He dismantles the romanticized digital‑nomad archetype, showing that true mobility is rooted in place, community, and meaning. The book balances empathy for...
The Imposter – Chapter Thirty-Five
The author of the novel *The Imposter* has refreshed the book’s visual identity by pairing it with Edward Hopper’s 1909 painting “Summer Interior,” now displayed on Substack. The novel, originally published by Pan Macmillan in the UK in 2021, is being...
Top 9 AI Character Creator for Stories: Tools & Apps Writers Actually Use
The article ranks nine AI character‑creator tools that help writers generate backstories, dialogue, and visual portraits, evaluating them on customization, story integration, ease of use, free‑tier value, and price. DreamGen tops the list with deep customization, unlimited free credits, and...
An Editor Who Read “Crash” Called JG Ballard “Beyond Psychiatric Help. Do Not Publish”
In the early 1970s Jonathan Cape received J.G. Ballard’s manuscript for Crash, only to have a senior reader label the author “beyond psychiatric help” and advise against publishing. The publisher ignored the warning, released the novel in 1973, and Ballard went on...
Beyond the Broken Years: Australian Military History in 1000 Books (2024) by Peter Stanley
Peter Stanley’s 2024 volume *Beyond the Broken Years* surveys a thousand Australian military‑history titles, tracing how the subject has been written, who has written it, and how narratives have shifted over the past half‑century. The book contrasts academic scholars with...
Helen Benedict’s Book Notes Music Playlist for Her Novel The Soldier’s House
Helen Benedict’s latest novel, The Soldier’s House, explores the lives of Iraqi refugees resettled with American veterans in upstate New York, seven years after the 2003 Iraq invasion. In the Largehearted Boy “Book Notes” series, Benedict pairs the story with a...
Dishonest Tunes for Dishonest Times
The article explores how AI diffusion models are now being used to generate music, spotlighting the Suno service that creates full tracks from user‑written lyrics. It explains the technical process—training on low‑entropy data, adding Gaussian noise, then reversing the noise...
The Barbarism of Yesteryear
Max Watman’s historical novel *Tomorrow, the War* offers a vivid, research‑driven portrait of 1850s American slavery while weaving together several interlocking storylines. The book deliberately avoids the period’s racial slur, aiming for modern readability, yet still conveys the brutal reality...
Live with Mike Pesca
Ethan Strauss hosted a live video podcast with veteran journalist Mike Pesca, focusing on the craft of writing and the challenges facing writers today. The episode aired on Strauss’s Substack platform and featured a Q&A segment that allowed listeners to...
Books I Read in March 2026
March 2026 saw three distinct releases that illuminate tech, influencer culture, and family trauma. Former Meta policy director Sarah Wynn‑Williams delivers a candid memoir, *Careless People*, detailing internal dysfunction and Meta’s own attempts to suppress the book, which only heightened...
🛸 What's the 'Greatest American Utopian Science Fiction Story' Ever Written?
Kim Stanley Robinson, in a Long Now talk, refers to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as the greatest American utopian science‑fiction story. The article expands this claim, arguing that the address’s vision of a government “of the people, by the people,...
Melissa Auf Der Maur Takes Us Back to the “Last Analogue Decade” In Her Memoir
Melissa Auf Der Maur’s memoir *Even the Good Girls Will Cry* revisits the “last analogue decade,” focusing on her rise from the indie band Tinker to five years in Hole and a stint with the Smashing Pumpkins. The book opens...
Kiss, Marry or Kill: 59
The author’s weekly "Kiss, Marry or Kill" column spotlights Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer‑winning novel *Demon Copperhead* as a "Kiss" – a must‑read recommendation. After multiple failed attempts with the Audible version, the reviewer found the Kindle edition compelling, praising its vivid...
Why Doubling Down on Your Position Never Works — and What Does
The article argues that doubling down on one’s own position backfires in persuasion. It promotes a "them‑first" mindset, leading with emotion, using stories, and mastering subconscious signals like tone and pacing. Practical steps include identifying the counterpart’s priorities, swapping arguments...
Get to Know Our Friends Priya Parmar & Lynn Cullen
The blog spotlights a Q&A with author Priya Parmar, revealing her core writing advice, daily rituals, and favorite recent titles. Parmar emphasizes starting before feeling ready and listening to one’s internal ear, while outlining a habit of drafting a sentence...
