Popular Romance Project

Selling books like music?

Pocket Books Senior Editor Abby Zidle has been a romance reader since she was 12 years old, and she planned to write about romance fiction as proto-feminist literature (arguing that it is not anti-feminist) when she was a graduate student. But she never finished her dissertation. Looking back on it she says, “A bad day in publishing is better than [...]

Call me?

Call it the “call me” summer. There are likely few corners of the globe that haven’t spent the past several months humming along—if not more—to Canadian pop star Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” The fun, flirty invitation to a dreamy crush has been on the USA Top 40 singles chart since March, holding the #1 spot for nine weeks [...]

How I adapt history

The first rule of romance is that the heroine always wins. The heroine’s happily-ever-after is a hallmark of the genre, and no matter which time period or sub-genre of romance, our readers come to our novels in the faithful expectation of the heroine’s eventual triumph. Yet, throughout history, such an empowered outcome was sadly rarely the case—women have most often [...]

Tied (down) and true

Rejecting the necessity of marriage, Joni Mitchell sang on 1971′s Blue, “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true.” Referring to her romance with onetime love Graham Nash, Mitchell offered a striking break from the recent past, when a piece of paper from city hall, along with an engagement ring, a wedding [...]

What’s it all about, Arnold?

My father, who loved to sing, had little taste for rock ‘n roll. It was the end of the 1960s, and modern show-tunes were his favorites—songs from The Fantasticks, Camelot, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris—along with the occasional foray into lush, top-40 pop. I can probably still sing you every word of that big brown [...]

Play it again, Selena Gomez

For 25 years, now, more or less, I’ve been haunted by a pair of sentences about love by the French thinker Roland Barthes. “Anguish, wound, distress or jubilation,” he muses: “the body, from head to toe, overwhelmed, submerged by Nature, and all this nonetheless: as if I were borrowing a quotation. In the sentiment of love, in the erotic madness, [...]

Troubadours and fin’amor

Who were the troubadours? Many people have heard of them, but a popular misconception is that the troubadour was a wandering minstrel who sang for his supper. Far from it! The troubadour was a medieval rock star. From approximately 1100 to 1300, there were troubadour kings and dukes, many were nobles, some wealthy and some not, but some rose from [...]