Literary Links

The Novel I’m Searching For

“Five years after the pandemic, I’m holding out for a story that doesn’t just describe our experience, but transforms it.”

Novelist Lily Meyer, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, writes that early literature about the COVID-19 pandemic aimed at giving people a sense of control by mentioning details of how we coped with it. But, she argues, she’s more interested in literature that tries to transform the experience. Having “[kept] an eye on the literature of the pandemic as it emerges,” she has yet to find one that treats the subject in such a way.

Ancient Book Becomes a Bestseller 2,000 Years After Its First Publication

Hadia Zahid writes about Tom Holland’s translation of The Lives of the Caesars, originally written in Latin by the Roman historian Suetonius in the second century. The book is a “collection of 12 biographies [that] details the rule of Julius Caesar and the first 11 Roman emperors, offering a mix of political insight, personal scandals, and psychological analysis.” Zahid attributes current interest in Suetonius’s work to its gossipy nature, its insight into the nature of power, and translator Holland’s podcast “The Rest Is History.”

Ugly Truths: The politics of the mad memoir.

We have had autobiographical accounts of madness for nearly as long as we’ve had autobiography, but after germinating in relative obscurity for much of the last two centuries, autobiographical accounts of insanity rode the more general memoir boom of the 1980s into a run of bestsellers that established the mad memoir as a staple of American literature.

Emmett Rensin, author of The Complications: On Going Insane in America, details the history of memoirs of madness, which he says have always had a political/social motivation. But, he says, current examples of the genre have become instances of “respectability politics” that suggest people who experience mental illness have become “just another ‘marginalized group’ . . . another population suffering from bigotry.” Mental illness “It is not simply inconvenient. It is dangerous and strange, and no number of respectable strivers insisting over and over again that this isn’t true, that it’s stigma to say so, that it’s all television’s fault for perpetuating those lies, will ever change that.”

Rensin therefore wants the mad memoir “to return to ugly things, to stigmatizing things, to ambivalence, to difficulty, to unlikeable narrators, . . . . The point of the psychiatric memoir has taken many forms, but its essence has always been in forcing the reading public to reckon with those parts of madness—its experience, its effects, its treatment, its pain, its fear—that the world does not already know.”

You Don’t Need Words to Think

My most compelling insights almost always come to me as complete sentences. They often arrive just as I’m waking up. I don’t exactly hear them in my head; that is, I don’t hear a voice—either my own or someone else’s—saying them, but I experience them as sentences. Often the sentence is an answer to or an explanation of something I’d been pondering the night before (reinforcements of the old adage to “sleep on it” before making a decision).

Because such sentences come to me seemingly by magic, I was intrigued by the title of this article that addresses questions like these:

Do we require words or syntax as scaffolding to construct the things we think about? Or do the brain’s cognitive regions devise fully baked thoughts that we then convey using words as a medium of communication?

In this article from Scientific American, neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko of the Institute for Brain Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains research results that have lead her to conclude that “language and thought are, in fact, distinct entities that the brain processes separately.”

Emily St. James on Using Differing POVs to Write a Trans Novel

“The Author of “Woodworking” Explores What It Means to Transition in Art and Life”

In conversations about novels, I’ve periodically heard someone say, “I don’t like novels written in first-person.” And I’ve always wondered how anyone can make such a blanket statement. To me, the story an author wants to tell determines what point of view is appropriate for the telling, and anyone who casually dismisses a whole body of fiction on the sole basis of its point of view is an ill-informed, insensitive reader. 

In this article Emily St. James explains how she came to realize that the experience of transitioning involves a change from a self “built to some extent out of others’ expectations” to “someone living life on their own terms.” Her novel Woodworking “is told in alternating third-person and first-person chapters” to indicate the differences between a character before transitioning and the character who emerges after transitioning. 

Six Immigrant Novels that Employ Unconventional Narrative Structures

Just as the story determines the necessary point of view, it also determines the most effective narrative structure. 

“Being an immigrant—or a child of immigrants—can mean grappling with disparate rules, cultures, languages, and histories as a matter of daily existence,” writes Shubha Sunder. Here Sunder recommends six novels that are “trim narratives that often employ unconventional elements of storytelling to convey the complexities and contradictions of an outsider’s experience.”

Are Writers Uniquely Vulnerable to Scams?

The blog Writer Beware®, sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, examines “the dark corners of the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls” as well as “providing advice for writers, industry news, and commentary.” Here Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware®, offers solid advice on avoiding literary scams. 

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown