It’s the most famous opener in English literature, but a celebrated critic suggests that a lot of us misread it — An easy way to rebut self-declared adverb-haters like Stephen King is to quote the first line of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Ask how Jane Austen could have improved…

I’m probably not seeing your posts if you’ve done these — Are your posts getting fewer claps or comments than you’d hoped? It may be happening because you haven’t hit your stride or found your voice on Medium — and you’ll start getting more when you do. …

It works for big-name authors with large followings, but what if you’re a small-name or no-name author? — “You have to be on social media.” If you’ve written a book — or plan to do one — you’ve probably heard this more than once. Editors, agents, and publicists hail social media as the potential savior of authors ignored by mainstream reviewers and news outlets. As evidence, they point…

Eva Longoria fawns over food in a new series airing amid heightened travel warnings for visitors — It’s hardly Eva Longoria’s fault that Searching for Mexico has arrived a few weeks after four Americans were kidnapped, two of them murdered, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas. But you wonder what CNN was thinking when it planned this six-part food-and-travel series about a country that raises so…

‘As I build books, God builds people,’ the $10-million-a-year writer tells Wired — Brandon Sanderson is the Colleen Hoover of epic fantasy. Both authors, in their 40s, have armies of fans who have shown extraordinary loyalty to them: Sanderson’s by pledging $42 million to him on Kickstarter and Hoover’s by posting weepy, viral TikTok videos about her. But their differences go beyond his…

A famous author and his world-class editor thrash out their differences on the big screen — If I could see only one film this year, I’d see Turn Every Page, a documentary about the decades-long jousting match between the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Robert Caro and his celebrated editor, Robert Gottlieb. …

It goes beyond attempts by politicians to keep schools from teaching certain subjects — Book banning is an old story. It’s been going on for centuries. In 1637 the Puritan government in Quincy, Massachusetts, banned a book its leaders saw as too critical of how the Puritans wielded power — a move historians consider the first book ban in the United States. But book…

These pros write great stories that can inspire you to raise your game — but they don’t brag about it — Are you having trouble finding good stories to read on Medium? Would you like to see more posts by the best writers on the platform and fewer by people boasting of their awesome earnings or trying to sell you something? I have two words for you: Follow journalists. Naturally, I…

How did Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes get away with her crimes? A movie tries to explain it — Gloria Steinem has said that women aren’t more moral than men — we’re just uncorrupted by power. Perhaps no one shows better than Elizabeth Holmes how much damage female tech entrepreneurs can do when they get their hands on it. The HBO documentary The Inventor tries to explain how the…