Last One Out by Jane Harper
Jane Harper’s latest novel, *Last One Out*, returns to the stark, dwindling town of Carralon Ridge in rural New South Wales, where former GP Ro Crowley revisits the mystery of her son’s disappearance on its fifth anniversary. The book leans...
The Most Influential Genre In America Is Rewriting How Women Think About Love, And Conservatives Aren't Even In The Room
The romance genre has become America’s most influential literary category, with the average reader devouring 36 novels a year. These stories dictate cultural norms around love, sex, femininity and family, shaping women’s expectations for decades. Conservative romance writers, despite sharing...
THE CASTLE some Big UK News
Jon Ronson’s new nonfiction title The Castle is now available for preorder in the UK, featuring a cover unveiled in a video that also includes brief audio from his reporting. The book has earned a glowing endorsement from documentary maker...
Thousands of AI‑written, Edited or ‘Polished’ Books Are Being Sold – an Eerie Echo of Orwell’s ‘Novel‑writing Machines’
A wave of AI‑written, edited, and "polished" books is flooding the market, spotlighting the legal fallout from recent AI copyright disputes. In 2025 Anthropic agreed to a settlement of up to $1.5 billion to compensate thousands of authors whose works were...
Unlocking Palestine: Sara Yasin on Editing ‘The Key’
The Key, a new digital publication dedicated to covering Palestine, debuted as an outgrowth of the PalFest literary festival. In a recent BULAQ podcast, editor‑in‑chief Sara Yasin—formerly managing editor of the Los Angeles Times— discussed the outlet’s mission and its...
Jen Ruiz Left Law to Write Travel Books – This Is Her Journey From Self-Publishing to Traditional Contracts
Jen Ruiz left a legal career to chase a personal challenge: visiting 12 countries in 12 months. The experience sparked a pivot to travel writing, leading her to self‑publish two guidebooks that quickly found niche success on Amazon. Leveraging that...
‘The Hotel’ (2026), by Nicole Hazan
American Jewish Book Council has launched Paper Brigade, a program aimed at countering the growing exclusion of Jewish authors from literary platforms. As part of its debut, the council released the speculative short story ‘The Hotel’ by emerging writer Nicole...
The Upanishads
Eknath Easwaran’s new translation of the Upanishads brings the 3,000‑year‑old Hindu scriptures to a modern audience with clear, readable prose. The edition includes introductions that frame each Upanishad’s philosophical debates, from the nature of consciousness in the Kena to the...
Marianne Moore on the There Elements of Persuasive Writing
The article revisits Marianne Moore’s out‑of‑print essay collection *Predilections* to spotlight her three psychological elements of persuasive writing—humility, concentration, and gusto. It weaves her personal literary history, from a one‑vote loss for the Academy fellowship to later Pulitzer and National...
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
Andrew Roth’s essay revisits the centuries‑old Shakespeare authorship controversy, spotlighting Susan Dwyer Amussen’s new book *What’s in a Name* as a definitive rebuttal to alternative‑author theories. The piece traces the movement’s 19th‑century origins with Delia Bacon and later fringe claims, including...
The Woody Brown Saga Required A Number Of Institutional Failures
The recent bestseller *Upward Bound* by Woody Brown has ignited a debate over whether the 28‑year‑old autistic author actually wrote the novel or if his mother’s use of the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) fabricated the text. RPM, a variant of...
The New Dark Ages: James Marriott in Conversation with Henry Oliver
James Marriott, author of *The New Dark Ages*, will discuss his book with Substack writer Henry Oliver on July 8, 2026, at Dr Johnson House in London. The conversation will probe whether the erosion of reading habits signals a cultural dark age...
Are We All Participating in Lindy West’s Humiliation Kink?
Lindy West’s new memoir "Adult Braces" pulls back the curtain on her public feminist persona, revealing personal struggles and a complicated view of polyamory. The author of the blog post critiques the book as both a candid self‑portrait and a...
12 Books That Will Make You Dangerously Well-Read
The post curates twelve books that promise to make readers “dangerously well‑read,” spanning psychology, philosophy, history, and literature. It highlights Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive bias, Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology, and C.L.R. James’s account of the Haitian Revolution, among others....
The Top 20 Kindle Books Glasp Readers Highlighted in Q1 2026
Glasp released its Q1 2026 roundup of the 20 most‑imported English‑language Kindle books, based on reader highlights. The list is led by self‑help and productivity titles, with Tiago Forte’s “Building a Second Brain” achieving the highest consensus at 60% of its...