
Polly Stewart
Contributor at CrimeReads
Author of THE GOOD ONES, forthcoming 06.06.23 from Harper Books and Little, Brown UK. I write the Backlist column at CrimeReads. @pollystewartbooks on IG
Articles
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1 week ago |
crimereads.com | Polly Stewart |Gabrielle Zevin
Every reader has a book they’ve heard about so often that they feel like they’ve already read it. For me, it’s The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebald, and I don’t think I’m alone. Everyone, whether they’ve read the book or seen the movie or not, seems to have some familiarity with the story of Susie Salmon, who is horrifically murdered in the opening pages and narrates the remainder of the book from heaven.
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2 months ago |
crimereads.com | Polly Stewart
I have high standards for vacation reads. I’ve never been one of those people who saw a trip to the beach as an excuse to read something that only required half my attention. Even if I’m reading on a plane or by the pool, I need a smart, well-written page-turner, and a couple of years ago, I realized that I could never go wrong with a novel by Alafair Burke.
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Feb 27, 2025 |
crimereads.com | Polly Stewart
In the preface to his Collected Stories, the writer John Cheever says that reading the work of a young writer is like watching a child: in their early work, “a writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.” Even now that I can no longer qualify as a young writer, I come back to this line often, gratified by the vision it offers of an extended training program in craft.
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Feb 13, 2025 |
crimereads.com | Polly Stewart
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love.
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Nov 20, 2024 |
crimereads.com | Polly Stewart
From the time I began this column, nearly two years ago, I’ve been looking forward to interviewing Megan Abbott. I first became aware of her work in 2016, when I read The Fever over the course of a few days while holding my baby daughter, in the midst of a bleak election cycle which, as we now know, presaged many more bleak election cycles to come. I remember looking down at my daughter’s face and thinking, Oh no, is this really what it’s like to be a girl?
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RT @CrimeReads: Rebecca Makkai (@rebeccamakkai) and Polly Stewart (@pollystew) discuss the Alexandros Papadiamantis and the project that's…

RT @wmboyle4: Over @CrimeReads, I talked to my pal @pollystew for her column, The Backlist, about one of my favorite book discoveries in re…

RT @elicranor: here’s all the stops for the forthcoming BROILER tour big thanks to @soho_press for still doing shit like this and much 🖤…