Literary Links

Hanif Kureishi’s Relentlessly Revealing Memoir

“How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again”

In December 2022, at age 68, writer Hanif Kureishi fell onto a hard floor in Rome and woke up a tetraplegic. Hillary Kelly visited Kureishi in London in December 2024 and here describes that visit and comments on his memoir, Shattered:

A vulnerable, relief-seeking self-exposure is now a necessity, a compulsion—a mode of connection, even as his world has shrunk. It has also offered a way to again rebel against the dominant modes of storytelling. He has one story, and it’s his own, and the only way he wants to tell it is to spit it out raw.

A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books

“In ‘Bibliophobia,’ Sarah Chihaya combines criticism and memoir to write about reading’s role in a life’s highs and lows”

Becca Rothfeld, nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post, discusses Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. A tenure-track English professor, Chihaya found herself in an inpatient psychiatric ward, a “woman driven mad by the narrative conventions of difficult novels.” 

The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”

Let me open a treasure chest to explain how metaphor works

“Once maligned by philosophers, metaphors are a key communication tool for extending the power of literal speech”

Elek Laneis, a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, writes, “it is now recognised that metaphor is crucial to human communication, providing us with a method for extending the expressive power of literal speech.” Here Laneis explores the questions “how does metaphor work?” and “how do we derive a metaphorical message from literal meanings?”

ChatGPT struggles to imitate famous authors — unless it’s Mark Twain

Let’s face it: We can no longer ignore artificial intelligence (AI), especially as it relates to reading and writing. This report out of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, reports on results of a study that explored “literary bias and style in GPT, a type of artificial intelligence model that processes and generates human-like text.”

7 Meta Books That Question the Boundaries of Storytelling

“These writers blur the line between fiction and reality, challenging how we define and experience literature”

Eliza Moss explains the metafictional nature of her recent novel What It’s Like in Words:

Enola [the novel’s protagonist] is someone who tells herself stories. Daydreaming about the past, the future, and the other worlds that might exist in which she is happier. She is also influenced by the stories that society tells women about what their lives should look like. Therefore, before she can change her reality, she must re-write the narrative in her head.

Moss lists another “seven meta books which question the boundaries of storytelling,” including Station Eleven, The Princess Bride, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

How Translation Works, Book Title Edition

Translation is not just straightforward substitution of a word in one language for a word with the same meaning in another language. Languages are social constructs; that is, they are created by one social group (some type of community) to represent aspects such as values, beliefs, or expectations that the group finds important. The best translations communicate the social assumptions inherent in the original work.

John Scalzi is a prolific science fiction writer. In this post he explains how the Hungarian translators of one of his books dealt with the book title, which was based on a quotation from a well known (to English-speaking audiences) song.

This Drug Can Mend a Broken Heart

Narrative identity theory, the basis for Life Stories in Literature, holds that we are what we remember. But some memories can be too painful to deal with this, and our lives would be better if we could get rid of them. Science fiction novels like The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh feature stories about people who have had bad memories erased.

This article details scientific studies of how a drug may be useful in achieving “memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.”

Science fiction on its way to becoming science fact. 

Getting Mental Health Representation Right

“Two YA authors weigh in on writing characters’ psychological conditions.”

Although I’m not a clinician, I am interested in how mental health issues are presented in literature. This article from Booklife, a publication from Publishers Weekly aimed at self-publishing authors, advises writers on how to portray psychological conditions.

Encountering characters who look, speak, and behave in familiar ways can help readers feel seen, heard, and, most of all, included. As writers, we want to create diverse and representative characters, and in today’s context that means including characters with mental health challenges. Here are four tips to help indie writers create a child or teen character who accurately portrays what it’s like to have a mental health challenge.

Goodbye, Goodreads: Five New Reading Tracker Apps to Try

Articles about getting away from Goodreads, an Amazon product, come up periodically. I started using Goodreads before Amazon absorbed it. I continue to use it because, frankly, I don’t choose to spend my time right now researching and implementing other options. But if you’re looking to ditch Goodreads or to start tracking your reading, here are five options.

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown