The Sound of My Inbox
“The financial promise of email newsletters has launched countless micropublications — and created a new literary genre.”
I admit that I receive a number of these newsletters every day, although I stick to the free versions. But many of them also offer a paid version that promises to be even bigger and better than the paltry version that I’m reading.
How to gain more from your reading
I’m a frequent advocate of slow reading. Here Robert DiYanniis, professor of humanities at New York University, explains “how to increase your enjoyment of literary works, how you might amplify literature’s value, and savour more fully the pleasures of language and form, of idea and insight that works of literature offer.”
How Many “Types” of Stories Are There? And Can They Save Us?
In this excerpt from Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing about Trauma, David Chrisinger discusses the types of stories he has found to be most useful in helping people deal with trauma.
Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety
In “Cruel Optimism,” [literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren] Berlant moved from theorizing about genres of fiction to theorizing about “genres for life.” We like to imagine that our life follows some kind of trajectory, like the plot of a novel, and that by recognizing its arc we might, in turn, become its author. But often what we feel instead is a sense of precariousness—a gut-level suspicion that hard work, thrift, and following the rules won’t give us control over the story, much less guarantee a happy ending.
Matt Haig: ‘I have never written a book that will be more spoofed or hated’
In The Guardian, Stephen Moss profiles Matt Haig, “novelist, self-help guru, periodic endurer of depression and anxiety.” Haig’s most recent book, The Comfort Book, is “a collection of aphorisms and inspirational stories of survival against the odds” born of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What Is Digital Literature? Understanding the Genre
“Digital literature, or electronic literature, has been an emerging genre for decades now. But what exactly is it?” Rey Rowland works toward a definition.
The Best Debut Books of 2021 (So Far)
If you like to keep your finger on the pulse of the publishing and literary world, check out this list of the year’s outstanding debut books.
© 2021 by Mary Daniels Brown
I’ve become very interested in digital literature as a genre.
It’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? I’d expect it to give rise to a lot of those old “choose your own adventure” stories. I admit, though, that I don’t read very much digital literature (as opposed to digital criticism, which I DO read a lot of).
I think the “choose your own adventure” concept is used more in story-based gaming now than fiction. I’ve never been a fan, myself.