Literary Links

When Emily Dickinson Mailed It In

“The supposed recluse constantly sent letters to friends, family, and lovers. What do they show us?”

Kamran Javadizadeh looks at The Letters of Emily Dickinson, “a new, definitive edition that collects, reorders, and freshly annotates every surviving letter that Dickinson sent (or drafted) to someone else, along with the handful of surviving messages that she received.”

9 of the Most Polarizing Science Fiction Books to Love or Hate

“Science fiction has been pushing boundaries and asking big questions since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein first debuted the genre,” writes Chris M. Arnone. Here he lists some of the most polarizing science fiction books, both classics like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and more recent works such as Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki.

The Best Apps for Distraction-Free Writing

Because a lot of readers are also writers (whether of published books or blog-post reviews), here’s a list of writing programs from contributing writer Terrence O’Brien for Wired. I use Scrivener, which I was happy but not surprised to find on the list.

Five Books That Changed Readers’ Minds

I latched on to this article because I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about confirmation bias, our tendency to seek out—and believe—material that reinforces beliefs we already have. “But sometimes, the best books are the ones that challenge rather than confirm your expectations,” writes Stephanie Bai. She compiled this list by consulting writers and editors of The Atlantic.

Caledonian Road, Andrew O’Hagan. A Psychological Portrait of Campbell Flynn

Dr. Stuart Cooney, a clinical psychologist from Scotland, is The Paperback Psychologist. He applies case formulation to understand fictional characters. Here’s an example.

Love Them or Hate Them, This Couple Reign in Russian Literature

“For Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, translating together extended naturally from their relationship as husband and wife. Now, it is their life’s work.”

Some time in the future I hope to reread a couple of Dostoyevsky’s novels that I read way back in college. From everything I’ve seen, I understand that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are the current go-to translators of Russian literature into English. 

The first book that they translated was Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Their goal in translating “was simple: to do in English what Dostoyevsky did in Russian, as opposed to, Pevear said, ‘imposing English rules on Russian.’”

What Judy Blume understood about growing up

I’m just a little too old to have grown up with Judy Blume. But Amy Joyce, the author of this piece for The Washington Post, isn’t. 

“It is hard to overstate the impact Blume has had on millions of children since she started writing for them in the 1960s,” Joyce writes. “Blume’s books let us know we weren’t alone, a comfort when those years were anything but comfortable.”

Kazuo Ishiguro Is A Repetitive Genius

Owen Lewis: “Ishiguro’s best trick, I think, is to show without telling at all costs for the majority of a novel, then tell at the end to devastating effect.”

The Best Alternate History Novels

Alternate history is a subgenre of fiction that presents worlds in which events have turned out other than as they actually happened. (Think: What would it have been like if the South had won the U.S. Civil War?) Harry Turtledove, who holds a PhD in history, is generally considered the master in this field. Here he discusses five of his favorite alternate history novels.

The New Trend In Book Covers Is Old-Timey Animals

Patrick Redford is not a book-cover designer, he assures us, but he did speak to one for this article. Here he talks about how the colored-blobs trend of book covers is giving way to old-timey animals.

© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown