Another piece of advice you of want to succeed in writing a novel:

1) Be youngish and photogenic;
2) Lure an agent with your headshot - or be well-known already;
3) Get a PR who is at least as good as your agent;
4) Include some mildly kinky sex scenes in your book and market it as being aimed at middle-aged women;
5) Live on Facebook with a thousand-selfie-a-day habit;
6) Praise god for your God-given talent then adopt atheism;
7) Tell everyone to get fucked.

To quote Somerset Maugham: "There are only three ways to write a novel ....unfortunately, no one knows what they are .... "

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

One of the books that caught my attention. From the famous author, George Orwell, the story is about Wilson Smith who is trying to figure out what is happening to the world especially where he stayed; Ocenia. This is the era where people scrutinize peoples action and under the dictatorship of Big Brother. At this age, no one is daring enough to express their feelings and oppose the government. The act of thinking about ruling over the government can poses a danger to oneself and even be erased from the world in just one night. Heck, even from the history itself. 

I liked to progress of the story with precise details of what happened. Although it was just a fiction, I do think it might be other dimension we might live in. OR. Might be the future that we will face sooner or later.Let's just say we were hoping for a utopia world but instead, we were given the dystopia world

The presence of emotions involved throughout this story did seem real. The tense of the oppression, the chastisement and even the ending of this story. 

I do recommend this book. The author made this book because of his vision for this world 40 years ago. It may not happen now but it might in the near future. 

Overall, it is really astounding.

I write this review as a member of Rosie’s Book Review Team and thank Rosie and the author for providing me an ARC copy of this novella, which I freely chose to review.

It is difficult to describe the reading experience of Literature. I have read reviews comparing it to noir novels (absolutely, especially the voice of the characters and some of the situations), to Fahrenheit 451 (inevitable due to the plot, where fiction has been banned and nobody can possess or read books) and 1984 (although we don’t get a lot of detail of the way the world is being run, the sense of claustrophobia and continuous surveillance, and the way terrorism is defined are definitely there), and even Blade Runner (perhaps, although Literature is far less detailed and much more humorous). I did think about all of those while I read it, is true, although it is a pretty different experience to all of them.

Billy Stringer is a mixture of the reluctant hero and the looser/anti-hero type. The novella shares only one day of his life, but, what a day! Let’s say it starts badly (things hadn’t been going right for Billy for a while at the point when we meet him) and it goes downhill from there. The story is told in the third-person but solely from Billy’s point of view, and we are thrown right in. There is no world-building or background information. We just share in Billy’s experiences from the start, and although he evidently knows the era better than we do, he is far from an expert when it comes to the actual topic he is supposed to cover for his newspaper that day. He is a sports journalist covering an important item of news about a technological/transportation innovation.  We share in his confusion and easily identify with him. Apart from the action, he is involved in, which increases exponentially as the day moves on, there are also flashbacks of his past. There is his failed love story, his friendship with his girlfriend’s brother, and his love for books.

The story is set in a future that sounds technologically quite different to our present, but not so ideologically different (and that is what makes it poignant and scary, as well as funny). People smoke, but you can get different versions of something equivalent to cigarettes, but they are all registered (it seems everything is registered). And you can drink alcohol as well (and Billy does, as it pertains to a hero in a noir novel). Transportation has become fundamental and it has developed its own fascinating-sounding technology (the descriptions of both, the vehicles and the process are riveting). It has to be fed by stories, by fiction, although literature itself has been banned. We get to know how this works and, let me tell you that it’s quite beautiful.

The book is short and I don’t want to spoil the story for readers, but I can tell you the writing is excellent and it is exquisitely edited. Despite its brevity, I could not help but share a couple of snippets.

“You like her?” he said. He was looking at the knife like a person might look at an especially favored kitten. “Been with me a long time,” he said. “She’s an old lady now. But she’s still sharp.” He looked up at Billy. “I keep her that way.”

In a day very generously populated with problems, Jane’s kid brother was Billy’s newest.

I loved the ending of the book. It is perhaps not standard noir, but nothing is standard in this book.

I recommend it to anybody interested in discovering a new and talented writer, with a love for language and for stories that are challenging, playful, and fascinating. A treat.

I think almost everything has already been said and written about 1984, so I will just add some thoughts of my own.

The concept of 1984 is so interesting and at the same time terrifying that it really intrigued me, especially in the way things have turned out. When I first read it I was around 18 and I was starting this Dystopian period where 1984 just couldn't be left out. I'd been more hesitant before then, because the story is well known and I don't always tend to like the school-recommended classics, but after graduating I felt safe to try.

I would certainly recommend it. Even if you wouldn't read it for its own impact, if you enjoyed any of the modern dystopian novels, reading 1984 is a must.