The list, care of Airship.
Showing posts with label Romance Novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romance Novels. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Saturday, March 23, 2013
How Romance Novels Came to Embrace Feminism
The Atlantic discusses it, here.
From the piece...
Feminist romance authors often embrace the problems in romance fiction and then write plots that actively do the opposite of what readers expect. This subversion of audience expectations is often jarring because, as a reader, you are bound to notice actions and emotions that are not what you assumed would happen.
Grant sees this tension between feminist ideology and the traditionally conservative genre as a welcome challenge to feminist romance authors. "How, respecting the genre and working within its defined parameters, can I write a love story that's palatable to me?," Grant asks herself when deciding the plot for her next novel. "Are there specific trends and devices it might be worthwhile to subvert?" In Grant's first novel, A Lady Awakened, the heroine uses the hero in order to get pregnant. She is not initially interested in emotional intimacy or love. The heroine is the one taking charge of her sexuality and her future while it is the rake who we find crying about how he feels used and eventually begging his love for a long-term commitment.
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Love, in Amish Country
The Paris Review discusses, yes, Amish romance novels.
From the piece...
The only items there truly unfamiliar to me were two wire racks full of paperbacks, their covers each backlit with the golden glow of God’s everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet. I spun through the racks, elated, repulsed. Could there be anything better, or worse, than Amish romance novels?
“Oh yes, people love them,” my uncle said. “They’re very popular.”
I picked the only one I could have possibly purchased, titled Rachel’s Secret, and left with this as the one keepsake from my conflicted return to Amish country. Fitting.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
In Defense of the Romance Novel
NPR takes up the case.
From the piece...
Most romance arcs follow Elizabeth and Darcy's lead — they start with conflict and lead to mutual understanding. Yes, generally, the initial attraction is physical, but still, by the end, you understand that these people love each other because of who they are, and that they bring out the best in one another. Also, to deserve that HEA, those characters have to change, to grow. They have to develop into people who are worthy of each other, who are ready and willing to risk everything to earn the love, respect and admiration of this person they love.
Why is our devotion to this lovely, affirming storytelling something we should hide, or apologize for? Why this intellectual idea that romance is something to look down on? We know that many intelligent, educated women read it. They must: Romance continues to dominate the publishing industry, accounting for nearly $1.4 billion in sales in 2011, a full 14.3 percent of all consumer book sales.
Romance may not interest you. I get that — though I highly recommend that you at least give it a try.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Self Published Romance Authors Band Together
Several romance authors have gotten together to launch a brand designed to help readers find "high-quality self-published works." This brand is called Rock*It Reads, and you'll be able to identify Rock*It Reads books by the logo on the cover.
From a story in USA Today...
Joyce: Why did all of these authors form this group/brand?
A: The e-book market place is exploding, offering readers an astounding number of books to choose from. But it's too easy for readers to get "search fatigue" from wading through the options, trying to find the gems.
By establishing Rock*It Reads, we're giving readers an effective, streamlined way to find really great books. Our beautiful new website is a one-stop portal for finding our books and for keeping up to date on latest news and upcoming releases. And our clearly recognizable logo is a signal to readers that they're getting a story that's been tended with the same level of attention and professionalism as our New York works. The logo is our "seal of quality," telling readers we care as much about writing great stories as they do about reading them!
Monday, March 05, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Romance Novels - the Last Great Bastion of Underground Writing
The Awl takes a look at the unending allure of romance novels.
From the piece...
Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we're not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd, unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people—literature for women! Books Just For Her!
Low or not, romance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for classic/literary fiction, according to Simba Information data published at the Romance Writers of America website.
It would be crazy to fail to pay close attention when that many people are devoted to something.
So, what is in all these hundreds of millions of books? What is their strange allure? As it happens I am in a position to say, because I read and love romance fiction. It's one of the genre things I collect sporadically; I have a particular fetish for Mills & Boon and Harlequin romances of the period between the late 1930s and 1980, what I think of as their Golden Age. During this time, the two houses produced an immense and vastly entertaining body of writing with a unique function and value in American life. Or Anglophone life, to be more exact, since Mills & Boon was founded in London (Whitcomb Street, W.1.) in 1908. Harlequin, which came much later, is a Canadian firm.
Romance novels are feminist documents.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
What Fiction Can Teach Us About Love
Reading fiction, from Virgil to Jane Austen to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a great way to learn about the ways of the heart—and to avoid getting heartsick.
From a piece in the Daily Beast...
When E.M. Forster asked a hypothetical reader in his book Aspects of the Novel why he read fiction, the character said, “It seems a funny sort of question to ask—a novel’s a novel—well, I don’t know—I suppose it tells a story, so to speak.” The story is essential, of course, to keep us engaged. But those of us who are drawn to novels aren’t there purely for entertainment (particularly not in this era when we can watch all the movies, television shows, and viral videos we want). No, most of us go between the pages to get inside different minds and learn more about how people tick. It’s no coincidence that the world’s best novelists are some of our most outstanding psychologists. (Just ask Freud, who thought Dostoyevsky was revelatory.)
When it comes to figuring out crucial lessons of human behavior, timeless works of fiction are unparalleled primers. As Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, recently told the Guardian: “Reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way [of] making the world a better place by improving [empathy] … but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education.” Fiction can also, I’ve found, shed plenty of light on our romantic lives. In fact, I myself have learned so much about my own amorous trials and tribulations from great stories that I was inspired to write a book about it: the just-published Much Ado About Loving: What Our Favorite Novels Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-so-great Gatsbys, and Love in the Time of Internet Dating.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
The Notebook - The Musical?
Indeed.
From a story in the Guardian...
According to entertainment blog Zap2It, the musical is being written by One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Galeotti and Ron Aniello, who staged a reading in North Carolina two years ago.
"We're still in development of this process," Sparks explained, "but the best way that I've always found, and it's what I've done in Hollywood or whether it's working with the publishers that I've worked with for a long time, is to work with people that you really trust, who understand what it's about and they want to take that and mold it into something new."
The Notebook was Sparks's first published novel and centres on 80-year-old Noah reading his diaries to his wife in a nursing home. They detail his experiences of love as a youth. Aged 31, having just returned from military service in the second world war, Noah is reunited with his ex-lover Allie, sparking a passionate affair.
Monday, September 05, 2011
How Do You Reinvent Romance Novels? Add Mixed Martial Arts
The Globe and Mail discusses ways in which romance novel publishers are constantly reinventing themselves.
From the piece...
In an unlikely combination merging mixed-martial arts (MMA) and romance, Her Son’s Hero tells the story of Dominic Payette, an MMA fighter who falls in love with single mother Fiona MacAvery. But Fiona has an aversion to violence that stems from her desire to protect her son, a victim of schoolyard bullying, and she initially resists Dominic’s advances.
Written by Toronto writer Vicki So under the pseudonym Vicki Essex (“You can’t spell my name without sex,” she says), Her Son’s Hero is a classic tale of opposites attracting – but wrapped in an unorthodox package.
As the world’s largest publisher of romance fiction, Harlequin releases 110 titles a month in 111 countries around the world, and the company is constantly looking for a fresh take on the boy-meets-girl love story.
“We really do take the cue from the authors. If they can deliver a story that is authentic and emotional and grips the reader – whether it involves an alien or someone who has been very wounded in terms of having gone to war and lost a leg because of an amputation because of an injury – it’s just such a huge range of things,” says Dianne Moggy, vice-president of Harlequin’s series and subsidiary rights. “There’s nothing that’s really taboo in terms of what type of hero you can have – or heroine – or what are the conflicts and the things that they’re dealing with.”
Thursday, July 21, 2011
How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Bodice-Wripping Victorian Romance Novel
Now we know how, thanks to the Wall Street Journal.
From the piece...
For most people, giving a presentation in skivvies to 100 professional peers sounds like a bad dream. But Ms. Gist was giving a workshop on Victorian clothing at the Romance Writers of America's annual convention this summer. The romance novelists had gathered in New York to learn how to dress—and undress—heroines in their novels.
It took an hour for Ms. Gist to squeeze into a dozen layers that a lady would have worn in the 1860s—stockings, garters, bloomers, chemise, corset, crinoline or hoop skirt, petticoats, a shirtwaist or blouse, skirt, vest and bolero jacket. By the end, workshop attendees were skeptical that seductions ever occurred, with so many sartorial barriers.
"How did they ever have hanky panky?" asked novelist Annie Solomon.
With great effort, it turns out. Women wore blouses under their corsets—making actual bodice ripping fairly pointless. Corsets fastened in front and laced up the back and couldn't be undone in a single passionate gesture. "You'll see pictures of corsets on bare skin. That's completely historically inaccurate," Ms. Gist told her audience.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Friday, July 08, 2011
Romance Novels Bad for Our Health?
Yes.
From an article in the Guardian...
Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that "what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association", advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that "sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the books – and pick up reality".
Her comments follow a recent claim that romance novels can "dangerously unbalance" their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing "more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books", and that "for many women, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships".
Writing in the latest issue of the academic magazine, published by the British Medical Journal, Quilliam said that the messages of "the post-sexual revolution bodice rippers of the 1970s", which typically see "the heroine being rescued from danger by the hero, and then abandoning herself joyfully to a life of intercourse-driven multiple orgasms and endless trouble-free pregnancies in order to cement their marital devotion", run "totally counter to those we try to promote".
Monday, May 09, 2011
Amazon Embraces Romance Novels
Amazon has taken note that romance novels are hot (sultry!) sellers. So, why not publish the titles themselves?
From a piece in the Guardian...
Amazon.com has announced plans to move further into publishing with the launch of a new romance imprint, Montlake Romance, "bringing readers the freshest, most innovative and compelling love stories possible".
Montlake, named after a neighbourhood in central Seattle, is the online retailer's fourth imprint, following its flagship venture Amazon Encore, literature in translation imprint Amazon Crossing and bestselling author Seth Godin's The Domino Project, "a series of manifestos by thought leaders".
Launching in November with the award-winning writer Connie Brockway's The Other Guy's Bride – in which a budding archaeologist in turn-of-the-century Egypt poses as another man's fiancée – Montlake will publish across the romantic fiction spectrum, from romantic suspense to paranormal romance and fantasy. The "broad range" of new titles will be available to readers in North America in print, Kindle and audio formats from Amazon's website and from bookshops in the US.
"Romance is one of our biggest and fastest-growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers, so we can't wait to make The Other Guy's Bride and other compelling titles available to romance fans around the world," said Amazon Publishing vice president Jeff Belle, announcing the news.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Bad Romance Novels
Bad excerpts from bad romance novels...every day.
An example...
His breath smelled of coffee, mint, and faintly of cheese, one of her favorite sinful pleasures.
“Star Bright” - Catherine Anderson (Submitted by Jane)
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