Literary Links

Science fiction may help foster a sense of global solidarity by evoking awe, study finds

New research suggests that regularly engaging with science fiction—whether through films, books, or other media—can help people feel a stronger connection to humanity as a whole. The researchers found that science fiction’s ability to evoke awe, a powerful emotion triggered by vast and novel experiences, plays a key role in this effect.

Having only recently come to appreciate how effective science fiction can be in figuratively exploring human existence, I was gratified to read of this scientific research.

A First Look Into the Joan Didion Archives

Joan Didion, unsurprisingly, took a lot of notes. The author and journalist, who died at 87 in 2021, also kept those notes, and her datebooks, and more generally the paper trail of her literary legacy. All of it, after her death, went to the New York Public Library, knitted together with that of her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Christopher Bonanos gives us a glimpse into the contents of 336 boxes of materials comprising the Didion-Dunne archive recently opened to researchers by the New York Public Library. His offerings include photos of documents such as Joan Didion’s birth certificate, the couple’s daybooks (including calendars and financial records), a looseleaf binder of a “random collection of quotes, thoughts, observations, and other bits of prose, mostly likely just Didion’s ‘I might want to use this’ file,” and several letters.

What We Knew Without Knowing

This piece in The New Yorker digs more deeply into one section of the Didion-Dunne archives:

. . . a thick file of typewritten notes by Didion describing her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, beginning in 1999. Addressed to Dunne, the entries are full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. Didion was concerned about Quintana [the couple’s adopted daughter] and her struggles with depression and alcoholism, but she was preoccupied, too, with aging, with creative fulfillment, with the complex dynamics of their family.

The notes previewed here will be published in book form as Notes to John on April 22, 2025.

Ten years of A Little Life – what’s behind the enduring popularity of Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘trauma porn’ novel?

I’ve designated A Little Life as one of my top five novels of all time (scroll down to #4).

Here Natalie Wall of the University of Liverpool discusses the novel on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its publication, asking “how has a novel with such harrowing content become one of the most popular books of the last decade?” Wall’s short analysis addresses the issues of the trauma plot and the book’s place in the queer canon as well as readers’ reactions to the experience of reading the novel on social platforms such as BookTok, Bookstagram, and BookTube.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Advice for the Impatient Writer

In this excerpt from Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell, McConnell synthesizes some of Vonnegut’s advice to writers wondering whether they’ve had any experiences worth writing about.

The Five author Hallie Rubenhold: ‘I really hate true crime’

In The Guardian, Emma Brockes writes about Hallie Rubenhold. Rubenhold’s 2019 work The Five, which became a bestseller and received the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, was a “radical refocusing” of Jack the Ripper that took the emphasis off the killer by concentrating on his five victims. The Five, Brockes says, effectively re-invented true crime.  

Here Brockes focuses on Rubenhold’s recent book Story of a Murder, about another well known British murder case of more than 100 years ago, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen’s killing of his second wife, Belle Elmore. The point of this book is to refute Crippen’s story that Belle was “an overbearing, nagging harridan of a woman who drove him into the arms of his secretary and co-conspirator, Ethel Le Neve.”

“The one thing that unifies the crimes behind both books ‘is woman hate,’ she [Rubenhold] says,” Brockes writes. The article describes how Rubenhold conducts historical research in order to bring the experiences of her subjects to life. “Traditional books in that genre [true crime] foreground the identity of the murderer over his victims, giving rise to the personality cult of notorious killers.”

Seeking Truth: 8 SFF Mystery and Thrillers to Keep You Guessing

“I am absolutely a sucker for books that combine and subvert genres,” admits Lyndsie Manusos at the beginning of this article. I share that enthusiasm, which is why I offer her list of books that combine science fiction/fantasy with murder/thrillers.

The Life and Death of Conspiracy Cinema

“Why did Hollywood lose interest in making paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor? Was it a change in the culture? Or a change in the marketplace?”

This article is about film, but the changing consciousness of U.S. viewers applies similarly to other features of popular culture such as books. 

social media, I think, has changed the way we process information: On TikTok and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, paranoia circulates freely because it seems easier to indulge in a smaller, more private version of reality with fellow travelers than to come to a shared consensus on why everyday life feels so awful. There is a banal truth in what conspiracy theories offer to their adherents on these platforms: They arise from the powerlessness to enact change in life on a collective or individual level, and what emerges, then, is a feverish hunt for explanations. That may be why the recent release of National Archives materials related to the assassinations of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was met with a collective shrug. Their murders were national tragedies but I’d argue that people are less interested in the cold facts of what happened than the surrounding conspiracies that muffle the truth about how power is cultivated and used in this country.

Four-Year-Olds Respond to Misinformation by Exercising Instinctive Skepticism Muscles

Gary Stix, senior editor of mind and brain topics at Scientific American, discusses how children “judge what is true or false in their early encounters with social media.” He discusses research from the University of California, Berkeley, that looked at “whether children can adjust their level of skepticism according to the quality of information they’ve seen before and translate that into a reasonable policy for how much they should fact-check new information.”

The conclusions drawn from this research . . . suggest that “oversanitizing” children’s media consumption—allowing exposure only to sites labeled “kid-friendly”—may be a mistake. It can prevent the development of skills that allow a child to discriminate between true and false.

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown