Recently in Patterson, James Category
The New York Times magazine recently ran a
profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz."
Lacked the nuance and originality of Dean Koontz ? That's like saying he lacks the grammatical competence of Sarah Palin.
Whatever the legitimacy of the criticism (and I don't know because I haven't read Patterson), I have to wish - however naively - that publishers were more publicly supportive of their authors.
Of course, authors can generate terrific material insulting their publishers (for example, Lord Byron's "
Dear Doctor, I have read your play "). But such artistic impishness doesn't strike me as being as shockingly discourteous as Critchton's remark. John Murray, after all, made money off Byron's poem mocking him.
(Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Iago from the
Victoria & Albert museum )
This page is an archive of recent entries in the Patterson, James category.
Oyono, Ferdinand is the previous category.
Peck, Dale is the next category.
Select category
Authors (173)
--Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi (1)
--Auel, Jean M. (1)
--Austen, Jane (6)
--Auster, Paul (1)
--Bauman, Beth Ann (1)
--Beckett, Samuel (2)
--Blixen, Karen (22)
--Blum, Jenna (2)
--Bolaño, Roberto (7)
--Borges, Jorge Luis (8)
--Bull, Bartle (2)
--Byatt, A.S. (1)
--Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1)
--Cornwell, Bernard (1)
--Coward, Noel (1)
--Cranworth, Lord (1)
--Dehaene, Stanislas (1)
--Desai, Santosh (1)
--Descartes, René (2)
--Diamond, Jared (1)
--Didion, Joan (2)
--Dobyns, Stephen (1)
--Doctorow, E.L. (1)
--Eliot, George (4)
--Enright, Anne (1)
--Flaubert, Gustave (4)
--Forester, C.S. (4)
--Forster, E.M. (7)
--Fox, James (1)
--Frayn, Michael (2)
--Gaarder, Jostein (2)
--Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (3)
--Gibbons, Stella (2)
--Gilbert, Elizabeth (1)
--Gordon, George, Lord Byron (5)
--Gottlieb, Lori (1)
--Grossman, David (3)
--Hanley, Gerald (3)
--Hare, David (1)
--Hitchens, Christopher (1)
--Hochschild, Adam (1)
--Hollinghurst, Alan (5)
--Huxley, Aldous (1)
--Huxley, Elspeth (5)
--Irving, John (1)
--Ishiguro, Kazuo (1)
--James, Henry (13)
--Jamie, Kathleen (1)
--Johnson, Samuel (1)
--Kassobova, Kapka (1)
--Kundera, Milan (1)
--Leakey, Lewis (1)
--Leithauser, Brad (1)
--Mantel, Hilary (6)
--Markham, Beryl (2)
--Maugham, Somerset (2)
--Maupassant, Guy de (2)
--McEwan, Ian (3)
--Middleton, Thomas (1)
--Miller, Arthur (1)
--Miller, Charles (2)
--Mitchell, David (1)
--Mitchell, Margaret (3)
--Moore, Lorrie (6)
--Naipaul, V.S. (1)
--Oliver, Mary (1)
--Ong, Walter (8)
--Oyono, Ferdinand (2)
--Patterson, James (1)
--Peck, Dale (1)
--Pierpont, Claudia Roth (1)
--Powers, Richard (1)
--Proust, Marcel (1)
--Rankin, Ian (1)
--Robinson, Marilynne (1)
--Rosberg, Jr., Carl G. and Nottingham, John (2)
--Ryan, Kay (2)
--Sacks, Oliver (1)
--Salih, Tayeb (3)
--Salinger, J.D. (2)
--Shakespeare, William (7)
--Shaw, George Bernard (1)
--Singer, Peter (1)
--Stein, Gertrude (1)
--Sterne, Laurence (1)
--Thackeray, William (3)
--Thomas, DM (1)
--Thurman, Judith (1)
--Toíbín, Colm (6)
--Tree, Iris (1)
--Trzebinski, Errol (5)
--Turgenev, Ivan (1)
--Vargas Llosa, Mario (11)
--Wainaina, Binyavanga (1)
--Wallace, David Foster (2)
--Waugh, Evelyn (1)
--Wheeler, Sara (2)
--Whitman, Walt (1)
--Winterson, Jeanette (1)
--Wodehouse, P.G. (9)
--Wolf, Maryanne (2)
--Wordsworth, William (1)
--Wrong, Michela (1)
--Yagoda, Ben (1)
--de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine (1)
--de Tocqueville, Alexis (1)
--wa Thiongo, Ngugi (3)
Biographies (7)
--Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1)
--Silence Will Speak (5)
--Too Close to the Sun (3)
Book Reviews (47)
Copyright (6)
Exhibition catalogs (2)
--and Europe will be stunned (2)
Fables (5)
--The Little Prince (1)
--Winter's Tales (4)
Humanitarian work (11)
Life (28)
Maya Alexandri's Novels (5)
--The Celebration Husband (1)
--The Swing of Beijing (5)
Memoir (14)
--Kenya Chronicles (1)
--Out of Africa (8)
--Shadows on the Grass (3)
--Warriors (3)
--West with the Night (2)
Non-fiction (22)
--Democracy in America (1)
