The National Book Festival
The Library of Congress invited Eloisa James to talk at the 2012 National Book Festival, making her the first romance author to speak at the festival. She claims that genre fiction transforms individual lives by resonating with reader emotions. We hope you enjoy the following selections! What lessons have you learned from reading romances or other genre novels? If you [...]
Victorian women writers
Quick—name a famous 19th-century British romance fiction writer. Did you say Marie Corelli, Amy Levy, Augusta Webster, or Lucas Malet? While Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë come first to the minds of 21st-century readers, Corelli, Levy, Webster, and Malet would have been popular choices of their contemporaries. These Victorian authors wrote best-selling novels, short stories, and poetry about romance and [...]
Presidential romance
The Obama campaign marked the 20th anniversary of the marriage of Michelle and Barack Obama by releasing a commemorative video. (Note: The Popular Romance Project does not endorse either presidential candidate.) Two and half minutes into the video, over images of the Obamas dancing, sharing a kiss at a basketball game, laughing over dinner, and looking, generally, crazy in love, [...]
Cullinan’s keeper shelf
My keeper shelf is a hard one to land on, because I’m something of an anti-hoarder, especially when it comes to books. I love my Kindle because books can pile up in a corner and still be there without taking up any real space, but even on my Kindle shelves, the number of “must read agains” are very, very small. [...]
Publish or not to publish?
When Dominique Raccah founded Sourcebooks in 1987 (with $17,000 from her 401(k) plan), the company initially published a few professional finance titles. Sourcebooks is now publishing five to ten single title romance novels per month (in addition to its popular gift books, college guides, nonfiction, poetry, calendars, and children’s books)—and it is the largest female owned trade book publisher in [...]
Pamela as precedent
Shelved in my study, in a single bookcase, is the history of the American romance novel. I love the history of literature—watching the growth and branching of genres across the centuries. Lately I’ve been researching the history of the American romance novel, which, I quickly realized, involved pretty much starting from scratch. There was no list of American romance novels [...]
Austen, romance novelist
When I suggest that to hard-core “Janeites”—lovers of Jane Austen’s books—that Jane Austen is a romance novelist, the instinctive reaction I get is a cringe, followed by a grudging admission that they suppose I’m probably right. This is usually immediately followed by an insistence that Austen’s works are so much deeper, so much more layered, so much better, so much more [...]
