What We Learn About Our World by Imagining Its End
Arthur Krystal ponders the stories humans have devised about when and how the world will end: “Having to come to terms with this eventuality [the end of the world] is the price we pay for being able to imagine it in the first place.”
Tash Aw: ‘There’s something hyper-masculine about writing an epic’
“As he embarks on a quartet of novels following one family, the Malaysian author talks about storytelling, family silences – and the legacy of colonialism”
Alex Clark talks with novelist Tash Aw about what Aw calls “the claims of narrative authority implicit in much panoramic fiction”: “ the whole subversion of the epic form is very important to me. Because I don’t think people think of their lives in terms of a continuous or coherent narrative. I think we experience life in a very fragmented way.”
What Octavia Butler saw on Feb. 1, 2025, three decades ago
Science fiction writer Octavia Butler wrote in her 1993 novel “Parable of the Sower” that Feb. 1, 2025, would be a time of fires, violence, racism, addiction, climate change, social inequality and an authoritarian “President Donner.”
Russell Contreras created this page for Axios on February 1, 2025, as an introduction to Black History Month, during which “Axios will examine what the next 25 years may hold for Black Americans based on the progress in the first quarter of this century.”
The Art of Reading Like a Translator
If I had my life to live over again, I’d learn more languages.
In this article Lily Meyer reviews the book The Philosophy of Translation, in which author Damion Searls “investigates the essential differences—and similarities—between the task of the translator and of the writer.”
The Twist Machine
“Freida McFadden has sold 6 million copies of her thrillers. How do ‘McFans’ even tell them apart?”
Just when I was beginning to think perhaps I should read a Freida McFadden novel to see what all the hype is about . . .
. . . I came across this piece on Slate. Laura Miller does not mince her words.
Munchausen by proxy subject of Seattle author’s new book
Ever since the movie The Sixth Sense, I’ve been surprised to see how often Munchausen by proxy (MBP) turns up in literature. MBP is a form of medical child abuse in which a caregiver “falsifies, exaggerates or induces illness in a child, sometimes to a deadly end.”
This piece from The Seattle Times discusses the book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy, co-written by Seattle novelist Andrea Dunlop and child abuse detective Mike Weber.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride review – brilliantly rule-breaking fiction
I enjoy reading novels that in some way experiment with form and/or content to explore the boundaries of how fiction works. I was therefore drawn to this review: “what is most startling about McBride’s work is not its dark material, but the way she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.”
The Stranger Things Effect Comes for the Novel
“A crop of stories is responding to the fakery of the digital age by embracing the realness of analog objects.”
I admit that I gave up on Stranger Things early in its second season, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from this article. But the slug line (quoted above) drew my interest because I just recently finished R.F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface. That novel couldn’t have existed if fictional author Athena Liu had not insisted on composing her manuscript on a typewriter so that the paper copy fictional writer June Hayward purloined was the only copy in existence. If Liu had composed on a computer, Hayward’s deceit would have been much more complicated to pull off.
I was half right. In this article Mark Athitakis describes what he calls a growing subgenre of modern fiction in which “vintage media have emerged as tactile objects that symbolize integrity, solve the crime, and radiate realness.” But later he adds that such elements “also set plots in motion,” which is what Kuang achieves with Liu’s typewriter.
However, Athitakis goes well beyond such a simple plot point to discuss novels in which analog items such as cassette tapes preserve the reality of the past in the face of a present where materials can be easily changed.
“Made a Difference to My Whole Existence”: Why Childhood Reading Matters
Sam Leith writes on the importance of literature for children:
Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It’s the platform on which everything else is built. It’s through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what’s round the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