--Discourse on Method (1)
--Forks and Hope: An African Notebook (4)
--Guns, Germs and Steel (1)
--Kenya: Contrasts and Problems (1)
--Letters from Africa (3)
--Memoir: A History (1)
--Mother Pious Lady (1)
--Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (7)
--Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (1)
--Proust and the Squid (2)
--Reading in the Brain (1)
--The Lunatic Express (2)
--The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya (2)
--White Mischief (1)
Notes to Self (4)
Novels (93)
--2666 (7)
--A Book of Common Prayer (2)
--A Gate at the Stairs (3)
--A Grain of Wheat (2)
--A House for Mr. Biswas (1)
--A Passage to India (2)
--A Place of Greater Safety (3)
--A Room with a View (5)
--Black Swan Green (1)
--Cold Comfort Farm (2)
--Daisy Miller (3)
--Emma (1)
--Fathers and Sons (1)
--Gilead (1)
--Gone with the Wind (2)
--Half of a Yellow Sun (1)
--Houseboy (2)
--In Praise of the Stepmother (2)
--Invisible (1)
--Love in the Time of Cholera (2)
--Madame Bovary (3)
--Middlemarch (4)
--Northanger Abbey (2)
--Portraint of a Lady (1)
--Possession (1)
--Pride and Prejudice (1)
--Psmith, Journalist (1)
--Red Strangers (1)
--Right Ho, Jeeves (1)
--Season of Migration to the North (2)
--Sense and Sensibility (1)
--Sophie's World (2)
--Thank You, Jeeves (1)
--The African Queen (4)
--The Aspern Papers (2)
--The Bad Girl (3)
--The Catcher in the Rye (2)
--The Child in Time (3)
--The Clan of the Cavebear (1)
--The Fallen Angel (1)
--The Feast of the Goat (2)
--The Fountainhead (1)
--The Line of Beauty (4)
--The Master (5)
--The Moon and Sixpence (2)
--The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (2)
--The Turn of the Screw (4)
--The Valley of the Horses (1)
--The White Rhino Hotel (2)
--The Wings of the Dove (1)
--The World According to Garp (1)
--This Way to Paradise (3)
--Those Who Save Us (1)
--To the End of the Land (3)
--Vanity Fair (3)
--Weight (1)
--Wolf Hall (3)
On Being Female (22)
Plays (14)
--A Midsummer's Night Dream (1)
--All My Sons (1)
--Beppo (1)
--Copenhagen (2)
--Design for Living (1)
--Hamlet (2)
--Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 (1)
--Krapp's Last Tape (1)
--Lysistrata (1)
--Othello (1)
--Pygmalion (1)
--Wall: A Monologue (2)
--Women Beware Women (1)
Podcasts (1)
Poems (12)
--Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play (2)
--Lines Written in Early Spring (1)
--Sonnet XVII (1)
--Sonnet XX (1)
--Spiderweb (1)
--The Door (1)
--The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1)
--The way we live (1)
--Turtle (2)
--Where We Are (after Bede) (1)
--Who Kill'd John Keats? (1)
--Wild Geese (1)
Publishing (14)
Research for Novels (31)
Short stories (14)
--Averröes' Search (1)
--Boule de suif (1)
--Emma Zunz (1)
--House of Asterion (1)
--Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth (1)
--Parable of the Palace (1)
--Ragnarök (1)
--Romance at Droitgate Spa (1)
--Self-Help (3)
--Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden (1)
--The Dead Man (2)
--The Heroine (1)
--The Immortal (2)
--The Man on the Threshold (1)
--The Necklace (1)
--The Theologians (1)
--The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths (1)
--The Witness (1)
--The Writing of the God (1)
--The Zahir (1)
The Bible (2)
The Great Themes (120)
--Art and transcendence (6)
--Articulating the inarticulable (6)
--Connection between literacy and visual arts (4)
--Critical thinking (9)
--Family patterns across generations (3)
--Fidelity to facts (9)
--Human consciousness (3)
--Humiliation and love (3)
--Importance of aesthetics (1)
--Integrity under fire (3)
--Limitations on compassion (12)
--Prudishness (4)
--Reading and class distinctions (2)
--The inessentialness of humanity (2)
--The nature of fiction (10)
--The nature of greatness (8)
--The perils of insularity (14)
--The power of writing (11)
--The role of the novelist (13)
--The value of debate (4)
--The value of reading (15)
--The well-told story (34)
--Transitional modernization (8)
--Unconditional love of life (4)
Video (4)
Writing my novels (16)
The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz."
