Book Recommendations

15 Novels That Stretched My Knowledge

I keep finding book lists on the internet with titles like “Books That Will Change Your Life” and “Books That Will Influence Your Thinking.” So here’s my list (in no special order): 15 Novels That Stretched My Knowledge and Stayed With Me Long After I’d Read Them. What novels would make your list? Let us […]

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Monday Miscellany

Little Libertarians on the prairie Christine Woodside argues that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, journalist Rose Wilder Lane, edited her mother’s reminiscences into books that project a Libertarian point of view: A close examination of the Wilder family papers suggests that Wilder’s daughter did far more than transcribe her mother’s pioneer tales: She shaped them and

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Monday Miscellany

Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part. Reading IS the Part. The digital revolution has contributed to the dramatic rise in audiobooks: Once a small backwater of the publishing industry, in part because of the cumbersome nature of tapes, audiobooks are now flourishing. Sales have been rising by double digits annually in recent years.

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Monday Miscellany

The top 10 classic spy novels From Joseph Conrad to John le Carré, intelligence historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones picks the fiction that best reveals the secrets of espionage “So my selection of novels reflects the interests of a historian, and draws on both domestic and foreign espionage. They are “classics” in being of some antiquity, and

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Monday Miscellany

Zocalo Public Square Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit daily ideas exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism. The entire initiative is a project of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University and the New America Foundation, and its goal is to “explore connection, place, big ideas, and what it means to

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Monday Miscellany

How Literature Saved My Psyche: Attending a Book-Themed Therapy Session at the Center for Fiction Just read this. That is all. Nicholas Royle’s top 10 first novels Clever Nicholas Royle: First Novel, my seventh, is all about first novels (and other stuff). My narrator, a creative writing tutor, tries to help students write their debuts

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Monday Miscellany

“Ghost Stories”: The ubiquitous anti-feminism of young adult romances In a Guardian article last November, Tanya Gold condemned the Twilight franchise and the paranormal progeny it has spawned, calling them sado-masochistic “disempowerment fantasies” masquerading as fairy tales, normalising abuse in the name of risqué romance. But her argument – though apt – hardly goes far

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Monday Miscellany

Amherst College: Emily Dickinson Collection To say Emily Dickinson has an association with Amherst College is a bit of an understatement. Her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was one of the founders of the college and her father, Edward Dickinson, was treasurer of the school for over 35 years. In 1956, Millicent Todd Bingham gave Amherst

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Monday Miscellany

Hemingway family mental illness explored in new film Ernest Hemingway, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, struggled with depression throughout his life before committing suicide in 1961. In this article from CNN, his gradddaughter, Mariel Hemingway, discusses a new documentary about the family that she hopes will increase awareness of and allow

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Monday Miscellany

The discovery of Mars in literature David Seed, author of Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, explains why the red planet has inspired so much speculative fiction. Reasons to Re-Joyce Is literary fiction really a dying breed? In The New York Times Darin Strauss argues that it is not: So things might look pretty bad. But

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