Latest news with #OprahsBookClub
Bloomberg
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
Someday We'll All Love Ocean Vuong
Fresh off a tour for his second novel — an Oprah's Book Club pick — the author is learning to live with being seen as a translator of the immigrant experience.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Beyond The Creative Status Quo—How Creators Are Reinventing Success
Writers collaborate and share ideas in a creative community, illustrating the power of connection in ... More today's storytelling landscape. The publishing industry is facing a cultural creative renaissance, driven by #BookTok trends, blockbuster book adaptations, and celebrity-led book clubs. As a result, the demand for great storytelling has never been higher. Creators are becoming savvier in how they market and generate an income from their art. The creative is the easy part; it's trying to understand the business part of the industry that deflates dreams. #BookTok has garnered over 35 million videos and been viewed over 200 billion times globally, according to Wiley. This community has sparked a renewed interest in reading, particularly among younger demographics. Additionally, celebrity book clubs, such as Oprah's Book Club and Reese's Book Club, have a significant impact on book sales, catapulting titles to the bestseller lists. 'Why don't we have guidance as writers before we invest years in a novel? Why don't we know if this is going to be good? Is the story good?' Louise Dean, founder of The Novelry, asked, highlighting the gap between creative passion and the business realities facing aspiring authors. As an award-winning novelist, she wanted more from her writing experience. The more she thought about the writing process and the anxiety creators experience, her questions led her down an entrepreneurial path. With the launch of The Novelry, a top-rated online writing school, the Betty Trask Prize winner aimed to create a community that would help authors achieve their desired level of success. Through this journey, she learned the following lessons: From Solitary Pursuit To Collective Power Dean's journey began with a simple, contrarian question: 'Why is this such a lonely business?' After years spent wrestling with the isolation of writing, she decided to challenge the status quo. The Novelry's origins were an open invitation for writers to draft their novels together in 90 days. Dean thought only a few would apply; however, hundreds joined without a website or marketing push, proving there was a hunger for community-driven creativity. Dean's philosophy is clear: 'Let's do this together.' She established a writing culture centered on collaboration, peer support and constructive feedback. 'Being together and writing was way more fun than writing solo, contrary to the myth,' she notes. This sense of shared journey remains the foundation of The Novelry, where writers support each other through the highs and lows, and the myth of the solitary genius is replaced by collective momentum. Louise Dean, Founder of The Novelry, preparing for the Next Big Story event. Neurodiversity: A Source Of Competitive Strength What sets The Novelry apart is Dean's recognition that differences drive excellence. There are many neurodivergent individuals within her sphere, and she sees this not as a challenge but as a strength. 'There's no cookie-cutter way of doing things,' she insists. She champions a 'tools, not rules' mindset, allowing people to work in ways that best suit them. 'Learning to understand how people operate gives a company superpowers,' she says. By fostering a flexible and adaptive culture, Dean has positioned The Novelry as a magnet for talent and innovation. The founder believes that connection and trust are more important than rigid hierarchy. 'We're not corporate, and that was important to me,' she explains. Her company operates on a culture-based autonomy system; each team member plays to their own strengths, rather than having to fit a specific job description mold. Redefining Access And Opportunity The company was designed to provide aspiring writers with the kind of access and support typically reserved for insiders. With in-house coaching from bestselling authors and former Big Five publishing editors, The Novelry is reshaping how great stories are discovered. Since 2017, thousands of writers have gone on to secure major book and TV deals, with 75% of represented writers landing publishing contracts with prominent publishing houses, including Penguin Random House. The company's latest initiative, The Next Big Story—a $100,000 contest judged by book world luminaries like Emma Roberts and Julia Quinn—aims to spotlight new, underrepresented voices in fiction. As publishing continues to evolve, human-centered leadership offers a powerful reminder: creativity flourishes where connection and access come first. By championing community over competition and recognizing the unique strengths within every writer, the industry changes what's possible in storytelling; it's setting a new standard for what leadership can look like in any creative industry. 'We have this incredible community of resources,' Dean concludes. 'We know how to get what people need really quickly, and people can learn and write in the ways that work for them.'
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Her Follow-Up to ‘American Dirt,' Jeanine Cummins Turns to Puerto Rico
In January 2020, Jeanine Cummins's novel 'American Dirt,' about a Mexican mother and son who flee cartel violence in Acapulco for the United States, arrived to rapturous praise from the publishing world, became an Oprah's Book Club pick and went on to sell over four million copies in 40 languages. It was a literary event that quickly became a cause célèbre. Scathing critical response accused Cummins of stereotyping, cultural appropriation and racism in her thin depiction of the border and its inhabitants. The vitriol grew so intense that her publisher canceled her 40-city book tour. Cummins's new novel, 'Speak to Me of Home,' is ostensibly about Puerto Rico. Gone are the propulsive writing, drug lords and chase scenes. In their place are quieter epiphanies: evocative, poetic passages about characters falling in love and the close bond between parents and children. But despite the publisher's framing, the book is not, in fact, about Puerto Rico. It's about the internal lives of three generations of women in one Puerto Rican-Irish family, and their shared preoccupation with their own whiteness, from the 1960s to today. Born in San Juan, Rafaela marries a white naval officer from Missouri in 1968, and 10 years later he moves their young family to St. Louis. Their 7-year-old daughter, Ruth, tries to assimilate into her new life in the Midwest, forgetting most of her Spanish and smoothing the edges of the prejudice and xenophobia around her (including among her father's family). Two decades later, Ruth's own teenage daughter, Daisy, moves from Palisades, N.Y., to San Juan, where she's longed to live since her childhood visits back to her mother's birthplace. The narrative jumps in time and geography across these three women's histories, until a devastating accident brings them together in 2023. As I read I thought of the Puerto Rican poet Fernando Fortunato Vizcarrondo's poem '¿Y Tu Agüela, Aonde Ejtá?' ('And Where Is Your Grandma?'), addressed from a Black Puerto Rican man to a light-skinned one, whom he accuses of keeping his dark-skinned grandmother hidden in the kitchen. Puerto Ricans are well aware that, regardless of what we look like now, our ancestors bear evidence of the mixed-race heritage of the majority of our people. In contrast to Vizcarrondo's poem, 'Speak to Me of Home' conflates race with ethnicity, resting a significant part of the plot on the results of a stealthy DNA test. Ruth is mystified by her American-born children's insistence on their Puerto Rican identity (her son, Charlie Hayes, changes his name to Carlos Hayes-Acuña in seventh grade, because 'it's cool to be Puerto Rican'), and even denies her own: 'Do I need to remind you that I'm white, for God's sake? Look at me!' The novel views Puerto Rican culture from a distance, disconnected from the archipelago's colonial history and lacking the nuance of lived experience. Carlos claims Bad Bunny 'gets too much airplay,' without appreciating the artist's importance in contemporary Puerto Rican life. This disconnect is perhaps strongest in the snobby Rafa, who resents the hostile gaze of her white Missouri neighbors even as she marginalizes the only other Puerto Rican family she encounters there: 'That woman would not have been fit to sweep my father's floors in San Juan.' I simply couldn't extend poetic license to the author's sloppiness with detail, about Puerto Rico and otherwise — which, however petty, was enough to take me out of the story. A crucial plot point is the hurricane that begins the novel (in San Juan in June, when hurricanes are relatively rare in the Caribbean compared with, say, September); though Cummins's characters seem unaware of the ubiquitous local distinctions between a vaguada, a tropical storm, a hurricane, a cyclone. A single slice of fried plantain is mistakenly referred to as a 'tostone,' instead of a tostón. Facebook wasn't available in 1999, when Rafa uses the platform to search for a long-lost friend. The verisimilitude of Cummins's present-day Puerto Rico is superficial at best, and references — to alfajores, Yaucono coffee, pasteles and alcapurrias — seem to be plucked from Wikipedia to add authenticity. Cummins's story does involve a proverbial grandparent hidden in the kitchen, and the revelation comes across as an attempt to defend the author's own Latinidad. But skin color does not define identity; depth of experience does. As we say in Puerto Rico, No es lo mismo decirlo que hacerlo. Saying it is not the same as doing it.
