I’m Not Feeling Good at All
“The perplexingly alienated women of recent American fiction”
Jess Bergman writes, “the new heroines of contemporary fiction possess a kind of anhedonic equanimity, more numb than overwhelmed.”
Doing No Harm: A Look at Writing Suicide and Self-Harm in Fiction
Alice Nuttall makes the case that “Suicide and self-harm are serious topics, and ones that are absolutely necessary for literature to tackle – but carefully, thoughtfully, and in a way that avoids harming any vulnerable readers.”
The article provides several links to further discussions of this topic.
A Close Reading of the Chilling Prologue of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
I’m a fan of close reading. Here Emily Temple offers a close reading of the prologue of a big and very complex book.
Why Emma Is Still Jane Austen’s Most Pleasurable Heroine
With the recent release of the new film Emma, Hillary Kelly explains why Austen’s novel is “not a story of a young woman who makes her way up in the world through a lucky combination of strong character, bright intellect, and an estate-owning love match, but one of a bored 20-year-old sprite whose family ‘has no equals’ in the town of Highbury, but whose days have little to fill them.”
Woody Allen’s book could signal a new era in the publishing industry
According to Maris Kreizman:
The book publishing industry last week learned the potency of pushback — that bad business decisions have consequences and that lower-level employees have more power than for which they’d previously been given credit.
The Best of Speculative Fiction
The term speculative fiction means different things to different people. Here’s science fiction and fantasy writer Ken Liu’s definition:
to me, speculative fiction is generally the type of fiction that uses the technique of literalizing some aspect of reality that we usually speak of as metaphorical. By making that aspect literally true—by making that metaphor literally true—we are able to gain a different perspective and understanding of reality.
Here he recommends five works of this type.
© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown
