Welcome To My World

For our prompt this week, I want you to think about fake memoirs, author mills (James Patterons), and celebrity inspired book clubs. Basically write a readers' response to one of the articles you are reading for this week (see syllabus or links in this post for readings) - or talk about a time when a book or author that made headlines affected you personally or your work. Reflection  Fake memoirs and "misery lit" hoaxes perpetuate a fraud on the reader who invests more emotional weight in the account due to its perceived authenticity. For some readers, this deception may be very painful, like a betrayal. (Particularly if the memoir details abuse, or recovery from addiction.) My personal response to these hoxes is usually a psychic eyeroll and a mental shrug. It comes as no surprise to me that fake memoirs like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (2003) were initially submitted for publication and rejected classified as fiction. Some might say, "Wha...

Annotation  Author : Kathleen A. Flynn Title : The Jane Austen Project Genre : Science Fiction>Time Travel Publication Date : 2017 Number of Pages : 373 Geographical Setting : England Time Period : Semi-distant future, Georgian England (1815) Series : N/A (Though this could easily be turned into a series.) Plot Summary : Due to global warming, the future is a place where all food is vegan by necessity, vast numbers of species are extinct and Venice is only a memory, and, oh by the way, the secret to time travel is discovered. The latest mission to the past aims to retrieve Austen’s last novel, once thought unfinished, to find out what illness caused Austen’s death and to obtain missing correspondence sought by scholars. The two-person team is comprised of an Austen obsessed American doctor, Rachel, and a British literature scholar and trained improvisational actor Liam. Upon arrival in 1815, the plan is to insinuate themselves into the circle of Austen’s f...