Literary Links

To read or not to read: Does COVID-19 belong in our books?

Logan Brown, an arts writer for The Michigan Daily, writes the “ability to escape into another world is an essential requirement for me to like a book — when I am reminded of my own reality that escape is often broken.” She then discusses how COVID-19 references in Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld and Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney disturbed her reading experience. However, she does acknowledge that Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel “is one novel that does a particularly good job of incorporating COVID-19 into its plot.”

Pandemic Plots: Mysteries Set During COVID

On the same topic as the article above, mystery novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins writes, “For me, creating a story or novel taking place in or around that time without mentioning the pandemic was equivalent to setting a tale in 1942 without bringing up World War II or writing anything in the year or two after 9/11 without referring to the terrorist attacks.” He cites 9 mysteries, other than his own, that incorporate the period of COVID-19 into their storyline.

The 78 Most Popular Horror Novels of the Past Five Years

More suggestions for your Halloween reading enjoyment. All books included have a 3.5-star rating or better from Goodreads readers.

Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds

“The best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe.”

Novelist Jeff VanderMeer says that a “writer’s task is to bridge the gap between their reader’s experience and the consciousness of their characters so well that the audience intimately understands the world their protagonists live in, even if that world is utterly fantastical.” Here he discusses 5 works that do just that: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov; Primeval and Other Times, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones; Brodeck, by Philippe Claudel, translated by John Cullen; The Ravicka novels, by Renee Gladman; and Dark Matter, by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson.

The brain’s twilight zone: when you’re neither awake nor asleep

Célia Lacaux, Ph.D., studies the effect of sleep on creativity. In this piece she talks about research into the twilight state between wakefulness and the onset of sleep, a period known as hypnagogia. During hypnagogia, our brains tend to combine recent experiences—those that occur while we’re drifting off to sleep—with “much older, yet semantically related memories, creating dream-like scenarios that bridge different periods of your life.”

“This blending of disparate ideas and memories can spark new, creative associations,” Lacaux writes, a process that makes hypnagogia “a creative sweet spot.”

12 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Starring Older Protagonists

Becoming an older adult myself has heightened my interest in fiction that presents older-adult characters. Here’s a list of science fiction and fantasy books that do just that.

How Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Leigh Brackett Defined a Strand of Midcentury American Literature

“The three women, whose work is rarely read together, approached genre writing in ways that are still influencing writers today.”

This article is an excerpt from On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett, by Ashley Lawson (The Ohio State University Press, 2024). 

I’ve read works by both Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, though I knew nothing about Leigh Brackett, whom Lawson describes as “another midcentury, multi-genre writer whose legacy has been neglected.” By studying these three writers together, Lawson writes, “I hope to demonstrate the significant influence of women writers in the postwar era [of American literature]. In addition to highlighting gender influences, I will emphasize the way assumptions about genre—another important category of meaning—shaped critical perceptions of postwar publishing and its writers, thereby making the biases of this era visible.”

(For background information on genre writing, click here.)

How Ruth Krauss Made a New Kind of Children’s Literature

In this piece for The New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel profiles Ruth Krauss (1901-1993), the author of children’s books who “pioneered a method that now seems intuitive: portraying the world from the perspective of a child’s imagination.”

How a TV Show Brought New Fans (and Furniture) to Emily Dickinson’s House

The Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, the house where Emily Dickinson lived and wrote her poems, is owned by Amherst College. It’s been open as a museum for about 20 years and was featured as the setting of the Apple TV+ production Dickinson, which aired from 2019 to 2021.

Journalist Elizabeth Minkel describes how the Apple drama left behind production pieces that, incorporated among items collected by the Homestead’s staff, helped “create a space that truly feels lived-in.”

© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown