Word: novelness
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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is one of the few recent novels that has achieved commercial as well as critical success. Given McCarthy’s elegant minimalist style and simple, episodic plot, I wondered how this post-apocalyptic novel was capable of capturing the national imagination. It was only after attempting to read Philip Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral,” however, that the merits of “The Road” became apparent. One can learn important things from a novel without even...
...took his time getting there. Hill, 37, spent more than a decade trying his hand at a variety of genres (a thriller in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, a children's tale, a 900-page fantasy novel) with no bites from publishers. "I began to think I might not be able to cut it as a novelist," he says. So he scaled back, and in 2005 a small British press released a collection of his short stories, the touching, terrifying 20th Century Ghosts. It was followed two years later by the best-selling Heart-Shaped Box, a novel about...
...Bartley: Well, I got the idea after working at my uncle's restaurant in Garden City, New York. I bought a grocery store in the Square and converted it into a burger joint. The novel aspect of the restaurant was that we charged 48 cents for a burger! I wanted to make the restaurant seem like a dorm, so I bought a bunch of long wooden tables and tons of posters...
Helene Hegemann's debut novel, Axolotl Roadkill, cracked Germany's best-seller list and received rave reviews by newspapers after it was published in late January. "The book is phenomenal. And its author is a phenomenon," gushed the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Another paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called the book "the great coming-of-age novel of the Naughties." But Hegemann didn't have much time to rest on her laurels. A blogger, Deef Pirmasens, became suspicious of the minor's vivid descriptions of drug-fueled nights at the infamous Berlin techno club Berghain and discovered that several passages...
...novel tells the story of a precocious 16-year-old named Mifti, who, following the death of her mother, attempts to escape the meaninglessness of her life by losing herself in the sex, drugs and violence of the Berlin club scene. Yet despite Hegemann's claims that her use of Airen's words is not plagiarism but something she calls "intertextuality," critics question whether she has pushed the limits of what is acceptable. In an age when sampling other artists' work has become ubiquitous in the music industry, where does creative sampling stop and plagiarism begin in the writing world...