Update on Comments Glitch
The cause of the problem has been traced to Jetpack. Jetpack support has informed me that “this is an issue that our development team is aware of and working to resolve. It will likely be fixed in the next version of Jetpack in early January.” So that’s where we are.
In the meantime, here’s a trick that has been working for me: If you type a comment and hit the “post comment” button, you’ll get the message “submitting comment,” followed by nothing. But, if you manually reload the page, the comment will magically appear.
To reload the page manually, look for this symbol, which usually appears either just to the right of or just to the left of the URL (web page address) field near the top of your browser:
Again, I apologize for this inconvenience. I do value your comments and look forward to restored unhampered communication.
Christmas Capers and Hanukkah Hijinks: A Holiday Mystery Round-Up
Some festive-season reading recommendations from book reviewer and author John B. Valeri.
Surrealism, cafes and lots (and lots) of cats: why Japanese fiction is booming
“From tales of alienation to comforting novels set in bookshops, Japanese authors have written nearly half of this year’s bestselling translated novels in the UK. What’s their secret?”
The Guardian looks at the popularity of Japanese fiction in the U.K. The trend started with Banana Yoshimoto in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then blossomed when translations of works by Haruki Murakami hit shelves. Now, “of the top 40 translated fiction titles for 2024 so far [in the U.K.], 43% are Japanese, with Asako Yuzuki’s satirical, socially conscious crime novel Butter topping the list.”
The Cult of Haruki Murakami
“How did a demure jazz-club owner become a global literary sensation and a perennial Nobel Prize contender? We’re taking you inside the unlikely rise of Japan’s greatest contemporary writer.”
Jonathan Russell Clark profiles Japanese writer Haruki Murakami for Esquire.
The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. . . . Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.
Why some book fans are leaving Amazon-owned Goodreads in wake of the U.S. election
“The StoryGraph saw a surge of new subscribers the week after the election, echoing Bluesky”
The issue of people wanting to leave mega-corporation-owned Goodreads is not new, despite this particular take on the subject from CBC/Radio-Canada: “Some readers say they’ve left Goodreads, a popular platform for tracking and reviewing books, in favour of The StoryGraph, which bills itself as an ‘Amazon-free alternative.’”
How the Western Literary Canon Made the World Worse
“A talk with Dionne Brand about her recent book, Salvage, which looks at how the classic texts of Anglo-American fiction helped abet the crimes of capitalism, colonialism, and more.”
Dionne Brand, former poet laureate of Toronto, discusses how the influence of studying “17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century English literary texts” has affected perception of narrative structure and of “structures o feeling as well.” She examines how literature presents and represents the society that produces it.
What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?
The Public Domain Review offers “A Festive Countdown.”What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2025?
Lucy Grealy Understood What It Meant to Be Seen
“Three decades later, ‘Autobiography of a Face,’ a sensation when it was published, has lost none of its force.”
Molly Fischer discusses Grealy’s autobiography (which I reviewed here) on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary reissueance. Fischer puts the book into the context of “the nineteen-nineties memoir boom” and “a personal-essay boom” that “the growth of the blogosphere” made possible.
Why I killed Someone I Once Knew (in Fiction)
Daniel Aleman asks, “what are authors meant to do, if not take what wounds us and reshape it on the page? Where can we find inspiration, if not in our own lived experiences? How are we meant to understand ourselves and the world around us if we can’t write truthfully?”
Because “writing is how I process everything that happens to me, good or bad,” he explains how and why he turned a bad dating experience into his recently published novel I Might Be in Trouble.
Pip Drysdale: My Stalker, My Novel
“The musician-turned-author recalls the harrowing real-life inspiration for her new psychological thriller”
Like Daniel Aleman (in the article above), writer Pip Drysdale used her experience as the target of a stalker as the basis for a novel. Taken together, these two pieces provide interesting insight into questions about inspiration and the catharsis of writing.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
