The Book That Unleashed American Grief “John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.” Deborah Cohen discusses Death Be Not Proud, published in 1949, John Gunther’s account of the his son’s death at age 17 from a brain tumor. The publisher, Harper & Brothers, feared at the time that […]
Poll Shows Majority Oppose Banning Books About History, Race “According to a recent CBS News/YouGov poll, a large majority of Americans don’t think books that discuss race, criticize America’s history of slavery, or share different political views should be banned from school libraries or classrooms.” Categories: Censorship Feminist Phantasms: Recent Haunted House Novels by Women
How Contemporary Literary Fiction Is Reclaiming the Insanity Arc and Humanizing Women Dee Das starts her essay with this premise: A hundred or so years ago, women were silenced into submission by psychiatry under the label of ‘insane’, every time they posed a threat to the models of domesticity. Any woman who didn’t conform to
I Needed to Know if My Favorite Books Were Products of Cultural Appropriation We hear the term cultural appropriation often in publishing circles, but what exactly does it mean? Filipino American writer Cindy Fazzi wanted to evaluate whether the novels she grew up loving were examples of cultural appropriation that gave her inaccurate or inadequate
Textual Healing: The Novel World of Bibliotherapy From The Walrus, a Canadian publication: “Though not a stand-alone clinical practice in Canada, clinical bibliotherapy is a method used by professionals who already have certification in counselling, therapy, and clinical therapy and want to help patients seeking an additional outlet.” But be certain to see also the
How to Read the Dune Book Series in Order “21 novels with no obvious road map. Let’s dive in!” Adrienne Westenfeld, assistant editor at Esquire, offers some guidelines on how the navigate the Dune oeuvre, “21 novels with no obvious road map.” The Novelist Who Saw Middle America as It Really Was Sinclair Lewis captured
It always saddens me to post the annual list of literary figures we’ve lost during the current year, but the task is especially painful on a day that has seen the announcement of the death of Betty White. For many years I compiled an annual list of the obituaries of literary figures. But compiling the
Notable Deaths of 2021 Read More »
Here’s an abbreviated version of Literary Links for the holiday weekend. The Joy of Writing by Hand Writer Nicholas Russell says, “During quarantine, drowning in screen time and desperate for any reminder that I had a physical form, I took up writing by hand once again. This time, it was less about keeping up correspondences
I’ve been unable to stop reading all the articles about Joan Didion that have appeared since the announcement of her death yesterday. As a nonfiction writer, I knew her through her perceptive nonfiction pieces. But these articles have made me realize that I need to read her fiction as well. Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All
Remembering Joan Didion Read More »
Unlike Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and other pioneers of literary journalism, Didion did not become a character in her own stories. A pale wisp of a woman (90 pounds on a 5-foot-2-inch frame), with drab hair and wide-set eyes often hidden behind aviator glasses, she was by her own description “shy to the
Joan Didion dies; writer chronicled culture with cool detachment – Los Angeles Times Read More »
