- It's Pride Month. Here's what you need to know
- The Novel That Started the Trans Literary Revolution
- Dumped at Brunch and Too Jaded to Care
- Amazon employees protest the sale of books they say are anti-trans
- How the internet gets people to plagiarize each other
- The Book That Said the Words I Couldn’t Say
- Why Difficult Books Matter: How One Line from a Book I read as a Child Helped Me Heal
- Vacation Reading, Unpacked
- Gothic Revival: Embracing Dark Times
- How the Publishing World Is Muscling In on Hollywood Deals: For Authors, “The Future Is Multihyphenate”
It’s Pride Month. Here’s what you need to know
From CNN, a look at the origin and history of Pride Month.
Category: Personal
The Novel That Started the Trans Literary Revolution
“Imogen Binnie first published Nevada nine years ago. In the near decade since, a renaissance of trans fiction bloomed. Now republished this summer, Binnie talks about the pleasures of making art for trans audiences.”
But wait, there’s more:
Dumped at Brunch and Too Jaded to Care
An introduction to Nevada by Jackson Howard, editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and an excerpt from the novel.
Categories: Book News, Literary History
Amazon employees protest the sale of books they say are anti-trans
A group of Amazon employees on Wednesday disrupted a Pride Month event at the company’s headquarters in Seattle, protesting the company’s continued sale of books they say are anti-trans.
Categories: Bookstores, Censorship
How the internet gets people to plagiarize each other
As someone who grew up in academia and taught composition on the college level, I have a keen reverence for intellectual property (IP) and a stern dislike of its violation. In other words, I deplore plagiarism, which is the presentation someone else’s writing or images as your own work, without attribution to the original source. Proven plagiarism used to result in failure for a course and even expulsion from a college.
And then the internet comes along . . . and “the definitions of what constitutes IP get murky quickly.”
Categories: Copyright, Publishing, Writing
The Book That Said the Words I Couldn’t Say
One of the themes of Life Stories in Literature is the presentation of alternate life options. Lauren LeBlanc describes her experience:
The changing bodies, unexpected responsibility, and shifting circumstances of adolescent girlhood could make you feel like you were losing your mind. When I passed along my copy of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which centers on a teenage girl’s hospitalization with schizophrenia, to my friend, I wasn’t making a statement about depression or mental illness. I was trying to share the story of a girl like the two of us, who is scared and lost, but survives.
Categories: Life Stories in Literature, Literature & Psychology, Reading
Why Difficult Books Matter: How One Line from a Book I read as a Child Helped Me Heal
In a story similar to Lauren LeBlanc’s, Tracy Shapley Towley explains how a book she read as an adolescent finally helped her, at age 39, come to terms with sexual abuse she had experienced when she was 17.
Towley connects her experience with the current climate of book banning in the United States: “preventing kids from learning about bad things doesn’t prevent them from experiencing or participating in bad things. It just leaves them defenseless to face those bad things when they happen.”
Categories: Life Stories in Literature, Reading
Vacation Reading, Unpacked
“What do we want from the books we take with us when we travel? They can be a destination, a guide — or the tether that restores us to ourselves.”
“What books do you read on your trips?” Sarah Lyall asks in this reminiscence about her own vacation reading.
Category: Reading
Gothic Revival: Embracing Dark Times
“Why a 1970s subculture that championed rebellion is back—and more morbid than ever”
Gothicism arose from the Victorian obsession with death, writes Sadaf Ahsan in the Canadian publication The Walrus. It’s making a comeback now because of the similarities between the Victorian era and our own:
We may not be walking around in black veils, but COVID-19 has been a forceful reminder of our mortality. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 6 million people have died. Reminiscent of the nineteenth century, mass graves have appeared in Italy and New York. Depression and anxiety rates are higher than they’ve ever been, with the World Health Organization reporting a 25 percent increase since the start of the pandemic. We’re living in what feels like a state of constant impending doom, and much like the Victorians, it’s defining a new gothic era.
Categories: Literary History, Literary Criticism, Literature & Culture, Literature & Psychology
How the Publishing World Is Muscling In on Hollywood Deals: For Authors, “The Future Is Multihyphenate”
“Books and magazine articles have long provided the IP Hollywood depends on, but until recently, authors played little role in the process. Now, lit agencies and publishers are changing the rules and shortening the page-to-screen pipeline.”
This article in The Hollywood Reporter explains how writers are becoming more prominent in all the book adaptations were now seeing in films and television series.
Categories: Film, Publishing, Television
© 2022 by Mary Daniels Brown
