‘Little Banned Library’ featuring books removed from schools opening in Houston’s Heights neighborhood
Many of the current book challenges are coming out of Florida. Here’s a heartening story about a Little Banned Library erected in a Houston suburb featuring books that have been challenged in or removed from public schools. Be sure to take a look at the photo. The structure was designed to resemble a prison cell.
Category: Censorship
What Kind of Pandemic Storytelling Do We Actually Need?
“. . . where are the stories about the actual remaking of the world? We are in the midst of our own “after,” and when we look to our professional storytellers for a way forward, we need more than allegory,” writes Emma Staffaroni in her analysis of post-pandemic drama appearing in various popular culture formats.
Category: Literature & Culture, Story, Television
The Unexpected Power of Dream Sequences
As readers, we groan when we read a story ending “and then [character name] woke up and realized it was all just a dream.” Fortunately, we don’t see story endings like that much anymore because they are so widely disparaged that writers are warned to avoid them. But there can be situations in which references to a character’s dreams can help move a story along. Writer Cyndi MacMillan explains.
Categories: Literature & Psychology, Writing
10 Screen Adaptations Much, Much Worse Than The Books They’re Based On
It’s a truism among readers that the book is always better. Sometimes much, much better.
Categories: Film, Television, Reading
How We’ll Forget John Lennon
“Our culture has two types of forgetting.”
A look at “how music and movies and all the other things that once shone in popular culture faded like evening from public memory.” There’s evidence that these phenomena also affect the current decline in the popularity of and belief in science.
Category: Literature & Culture, Life Stories in Literature
Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal
Long-time educator Peter Leyland explains bibliotherapy, the notion “that people engage with literature, not just to escape the familiar world and travel somewhere else, nor only for academic purposes, but to ease the pain of existence, of being human.” He discusses his experiences conducting workshops with adults in the U.K. about books (novels, poetry, and nonfiction) that have helped them through disruptive periods in their lives.
Categories: Literature & Psychology, Reading
Open Letter from Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin Random House UK
There have been several news stories recently about the editing of classic texts by various authors to make the books more appropriate for our times. Here Tom Weldon explains “the complex issues around publishing classic books for contemporary readers” in relation to a recent rerelease of some works by P.G. Wodehouse.
Categories: Publishing, Reading, Writing
© 2023 by Mary Daniels Brown
I don’t think I’m ready for Covid lit just yet.