Oprah’s Book Club had a massive impact on the literary landscape, and I mean that in a good, non-dinosaur-killing way. The huge surge in the trade paperback market owes much to Oprah. I was working for Chapters when it went nova, and the number of times we were […]
This month we’re mixing it up at the Gutter, with the editors writing about something outside their usual domain. This week Chris Szego writes about movies. Well, mostly movies. I’m a total chicken. This means I don’t watch anything that smacks of horror. In fact, I tend to […]
Most major genre fiction publishers are located in either New York or London. Romance is a bit of an exception: Harlequin Books, the world’s largest publisher of romance, is headquartered in Toronto. Nor is the Canadian flag absent on the authorial side. There are Canadian romance writers […]
Generally speaking, Romances are divided into two broad groups: contemporary and historical. Those distinctions are somewhat fluid. For instance, although it used to refer to anything set after 1900, ‘contemporary’ now encompasses anything set after World War II. ‘Historical’, meanwhile, covers everything else.
I think the adage about not judging a book by its cover was probably invented by publishers’ marketing departments. They spend a surprising amount of time and effort on covers, and don’t want that time to be wasted, so you’re told to judge a book its prose. I […]
In the spirit of the season, here are ten, in alphabetical order by author.
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The Cultural Gutter 