French serial-killer expert admits serial lies, including murder of imaginary wife
Another author debunked: “Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about murderers have sold millions, says he invented much of his experience, including training with FBI.”
85 years ago, FDR saved American writers. Could it ever happen again?
David Kipen writes in the Los Angeles Times that Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers Project introduced “Americans to their multifarious, astonishing, broken country.” Could a similar program help pull the U.S. out of the coronavirus crisis?
To put it gently, 2020 is not 1935. The notion that a consortium of individuals can coordinate on anything like the level that a strong, organized federal government seems difficult to imagine. The sense of shared national endeavor that midwifed the Writers Project feels like a relic from another millennium.
The Sociopath in Black and White: A Reading List
Psychologist Dr. Martha Stout, author of The Sociopath Next Door, reflects upon society’s sociopaths, the people with “absolutely no conscience.” About “1 in 25 people, 4 percent of us, are sociopaths,” she writes.
Here she examines how sociopaths “appear in literature, where unimaginable things are vividly imagined and portrayed.”
15 epic books you may finally have time to read now
This isn’t the first list like this I’ve seen, but, just in case you need a good Big Book, here’s CNN’s “list of suggested epic reads. They’re all widely acclaimed as classics (or future classics) by readers or critics. And they’re all big, honking doorstops — most of them more than 1,000 pages — that ought to keep you busy for a while.”
The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages
While some people need a long book to occupy themselves during self-isolation, others have trouble concentrating and focusing for extended periods. For them, there are shorter books like those listed here.
Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist
If you’re one of the people having trouble concentrating long enough to read effectively, take heart: You’re not alone. Here Constance Grady interviews Oliver J. Robinson, a neuroscientist and psychologist based at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.
I Wrote A Gothic Novel — Now Life Feels Like It Is One
Elisabeth Thomas, author of the recently published gothic thriller Catherine House, writes:
As a little girl, I dreamed of being trapped in a gothic castle; well, here I am, trapped. I’ve been ordered to shelter in place, so I’m sheltering in place. I live in a small apartment with warm yellow walls and African violets on the sill — hardly a romantic gothic manor. But somehow this apartment has become a haunted house, and I am the ghost.
© 2020 by Mary Daniels Brown
CNN is having a laugh right? I don’t have time to read a 1,000 page book – i’m struggling enough with 300 page versions. I’m reading Mirror and the Light but it is taking me forever…
One of my initial reactions to lockdown was, “Great! I’ll knock off Ulysses, The Golden Notebook, Middlemarch. . .” Wrong. It’s not the time that’s the problem for me; it’s the inability to concentrate and focus for long periods of time. I admire you for taking on Mirror and the Light. I’ve been sticking mostly with thrillers and mysteries. Those giant tomes on my shelves will just have to wait a bit longer.