Summary
No pain, no gain for misery merchantsn
Browsing recently in Waterstone's, which is still technically a bookshop, I was taken aback that next to biography, there is now a section called "Painful Lives". I suppose it's a bit more classy than "Misery Porn" or "Schadenfreude Fodder". You can, however, have great fun by moving books from other parts of the shop that might feasibly be shelved there - so far I've added biographies of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Robert Schumann, Vincent van Gogh, Marie Antoinette and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as various Buddhist scriptures relevant to the idea that all life is suffering. Perhaps publishers could re-jacket dusty old biographies with those ghastly misery memoir subtitles? "George III - Born To Riches But All He Really Wanted Was His Marbles" or "Coleridge: My Poetry Was Opium".See the full content of this document
Extract
The Browser
Tepid melting pot
When it was announced that Lily Allen, the Edith Piaf of the hoodie generation, was to be a judge of the Orange Ficti...See the full content of this document
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