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Ask and ye shall receive. Just yesterday, some of us here at Double X were waxing nostalgic for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and lo: Today, Salon book critic Laura Miller offers a run-down of "urban fantasy" novels whose heroines would make our dear, departed, demon-killing California girl proud... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Nora Roberts has written
182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new
romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million
copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline
in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I
should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with
Nora Roberts.
There are clear sociological motivations for reading Roberts (one in
five readers is reading romance; Roberts is the Goliath of romance; she
sold 17 million books last year, almost all, one assumes to American women), but Collins makes the case ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers
to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of
night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of
the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions
of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire
as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this
ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence
of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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