Once a staple of the magazine and literary world, it had, for a variety of reasons, been neglected and had fallen out of favor.
Read more: The Short Story: Back in the Game
Category: News
Coming of the Aged
Recent movie releases such as The New and Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet seem to be a crack in the mantra of marketing pundits that the only worthy targets of mass media are teenagers and those who reach the ceiling age of forty-nine, not beyond.
Read more: Coming of the Aged
How to Fix Amazon’s Review System
It was inevitable that Amazon’s laissez-faire book review system would come under fire for providing the opportunity to advocates of or against a particular book to game the system and either trash it or promote it… For Amazon, the system began with good intentions as a marketing device for books, but unintended consequences have made it both an unreliable and suspect platform. Worse, it has tempted the unscrupulous.
Read more: How to Fix Amazon’s Review System
Misreading the Facts on E-Books
The reported decline in e-reader sales is being misread as an indication that consumption of the e-book itself is in decline. This false conjecture has given authors and publishers hope that the printed book will return to the economic dominance it enjoyed before the technological innovation of the e-reader device.
Read more: Misreading the Facts on E-Books
What Classics Will Our Century Produce?
Will 21st century authors of fiction produce any classics?… Out of his hodge podge one wonders whether the classics of the 21st century will come out of the genre fiction of romance, fantasy, graphic novels, mysteries, eroticism, vampire zombie, etc. categories, where books like Fifty Shades of Grey will be raised on the same pedestal as, say, War and Peace and Ulysses.
Read more: What Classics Will Our Century Produce?
Whatever Happened to ‘Books’?
We are going through a period where such books are getting lost in the crowded corridors of our commercial enterprises. Despite this, such books will continue to be written by those who must tell these stories, and read by those who hunger to read them.
Read more: Whatever Happened to ‘Books’?
Take Your Choice, Your Privacy or Your Privates
More than ever, we are an open book, an easy target, a bloodless check mark. Our individuality has been compromised. Technology has destroyed our privacy and revealed our preferences, desires, fantasies, biases and prejudices.
Iconic Book-Turned-Film The War of the Roses, Will Debut as Stage Play Across the United States After ‘Sold-Out’ Runs in a Dozen Nations
The War of the Roses stage play, based on Warren Adler’s iconic novel that was turned into the blockbuster hit starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito, will debut across the North-American theatre circuit and other English-speaking territories worldwide starting in 2013, following house-full runs and spectacular reviews throughout Italy, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, the Czech Republic. It will soon be premiering in Mexico City, as well.
The Contest Ploy for Literary Credibility
The Warren Adler Short Story Contest, which started online in 2006 and continued until 2011, was an outgrowth of my three brief years running a short story contest for the Wyoming Arts Council when I lived in Jackson Hole.
Read more: The Contest Ploy for Literary Credibility
Sex-Crazed Washington
The fact is that Washington has always been a sex-crazed town. Sex is the one entitlement that no matter how many powerful men, and now women, get outed and put in the stocks to be hooted or reviled by their fellow adulterers in the media and the hallowed halls of Government, the lure of the hormonal urge continues on its merry way.
Read more: Sex-Crazed Washington
Dad’s Boys
“…the power of family ties, not simply the genetic pull of blood relationships but the core value of the American bedrock, which is that we are all related by heritage, history and common ideals. Not to be part of a family, from the most basic of its definitions, is a form of exile.”
Read more: Dad’s Boys
Stuck in the Middle
I must confess that the only place I felt politically comfortable was the thirty years I spent in Washington, D.C., circa pre-Reagan assassination attempt. Politics in those days was a day job and at night the politicos would mix and mingle and checked all their animosity at the door and everyone was in the middle. From what I see from here, those days are over.
Read more: Stuck in the Middle
Last Man Standing
For years people have been asking me how studios, producers, film executives and actors make their decisions on picking books to adapt to theatrical movies and television… Like most things in life, there is never one answer.
Read more: Last Man Standing
The Future of the Novel
With the tsunami of e-books where traditional and self-published writers are beefing up reading choices to astounding levels, the book business has become a competing stew of infinite taste sensations that are offered up increasingly sliced and diced, and composed for an increasing segmented reading public.
Read more: The Future of the Novel
The Master… Really?
It would have been far more convincing if Phoenix’s character was portrayed as less aberrational…someone who had been inveigled into the cult by Lancaster Dodd’s cynical methods, more of a cautionary tale than this hodgepodge of missed signals and distorted and faux profound story-telling.
Read more: The Master… Really?
Female Villains: 10 Evil Women In Literature
Women, by virtue of their historical status as nurturers, and for centuries dominated by men and considered mere breeders, have been characterized by time and custom as the gentler sex, compassionate and kind, more merciful and tenderhearted of the genders. But they have not always been portrayed as shrinking violets….
Read more: Female Villains: 10 Evil Women In Literature
Decoding the Self-Published Author
The author, too, must adjust to the new reality. The term “self” in “self publishing” will eventually disappear as more and more authors will have to take the marketing and selling plunge on their own. Even if one is published in the traditional way by known publishers, one will have to market one’s books on one’s own hook, in imaginary and often costly ways. The self-published author will, in effect, be forced to become his own entrepreneur.
Read more: Decoding the Self-Published Author
Spanked by an Insider
I would prefer [the Old Gray Lady] to… present in news columns, a more balanced, more deferential and civilized, less vitriolic and cocksure journalistic presentation; a stance she had once maintained and guarded with great courage and commitment.
Read more: Spanked by an Insider
Counting the Bodies
Never before in a lifetime spent as a media hound and news junkie have I noted, with dismay, the amount of ink and digital bytes spent on documenting and numerically recording body counts.
Read more: Counting the Bodies
The Title Dilemma
Like every author on the planet, I’ve spent endless hours mulling over creating titles for my work. One strives, of course, to be both memorable and honestly descriptive of the content.
Read more: The Title Dilemma
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