Let’s call April mystery book month. Here’s what I’d read.
At the Malice Domestic convention April 22 to 24, devotees of traditional mysteries will present the Agatha Awards. On April 28 the Mystery Writers of America will hand out the annual Edgar Awards. Therefore, Michael Dirda asks, “Shouldn’t April be designated National Mystery Month?” He continues with a discussion of two foreign mysteries he read recently, one Norwegian and one Japanese, that “upend familiar conventions.”
Category: Book Recommendations
The Literature of Cabin Fever
“How lockdown fits into the canon, from the Mad Trapper of Rat River to Huckleberry Finn to ‘The Shining.’”
In true New Yorker spirit, Ian Frazier uses the enforced isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic to riff on the notion of cabin fever.
Category: Reading
On Time Travel and Metafiction
Author Rachel Barenbaum ponders why stories of time travel fascinate us so. In her recently published novel Atomic Anna, “characters have a plan to build [a time machine] and use it to stop Chernobyl and save their family.”
Categories: Literature & Psychology, Fiction, Reading
Kate Braverman Is Dead
Leah Mensch, an MFA candidate at New York University, writes on the life and works of Kate Braverman, an American short story writer, novelist, and poet who “believed that womanhood should confer outlaw status.”
Categories: Author News, Literary History, Literary Criticism
The Best Short Stories of All Time
Annika Barranti Klein consulted her colleagues at BookRiot to compile this list of the best stories of all time. There’s no attempt to define what a short story is or what makes one great, just a huge list of recommended reading.
Categories: Book Recommendations, Fiction, List, Reading
In “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne Barrels Into the Past
I haven’t watched this Netflix series, but this article makes me think that I should. The story presents a woman who “gets hit by a cab on the night of her thirty-sixth-birthday party. The accident is fatal, but instead of expiring Nadia finds herself in a ‘Groundhog Day’-like loop of reliving the same night and then dying in increasingly gruesome and unlikely ways.”
Categories: Television, Life Stories in Literature
The 100 Best Baseball Books Ever Written
Because it’s April, and because this is my blog.
Categories: Book Recommendations, List
© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown
