It kind of goes without saying that the Romance genre is full of tropes and archetypes (though just to be clear: the happy ending is not archetype, but architecture). Some come in plot form: the rags-to-riches story, for instance, a modern take on the Cinderella mythos. Sometimes they […]
We have saying in our bookstore: Frontlist may bring customers through the door, but it’s the backlist that brings them back. Book lovers are completists. Bookstores that can fill the gaps in their ever-increasing collections quickly become favourite stops. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of putting it […]
No matter the genre or subject, every reader has her Absolute Favourite writers. The ones whose books she’ll charge the stores to get, and drop everything to read. Diving into those books is a particularly edifying treat, a gourmet of literary delight. But there’s more than one kind […]
There’s lots to enjoy about romance novels. The arc of character development. The layered emotional content. The rare and welcome sense of success (otherwise known as the happy ending). A good romance novel is a singular pleasure. A bad one, on the other hand, can be excruciating.
I once heard a reader dismiss a particular romance novel – and, in fact, the author’s entire writing career – because she felt the writer had no grasp of history. Her complaint? In the book, a character used a zipper several weeks before it was invented in real […]
There’s a scene at the end of the film of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (the Ciaran Hines version, natch) that I love. In it, the hero holds out his hand, and the heroine takes it. That’s it, just two people holding hands. What makes it so powerful is what […]
Find t-shirts, mugs, totes and more at our new Guttermart location at Teepublic!
The Cultural Gutter 