Overlooked No More: Clarice Lispector, Novelist Who Captivated Brazil
“Critics lauded her stream-of-consciousness style and described her as glamorous and mysterious. But she didn’t always welcome the attention she received.”
“This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.”
From the New York Times, a look at Russian-born Clarice Lispector, who, beginning in the 1940s, fascinated “Brazil’s male-dominated literary world.”
How (and Why) to Spring Clean Your Digital Book Clutter
I think I have more than 3,000 books on my Kindle. Because I only recently discovered how to use collections, there’s very little order to my ebooks. Here Ashley Holstrom offers advice on how to organize your Kindle cloud and your Goodreads shelves. She also tells us to create Goodreads shelves to log our entire elibrary, but I’m not sure I’m going to invest that much time in this project.
Charles Dickens, the Writer Who Saw Lockdown Everywhere
You may have heard the story of how Charles Dickens never outgrew the fear of incarceration after his family’s stint in debtor’s prison in 1841. Here Laurence Scott reports that “In her 2011 biography, Claire Tomalin notes that, in adulthood, Dickens became ‘an obsessive visitor of prisons’” and looks at examples of passages from his works that illustrate his obsession.
11 Words to Spice Up Your Book Blurbs and Reviews
John Maher splendaciously offers 11 words collected by the editors at Merriam-Webster who host the podcast Word Matters.
Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?
“Deciphering the most beloved, most reviled children’s-book author in history.”
If you haven’t kept up with the recent controversy swirling around J.K. Rowling, here’s a very detailed analysis of what it’s all about and what it all means.
Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?
The New York Times reports on “a mysterious international phishing scam that has been tricking writers, editors, agents and anyone in their orbit into sharing unpublished book manuscripts.”
Both big-name writers—like Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan—and unknown writers have been targeted, and no one seems to know where manuscripts submitted through the scam end up. “When copies of the manuscripts get out, they just seem to vanish. So why is this happening?”
A Year of Historical Turning Points in New Yorker Fiction
Deborah Treisman, fiction editor for The New Yorker, comments on some of the fiction that appeared in the magazine during the “historically pivotal” year of 2020: “It’s hardly surprising that some of the anxiety of this unmooring year trickled into fiction—or sent us to stories that explore other historical turning points and what led to them.”
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
