Florida teachers told to remove books from classroom libraries or risk felony prosecution I’ve tried to hold back on the censorship news recently because, if I’m not careful, I’ll just burst into tears. But with this news story, we seem to have reached a whole new level. Category: Censorship How Edgar Allan Poe became the […]
Prince Harry’s Book Is Just Good Literature “I don’t give a fig about the royals, but much of Spare reads like a good novel.” After admitting that she doesn’t care about the British royal family and doesn’t follow what they’re doing, Laura Miller writes, “To my surprise, the first half of Spare turns out to
Today’s topic is My Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2023. By far the one I’m most looking forward to is the April release of Alafair Burke’s continuation of Mary Higgins Clark’s 1975 novel Where Are the Children? Below are my choices, listed in order of release date. Included is a short
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Authors Who Write Outstanding Mystery Series and Stellar Standalones One question that comes up periodically on book blogs is this: Do you prefer to read series or standalone novels? But this article by novelist Alicia Beckman reminded me that there’s also another side to this question: Do authors prefer to write series or standalone books?
Today is National Science Fiction Day here in the United States. Science fiction touches so many different areas of literature that most people can find one area that they love. Science fiction can include stories based in space with aliens like E.T. or space battles like Star Wars. The genre also can include time travel,
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Happy New Year! Welcome to the first blog post of the year! NaJoWriMo Journal Writing Challenge Starts January 1st I know a lot of book bloggers are also writers. Many participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, every November. Since I don’t write fiction, I’ve always been a little jealous. But, if you write in
This final post of the year is always the saddest. Notable Literary Deaths in 2022 “An Incomplete List of the Writers, Editors, and Great Literary Minds We Lost This Year” From Lit Hub.
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A (hopefully premature) obituary for Bookforum and the magazines that connect us David L. Ulin laments the closing of Bookforum, a review journal “positioned in the middle territory between service journalism and the academy”: To engage with an issue has long felt to me like going to a fabulous party where the guests are not
Why I teach a course connecting Taylor Swift’s songs to the works of Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Plath Elizabeth Scala, professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, explains how and why she created the course “The Taylor Swift Songbook,” an introductory English course. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Reading Why read old books?
On the End of the Canon Wars This think piece by John Michael Colón examines the question of whether and, if so, how a “liberal education” (which really means study across the humanities) benefits students. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary History, Literature & Culture, Reading A dinosaur is a story “in science as in fiction, the
